Top 5 SMS Marketing Best Practices
Five text marketing tips to follow when building your text campaign.
As a text marketing pioneer, EZ Texting has helped businesses and organizations send over 5 billion messages. Along the way, we’ve learned a thing or two about what makes for an effective business text message.
And now, you can benefit from our observations and expertise through our top 5 SMS text messaging best practices. Whether you are an EZ Texting customer or simply someone trying to learn the text marketing ropes, these top 5 best practices can help you craft successful SMS text messages that truly reach and engage your audience.
Here are our top 5 best practices you can use right now to guide you as you build your text campaigns:
1. Make It Personal
Text message marketing is considered a more personal means of communication, and as such, it only makes sense to personalize your messages. The most basic personalization efforts, like including the recipient’s first name in a text, can increase engagement by as much as 46%.
Another way to personalize your SMS messaging is through segmentation. This may sound complicated, but it’s as simple as setting your group criteria and defining your contacts for segmentation, then you’re ready to send targeted messages.
You may choose to segment according to your most active customers, biggest spenders, or simply by product or service type. Segmentation options are almost limitless, and should align with specific goals that you set prior sending out your text campaign.
2. Exclusive Offers Drive Engagement
Another strategy that drives engagement in much the same way personalization does, are exclusive offers. More than 30% of our customers use text marketing for promotions, and their audiences tend to be very engaged.
This is no surprise, considering mobile coupons are redeemed at a rate that far outpaces other marketing mediums. But, make sure your offer is exclusive, premium, or otherwise unique to maximize its impact. If your exclusive offer is not considered special or high value, you could damage this close connection to your customers and potentially lead to your contacts opting out.
Another approach to offering exclusive deals is through loyalty programs. Text marketing is very effective at building customer loyalty, so pairing an SMS campaign with a loyalty program that rewards repeat and consistent business is always a smart strategy.
3. Follow Up to Improve Conversions
When you send out an SMS message to your contacts, it creates an opportunity to not only build brand awareness, but encourage engagement. Engagement breeds conversions, or more simply put, it prompts your audience to take action – which may mean clicking a link, texting a keyword, or filling out a form.
Follow up is a crucial part of stoking the engagement fire to maximize conversions, but it can also be time consuming. This is why it’s important to be able to schedule out and automate your follow-up messages to ensure that this effective piece of the engagement puzzle is not forgotten.
4. Match Your Strategy to Your Industry
Not all industries will get the same results from the same features and approaches. Some industries — such as retail, restaurants, and education — may need to rely heavily on mass texting capabilities, while others — like real estate agents or legal and financial offices — may get more use out of two-way texting. You know your contacts best and can choose the features and approaches that best fit your strategies.
Making sure your strategy aligns with your industry and your customers before you start texting will ensure better results when you do.
5. Supercharge Your Customer Service
Business texts are popular with both the businesses that send them out and the customers that receive them because they offer a level of convenience unmatched by other marketing channels.
You can easily leverage this convenience to bring new energy to your customer service strategies by incorporating things like two-way messaging, mobile receipts, order confirmations, delivery updates, into your messaging.
As documented in our 2022 Consumer Texting Behavior Report, the overwhelming majority of consumers have positive feelings when they receive a text. We also know happy customers buy more, join more, and are more likely to engage with your messaging. Considering this, it’s no surprise that text messaging is a reliable way to elevate your customer service experience.
These are just a few of the best practices that can radically elevate your text marketing strategies. To check out more texting strategies, including those specific to your business type, check out our industries page.
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