Top 5 Essential Text Marketing Practices
Five SMS marketing practices that are mission-critical for any text campaign.
As pioneers in the text marketing industry, EZ Texting has learned a lot about how to ensure that SMS marketing continues to be a safe and trusted channel. Afterall, our text-marketing livelihood depends on our ability to lead the charge when it comes to fortifying text marketing as a valuable and reliable channel. As such, we know a thing or five about essential text marketing practices that every business engaging in text marketing or thinking about doing so in the future needs to know now.
Here are our top 5 text marketing best practices that we consider essential for success:
1. Make It Easy to Opt In
Text marketing, considered a more personal means of communication, requires users to explicitly consent to receiving this type of communication. Customers, or any user, must proactively opt in to join your text marketing list. If you text people without their explicit permission, you are spamming them, which is bad for your business and your customers.
So, make sure opting in is a snap. When shopping around for a text marketing provider or tool, make sure they offer a simple and trusted opt-in process with options that can be employed across your marketing campaigns. EZ Texting offers quick and simple opt-in tools, including a QR code generator, Keywords, and digital Sign-Up Forms, just to name a few. Use these tools to help you create opt-in opportunities, including store signage, advertising, receipts, and across your digital presence.
2. Make It Easy to Opt Out
Part of preserving text marketing as a trusted and secure channel involves making opt-outs just as easy as opt-ins. It’s not just a smart strategy, it’s also the law. To remain FCC compliant you must give your customers regular opportunities to opt out of your text marketing list. Offering easy opt-out opportunities is not just about compliance. It also is an effective strategy to keep your lists packed with engaged customers who actually want to receive your messages. This process automatically ensures that you are engaging with qualified leads or contributors.
That said, compliance is critical if you want to reap the benefits of text marketing. To help reduce your compliance risk and improve consumer confidence, we created SafeSTOP — a simple, secure process for adding necessary compliance language to your messages.
3. Let Opt-Ins Know What to Expect
Remember, text marketing is a more personal means of communication, so your welcome messaging to new opt-ins should include giving them an idea of what’s to come.
So, for example, let opt-ins know if you plan to send coupons, exclusive offers, and product updates. Or, perhaps your type of business will be sending out catalogs, reservation reminders, and appointment confirmation appointments. Giving people an idea of what types of messages you plan to send is not only recommended, it’s also customer centric. To make sure you execute welcome messages flawlessly, automate them, so whenever someone opts in to your text list a welcome message is automatically deployed.
4. Match Your Strategy to Your Industry
Some industries — such as retail, restaurants, and education — may need to rely heavily mass texting capabilities, while others — like real estate agents or legal and financial offices — may get more use out of two-way SMS messaging. Make sure that the nature of your messaging matches how your customers naturally interact with your business.
Why is this so important? Because making sure your strategy aligns with your industry and your customers before you start texting will ensure better results when you do. If you are typically communicating to larger groups, like an entire high school population for example, then mass texting makes the most sense. However, if you are typically engaging one-on-one, two-way texting is the way to go.
5. Find the Right Time to Text
When it comes to text marketing, timing really can be everything. It’s critical that you text your audience at appropriate times in order to both maximize your engagement and keep your customers from opting out.
In fact, messaging your audience at the wrong time can put you afoul of SMS marketing compliance laws — Under the TCPA, you cannot text or call subscribers before 8:00AM or after 9:00PM.
The results of our 2022 Consumer Texting Behavior Report revealed that the majority of consumers prefer to receive texts from a business or organization Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM or during the hours that are typical to the particular business. To measure how effective your timing is for your specific customer base, take a look at your response rates and unsubscribes to see if your messages are finding their audience.
These top essentials are just the tip of the text marketing iceberg and the many ways it can help you grow your business while cultivating a qualified contact list. To learn about more effective text marketing go-to moves, check out our TOP 5 SMS MARKETING BEST PRACTICES.
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