3 Tips to Help You Time Your SMS Marketing Campaign

Timing is everything.  While it’s an axiom everyone can understand and agree on, it’s doubly true when it comes to SMS marketing. If you send your messages at the wrong time, you’ll see your opt out rates jump and your ROI plummet. So when should you send your text marketing messages? Here are three key guidelines to help you schedule your next campaign:

1. Don’t send on weekends. Percentages vary, but in just about every kind of business, opt out rates jump when messages are sent on a weekend. Retail businesses have seen as much as a 372% increase in opt outs in messages sent on Saturday or Sunday. Restaurants have a less drastic, but still substantial, increase of opt out rates of around 150%. Either way the trend is very clear: people don’t want to be marketed to via text messages on weekends. There are obviously exceptions dependent on the nature of the messages, but just think – will your audience have made their major decisions for the weekend before Saturday?
2. Send Tuesday-Friday. Do your best to skip sending messages on Mondays. The evidence and trend isn’t as strong as for weekends, but Mondays tend to have a lower response rate (meaning people don’t take action on the message). The common sense reason given for this is that people are just too busy on Mondays. They are inundated with emails and work demands that built up over the weekend. Your simple text message is likely to get lost in the noise.
3. Pick the right time of day. Unfortunately picking the right time of day is not as simple as avoiding weekends. Some studies suggest avoiding traditional work hours (9-5) and reaching out to people just before and just after. But there are other examples that show just the opposite. Before and after work are “rush hours”. People are busy getting to work or getting home, and don’t have time to look at your message. The only agreement in the data is to not send messages after hours, generally from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. So what is the right time of day? You’ll have to experiment, or take a survey of your list, to find out what will work for your business.

Remember these are guidelines. They won’t apply to every business and really completely depend upon your list and what they want. If these guidelines don’t seem to bring good results, consider surveying your list to find their preferences. And you can get more ideas from our free SMS Marketing Guide.