As consumers depend more and more on mobile devices, text message marketing is giving businesses the ability to reach customers instantly. On average, 26 billion text messages are sent every day. As a result, these campaigns are known to perform seven times better than traditional email marketing campaigns. Here are ways you can begin incorporating text marketing into your current strategies.
Strategies for Text Campaigns
Text marketing campaigns should work in tandem with your other marketing efforts. Text campaigns can be used to support your loyalty programs and provide exclusive offers and promotions. A way you can implement these tactics into your strategy is by setting up automated sends to users on your current list.
For example, once someone makes a purchase, you can create a series of text messages that thank them for their purchase and invite them to join your loyalty program. Once they have opted in, place their contact information in a list you can later use to send out VIP offers or deals.
Even if your business focuses on services instead of products, text marketing can help you connect with your customers. Gyms, for example, successfully use these types of campaigns to connect with participants in their fitness programs and provide check-ins throughout the month.
Tracking Results
As with any successful marketing campaign, it’s important to track your results using tools like Google Analytics and make adjustments along the way. When running text campaigns, here are the metrics you should focus on.
Click-Through Rate: This metric is the measurement of subscribers that took action in your text and clicked the link you provided to make a purchase or learn more. This metric is most important because it gives you direct insight into what your customers engage with the most.
Opt-out Rate: This metric tracks the number of users that have requested to be removed from your marketing list. Although your business will likely experience unsubscribers, a high opt-out rate is a red flag. This could be a signal that you are sending out too many messages or not sending relevant information to your customers.
Conversion Rate: This metric tracks visitors that took a valuable action from your text such as responding to your call to action. This could be replying to your message, making a phone call, or making a purchase. This metric will help you better understand which products or services your customers care about the most.
Best Practices
When determining whether you should be using a text marketing strategy, these are several best practices you should keep in mind. Like all other marketing campaigns, a clear call to action is imperative. Keep your request simple and make it as easy as possible for your customers to take action. Consider using link shorteners as well to keep your message concise. In addition to a clear message, pick a specific cadence and don’t stray from it. Will you send messages daily, weekly, or monthly? Does this change for seasonal sales or VIP offers? Determine these schedules prior to launching your campaign and stick to it. Most importantly, make sure your campaign asks for consent before moving forward. Dropping in opt-in and opt-out options is crucial to protecting your business.
Text messaging campaigns are growing in popularity because businesses are seeing six to eight times higher engagement rates. Adding text marketing to your strategy can help you achieve similar results and truly connect with your audience.
Text messages have a 209% higher response rate than phone, email, or social media.
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