How to send the perfect SMS marketing message

SMS marketing can help your business receive those response rates that you have always dreamt of and can help you enhance and improve your business massively. Whether that be improving your customer service, sales and marketing or customer retention – SMS can do it all.

SMS is a personal form of communication which makes it very powerful, in fact 98% of all text messages are read. However this can make SMS marketing slightly daunting, knowing that every customer will almost certainly read your message as they will be notified of your message instantly at the time you send your campaign.

Like any marketing method there is always experimentation, every business is different and so is every customer, so there is no real standardised campaign that you can send out and will work for every industry. 

Below are some things you definitely need to do when sending your SMS campaign, and some things that you can experiment with, test on your customers and analyse your results. 

How to send a successful SMS marketing campaign 

Agree a target or reason for sending the message
First off, you need to clarify, agree and understand the goals of your SMS campaign.

– Why are you sending the campaign? To improve sales? To inform your customers?

– What do you want the response to be? Visit your website? Call your business?

– Have you got some targets or goals you want to meet? 15% click rate? 10% increase in sales?

These are just some of those questions that you need to answer internally beforehand, as then you can judge whether your SMS marketing campaign has been a success.

Know your audience, customer and recipient 
This will not only help your tone of voice and message content, but also what time and day you should be sending your message. 

Sending relevant content is imperative to the success of the campaign. So instead of sending blanket information to all your customers, segment your database into different categories. For example you could split your customers by sex, age, interests, previous purchases.

This means that you will not annoy your customers by sending them non relevant content.

Content is king
Ultimately the success of the campaign will probably live or die by the quality of the content of the message. There are certain things you need to think about when it comes to mobile marketing message content…

Sender ID – make sure you set this to your business name so the customer knows who the message is from.

Start strong – get straight to the juicy part. SMS messages are usually quite short, so get to the point straight away to make sure your customer reads the most important part.

Call to action – make sure you include an easy, simple call to action within your message. Let your customers know what to do but also how they can act on your message. Include the website links they will need, or the contact details, don’t make them have to go off and research them.

The early bird catches the worm… but not too early
Timing is everything. Make sure your customers are receiving your message at the perfect moment for them to be able to act. If you are sending out appointment reminders, don’t send them out 2 weeks before their appointment, or 10 minutes before, send them out the day before. 

The content of the message and who you are sending the message to, should influence the day and the timing the campaign. Try and put yourself into your customers shoes and think about what they will be doing at that point, and whether your message is relevant to them at that point.

Then last but my no means least…

Test, test and test again.
Send your message to your phone, send it out to all your work colleagues and ask/see their responses.

Experiment with different times, days, offers, opening lines, record and analyse your results and then refine and send again.

The simple stages will help you send out successful mobile marketing campaigns. Sign up for your free mobile marketing account today and see how SMS can enhance your business.