As the prevalence of mobile marketing continues to grow, businesses are turning to text messaging as a way to reach their audience. If executed well, Text marketing can be an effective way to promote sales, engage inactive customers, and keep your audience informed. However, a successful campaign requires more than sending a bunch of mass texts.
To leverage SMS marketing, you have to prepare appropriately. This includes setting goals, choosing the right platform, and segmenting your audience. But, of course, there’s so much more than goes into crafting a text message marketing campaign that captures customers’ attention.
Keep reading to find out how you can craft and carry out an effective and profitable SMS campaign.
Understand Your Goals
When getting into mobile marketing, it’s essential to set goals. Without them, you won’t know what to aim for. And your efforts won’t yield the results you want. So to start, review your overall marketing goals. That way, you can create an SMS campaign that takes your current business goals into account.
Establishing S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) will ensure that your SMS campaign is carried out in a way that meets your objectives.
For example…
S.M.A.R.T goals related to the ROI of your SMS marketing campaign may include:
- Generating $15,000 in revenue by the end of the year.
- Increasing subscriptions by 25% compared to the previous year.
- Decreasing customer acquisition costs by 5%.
- Achieving 2,000 pre-orders on an upcoming product/service.
Goals related to brand building might look like the following:
- Boosting engagement (likes, shares, and comments) on Instagram by 30% by the end of the fourth quarter.
- Getting 5,000 entries in an upcoming giveaway/contest.
- Gaining 50 newsletter subscriptions by the end of the month.
Regardless of the goal, you want to make sure that they are data-driven. An SMS software gives you access to critical metrics, which allow you to measure your goals. And this brings us to the next step.
Choose a Text Message Marketing Platform
Investing in an SMS marketing tool is one of the essential parts of running a successful campaign. It makes organizing contacts and sending target messaging easier, increasing your chances of conversions and customer retention.
However, not all SMS marketing platforms are created equal. Here are some features to look for in mobile marketing software.
24/7 Support
Why wait until office hours to get answers to your questions? An excellent text marketing platform offers support agents who are available 24/7. With Gleantap, you receive support when you need it without having to wait.
Dual SMS and Email Collection
Text messaging is only one element of the marketing picture. And the right SMS marketing tool helps you maximize results across your entire strategy. Look for software that provides multiple collection opportunities. Collecting leads through email and SMS enables you to optimize both methods and grow both subscriber lists.
Glentap lets you streamline your digital marketing efforts by providing multi-channel orchestration—including mobile push notifications and Facebook messenger.
Automated SMS Flows
The right SMS marketing platform will let you trigger texts based on events and personalized conditions. For instance, when customers sign up for a class or personal training session, they’ll automatically get a message. A few common automated flows include welcome,customer-win back, and transactional flows.
What’s great about the Gleantap SMS marketing platform is that it lets you quickly set up automated campaigns based on many conditions.
Conversational SMS
Text messaging marketing offers the chance to engage with customers on a personal basis. The right SMS marketing platform can turn your automated flows into one-on-one Q&As that encourage customers to respond. What are they looking for? Do they have specific issues you can help solve? You can recommend the best products to establish trust and improve sales based on their replies.
Gleantap gives you and your team the option to chat one-on-one with customers. You can even manage conversations with a streamlined inbox.
Segmentation
The more data your SMS marketing platform provides, the more you can organize your subscribers. Look for a tool that allows you to identify specific groups you want to target. Then use the information to create organized lists.
By segmenting your customers, you can send them relevant and personalized texts rather than content that doesn’t resonate with them. Segmentation is a way to optimize your SMS marketing strategy and maximize the ROI.
Our text marketing platform collects valuable data about each customer. It lets you create segments based on attributes, events, or the likelihood of event occurrences. In addition, the tool enables you to stack multiple rules to create powerful and highly targeted groups.
Speaking of segmentation…
Segment Your Audience
When it comes to text marketing segmentation, you have a few ways to approach it. Here are some ideas to help you organize your audience into targeted groups:
Psychographic and Demographic Segmentation
With this segmentation, you group customers based on traits like where they live, their age, interests, and most significant challenges.
One of the easiest ways to segment your audience is by using psychographic traits. Some of these include lifestyle, job, and life stage they’re at. Knowing this information lets you tailor your content and text to their characteristics.
Loyalty Building Segmentation
You can segment your customers based on how often they’ve purchased from you or interacted with your brand. Grouping them means you can reward them for being loyal to your brand. For example, you can create an automation that sends deals and content exclusively to loyal customers.
