Text message marketing is still an untapped marketing channel that most marketers today are missing. And those using it, most of them fail to understand what SMS marketing metrics to track.
Text messaging has proven to be one of the best ways to increase customers and it’s become an excellent measure of success today. customers.
So, utilizing text message services you can create engagement opportunities that you have been missing ever since.
But, here’s the deal.
But before we dive into the details of what SMS marketing metrics to track, let’s first see the wide array of use cases of SMS marketing.
- Order status: Companies do share the order status on emails. But sending them over the message helps customers to be aware of their product order status as and when you share it. This is because people open their text messages more than emails.
- Deals Promotions: As we mentioned earlier, text messages are typically read within minutes of receiving. This makes SMS marketing very effective to create a sense of urgency and promote good offers.
- New Product Launch: It is very easy for you to update the existing customers about your new product or service launch.
- Integrate SMS marketing with Omnichannel marketing: When you design any marketing campaign, include SMS marketing as a part of the buffet. It helps in establishing brand recall while you execute the campaign.
These are just some of the use cases of text marketing. There are many more reasons for you to start executing SMS marketing campaigns for your business.
Once you start with SMS campaigns for your business, you’ll learn that tracking the right metrics is very crucial. Concerning your business goals, metrics to track will vary. But some of the key metrics remain the same irrespective of the business goals and niche.
Certain metrics play a key role in making your SMS marketing campaign successful. And today, in this article, I will share these important metrics that you need to consider.
11 Metrics For Success of Text Message Marketing
Here are some of the key metrics that are essential for text message marketing and your overall SMS marketing strategy.
List growth rate
This is a measure of how fast your subscriber list is growing. This growth rate can be calculated on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. A steady growth rate means you are acquiring new customers and retaining them consistently.
By comprehending how much a standard customer spends on your product after you’ve run a text campaign for your company, you’ll start to know the actual lifetime value of each customer. It’ll help to determine the return on investment of your text marketing campaign and more importantly, the size of your list, and the customer value of each subscriber.
If the growth rate reduces you should look for solutions in two places – marketing to acquire new users and attrition of existing users. Hence, your text message campaign tracking system should keep a check on new customer addition to the list and average churn rate.
You can calculate this weekly or monthly, by dividing the increase into subscribers in this period by the original number of subscribers at the start.
Formula = (Subscribers at end of a time period – subscribers at the beginning)/(subscribers at the beginning of the time period)
List size
In the previous point, we did touch upon the importance of growing your subscriber list. As per this list, we saw how it helps you to keep a check on the average value that the person brings to your business.
Hence, as a business owner or marketing manager, you should keep a close eye on the list size of your customers. This metric is the total number of phone numbers subscribed to your campaign.
It is important to note that this number does not necessarily equal the number of customers reached since there will inevitably be some inactive phone numbers. But this is the best metric for measuring how large your subscriber base is.
As your list grows, it provides a better sample size to test your SMS campaigns, and strategize accordingly as per the location, budget, etc.
Attrition rate
Some customers will inevitably unsubscribe from your text marketing campaigns. Some will do so because they are simply no longer interested in your service, but others will because they find your messages intrusive or the value proposition lacking. Changing the frequency and content of your messages may lower your attrition rate.
You need to work to tune the content and frequency until you reach an acceptable attrition rate.
To reduce the risk of high attrition you can segment your audience on Gleantap and run different campaigns to each segment and understand which messaging converts more.
Formula = (Opt-outs during the week or month)/original number of subscribers at the beginning of the week or month
Response rate
This metric is the primary measure of effectiveness for an individual broadcast. It’s a measurement of how many subscribers have taken action after receiving a text message. Keeping track of this statistic will let you know what format for messages is most effective. Other factors to consider are timing, message structure, and offer type.
Not all messages may have a response rate component to them. For example, you could be sending your customers fitness tips if you are a gym and in those moments, you should look at open rate
Formula = offers redeemed/total offers delivered
An interesting application of tracking this metric is while you send survey-related messages. When you send survey/feedback questions in a text marketing campaign, tracking the response rate helps you understand the depth of customer attachment with your brand.
This response rate can help you plan better communication while you carry out another survey in the future.
Acquisition cost per subscriber
You don’t want to stop at tracking response rate, but go a layer deeper and understand how many people purchase your product or service. It’s the cash flow that keeps a business running and not just building a list.
Once you get a hold of the average purchase power of every customer, you can then create offers and campaigns according to your unique customer persona.
The acquisition cost per customer metric is used to measure the cost of acquiring a mobile subscriber. Comparing this cost to the average profit of a subscriber tells you how much you can offer customers to sign up to your list.
- Related article: Customer Engagement Vs Text Message Marketing | Is There A Link?
Click-through rate
Don’t confuse click-through rate with a response rate. Click-through rate is an important performance metric for all your marketing campaigns. It shows not just how many people opened the message, but how many of those who opened followed your call to action. And that defines the success of your campaign to a large extent.
When you’re measuring click-through rates, you measure total clicks or unique clicks. Measuring total clicks will show you how many times the link was clicked throughout the text message campaign duration. With products like Gleantap, you can also measure unique link clicks and make a better interpretation of the campaign data.
Delivery rate
Another SMS text marketing metric is delivery rate. This is the percentage of text messages you send that actually reach a member’s inbox. This metric is handy when eliminating non-authentic numbers such as landlines or disconnected numbers.
Formula = (Number of delivered text messages / Total number of text messages sent) x 100
Reply rate
Reply rate is the percentage of members who respond to your SMS – a helpful metric to measure how engaged your audience is and how well your text message resonates with them. This metric informs decisions for future text message campaigns.
Formula = (Number of unique replies / Number of delivered messages) x 100
Unsubscribe rate
Another measure of success is the unsubscribe rate. It sounds counterproductive, but it is valuable to know the percentage of your text recipients who chose to unsubscribe during a campaign. They usually unsubscribe by replying “STOP” to your texts.
Formula = (Number of opt-outs / Number of subscribers at start of campaign) x 100
Conversion rate
Not to be confused with click-through rate, conversion rate is the performance metric that shows you the percentage of users who chose to take the desired action from your SMS. This is the core win of your SMS marketing strategy – to convert users to leads.
Formula = (Number of conversions / Number of messages sent) x 100
Campaign ROI
As with most marketing campaigns, calculating ROI (return on investment) is a must. You can calculate ROI for text message campaigns monthly, annually, or post-campaign. The choice is yours. The formula below can be used for calculating ROI for any marketing campaign:
Formula = (Total sales – Total investment) / Total investment
Conclusion
As you become more advanced in text message marketing, you will need to track the right SMS marketing metrics to generate a good ROI.
Even though SMS text marketing is an excellent way to reach customers and create loyalty, it also works strongly when you’re consistently reviewing your performance to discover what improvements can be made in your marketing efforts.
If you are looking for a product that helps you track the right metrics at ease, give Gleantap a shot and see your ROI growing month on month.
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