The two common features of any phone are calling and texting. The majority of the business deals are done via phones today. The whole world has come inside a phone screen in this digital era. People browse websites, chat and even check their emails on phones more as compared to desktops or laptops. This brings into focus an important part of mobile phones and that is SMS marketing. SMS marketing is an important aspect of business promotion. People tend to check their phones more obsessively than their email boxes, which gives a great return on using SMS marketing campaigns.
It is also a great medium to drive people to your website. Here is how you can optimize your SMS marketing campaigns in the best way possible to make the most of the feature:
• Target your SMS messages
It is better to send targeted messages to a particular segment of your audience. Companies do not send SMS messages as frequently as they send emails and hence SMS messages do make an impact. Integrate your CRM system with your messaging platform so that you can send text messages based upon demographics, locations, and purchase history.
• Send triggered messages
Target your customers based upon their recent action or inaction. Sending triggered messages can help you interact with your customers better. When a customer has recently purchased an item from your website, you can send them text messages to invite them to buy related items to the purchase. You could also offer them a discount. As SMS messages can be sent with immediate effect, you can send them such offers even before they log off from the website.
• Select a good time
With the furor of spam emails and forward messages on WhatsApp, text messages have retained their importance. If an SMS message comes in the middle of the night, the majority of the people tend to get up to read it. So, it is necessary to maintain the importance of your SMS messages and send them at a time you think is most practical for your user. Morning hours during the weekend are great to send offers and promotional coupons on text messages.
• Keep your messages short and to the point
While sending SMS messages, it is important that you get to the point quickly. SMS messages have created a kind an impression in the minds of people of being short and brief. Nobody wants to read long and spam looking messages.
• Include a Call to Action
It is necessary to include a call to action message in your texts. A ‘click here’ or ‘buy now’ along with a new offer or promotional coupon has more chances of being effective.
• Include branded links for SMS marketing campaigns
Instead of adding a long and ugly link to your SMS message while including a call to action, it is better to use a generic URL shortener. It is also a good idea to create a custom short link with your company’s brand name on it. This increases your brand visibility and makes your message look neat and tidy.
• Include URL destination redirects
One of the best features of SMS marketing campaigns is that it enables you to change the destination URL of your links. This helps to easily fix an error if someone from the team has mistakenly added a link in the wrong place. In case, the special offer message has expired, you can redirect the link to the latest available offer.
• Include messages from your brand’s name
To create more brand awareness, it is better to let people see your brand name and not some anonymous number. This improves brand visibility and also puts more trust in your text message.
• Personalize your messages
When you send personalized messages, you make your customers feel more valued and you get a warmer response from them. But to send personalized messages, you will need to do some conversion. You can either do mail-merge so that all the contacts are greeted by their first name or you could send two-way SMS. In this method, a direct message is sent to specific customers and then a high-end bot can have a unique conversation with them.
• Track and monitor the results
With the short URLs with UTM parameters in-built, you can easily track which SMS marketing campaigns are getting the most clicks and user engagement. You can this way, analyze what works best for your customers. You can try different offers, sending times, call to action, and personalization to see what works best in order to optimize your SMS marketing campaign.
SMS marketing campaigns are used by many brands for marketing, customer service, sending password resets, delivery confirmation messages and appointment reminders. Some people also use SMS marketing for online surveys to encourage feedback. These tactics make customers more receptive to your messages.