Past Purchase Segmentation
Past purchase segmentations group customers together who have similar buying patterns. With this segmentation, you can send personalized product/service recommendations based on their interests.
SMS Segmenting Tips and Best Practices
- Never stop learning about your segments: collect more information about your audience through questionnaires, surveys, and reviews.
- Send targeted content: align your messages with your segments’ unique wants and needs.
- Move customers to different segments: not all customers will stay in the same group for their entire lifespan with your business. For instance, a prospective customer may become a loyal customer and will need different content from you.
Choose an Incentive
To get people to subscribe to your text message contact list, you’ve got to entice them. So choose something your customers will find valuable enough to exchange their phone numbers. Here are some incentive ideas:
Discount Codes
Offering a discount on your products or services in exchange for opt-in consent is a great way to reel in subscribers. This method works for many industries, including fitness and wellness. For example, you could offer subscribers a percentage off membership or class in exchange for their phone number.
Free Resource Download
By offering a free resource, you can encourage people to subscribe to your text list. This can be anything from a one-week meal prep plan or workout routine. You also offer the first chapter of a new ebook or how-to guide.
Free Merch
Noticing a pattern here? People like free stuff. One example is offering a virtual coupon for a free t-shirt or water bottle. You can even partner with local businesses in your area to provide a coupon for a free item.
Promote Your Incentive
Once you’ve chosen your incentive, it’s time to begin growing your list by promoting your lead magnet. First, determine how you will share your incentive with your audience. You have many options, but here are the most common:
Add to Existing Marketing Emails
Including your incentive in your existing communication helps gain new SMS subscribers. For instance, you could include a banner that lets recipients know about your lead magnet in your marketing emails. You could also plan an email blast announcing that new text subscribers receive a special offer. Also, don’t forget to communicate the benefits of signing up for your texts.
Social Media
Sharing your incentive through social media attracts your followers to your SMS list. Depending on the social media platform, you can be creative in sharing this information. For example, you can post high-quality graphics or post promotion videos on Instagram.
Your Website
You can use a combination of banners and exit popups to let visitors know about your marketing texts. Additionally, you can add text information to your website through contact forms, cart checkout, and at the bottom of blog posts.
Track and Test Results
Any text message marketing campaign’s success depends on its ROI. So it’s vital to analyze key ROI metrics in your SMS campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not. Here are the main indicators you need to pay attention to while tracking messages:
Open Rate
Open rate is one of the first things you should measure. It shows the percentage of people who received your text and opened it. Your open rates will depend on several factors, such as the time of day the text was sent and the audience segment.
Opt-out Rate
No SMS campaign is without opt-outs. There will be some subscribers who want to stop receiving messages no matter how good your campaign is. An opt-out could signal that they need to cut the number of text messages they receive or that they no longer need your services.
When measuring opt-outs, take notice of a high opt-out rate. This is usually a sign of problems in your messaging, like poor timing and audience targeting. Tracking your opt-out rate will allow you to test different texts and content.
Delivery Rate
The delivery rate lets you gauge the vitality of your subscriber base. Unfortunately, when you send text messages, some may not go through. There are many reasons behind a poor delivery rate. Some of them include:
- Numbers in your contact list are out of use.
- The texts are filtered and sent to spam.
- Your messages are sent through an unreliable provider.
Figuring out the culprit behind a low delivery rate can be frustrating. Gleantap is here to help you understand tricky metrics like delivery rate.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for assessing the success of your text marketing campaign. A conversion rate tells you how many people took an action based on your texts. For example, if someone replies to your text or makes a purchase, this is considered a conversion. Therefore, a reasonable conversion rate is one of the key indicators of the performance of your campaign.
Click-through Rate
Your click-through rate is a good metric to track if you include links in your texts. The click-through rate shows how many subscribers who received your messages clicked on the link.
Number of Subscribers
The number of people in your contact list lets you know how well your promotion efforts are going. In addition, looking at monthly contact growth will help determine if you’re advertising in the right places. You want to ensure that you are constantly expanding your list and reaching more people with your campaigns.
Jumpstart a Successful Text Marketing Campaign With Gleantap
Creating and executing a profitable and effective SMS marketing campaign involves many moving parts. However, you can simplify the process with the right SMS marketing platform.
Gleantap offers the features you need to start, maintain, and analyze your SMS marketing campaign. We also provide a team of professionals here to help you every step of the way.
If you’re ready to tackle text marketing, schedule a free demo!
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