10 Steps to Launch a Successful SMS Marketing Campaign – Infographic
SMS Marketing is extremely effective, simple to use and offers exceptional ROI. Like any other marketing channel, the key to success lies in starting out right and having the right strategy in place for your business. To help you understand how to launch a successful SMS Marketing campaign in just ten simple steps, we’ve put together this handy infographic.
Share this Image On Your Site
So with all the evidence indicating that SMS Marketing is an essential channel that companies simply can’t afford not to use, how can you launch a successful SMS campaign for your business? Here are ten tips from the FastSMS experts.
1. Know Your Audience
The first thing to do before you put any campaign in place is to do your market research. In order to comply with UK regulations, the customers that you intend to contact will need to have signed up and explicitly agreed to be contacted. At the point of getting this information from them, it is a good idea if possible to harvest as much further information as possible, including their name, age, gender and location.
This will allow you to make your messages more focused on their exact demographic and will also mean you can segment the lists of numbers to create tailored messages for each sector. It is then important to find out as much as you can about your target audience – some of it will be about making assumptions from what you can find. What are the current trends? What are they likely to be hearing about in the news? What other technology or brands will they be using? If you can make messages feel relevant to them, they’ll get the sense that you understand them.
2. Build a Marketing List
Now you know your audience and their interests, put together the list of numbers you want to target. Have you picked out a core segment – such as those under 30 years of age? Or perhaps you’ve only targeted women as the product you’re marketing will appeal to them most? Create a clear and easy-to-understand list that shows what messages each number has received. It’s important to not send conflicting or duplicate messages to people so organisation is key.
With Fastsms, you have access to off the shelf API integration with all the leading CRM platforms and access to full developer support, which can help to manage all of this and more, especially useful for organisations running larger scale campaigns.
3. Set Your Goal
In order to be effective, it’s important to have a goal in place for the campaign. Decide what it is that you want to achieve and make a note of it. Do you want to improve customer engagement? Drive more sales? Raise awareness of price changes or a new offer?
It’s also helpful to set a measurable time frame in which you want to do this. If you can, put together data from a ‘normal’ section of working time for the same length so you can create comparable data. This will help you analyse how successful your campaign was.
For best results, it is recommended to structure your campaign around SMART objectives.
4. Decide Your Frequency
When putting together your campaign, you need to decide how frequently you want to communicate with your audience. It is important to ensure your message gets heard but you don’t want to come across too pushy and insistent. Text messages have a high open rate as it is, so bear in mind that SMS Marketing is not like e-mail or social media where you need to keep pushing out the same message in order to get heard above the masses.
One way to think about it is how often would that person naturally think about your product. If your product or service is something they might use every few months, such as having a haircut, then messaging them every other day would become frustrating. If you consider car servicing, this might be relevant just once a year, although seasonal value-added services can help to boost your offer. The fundamental thing to remember is that your customers get the message; they hear you loud and clear. But they may not be ready to act on it regularly anytime soon.
In contrast, if you were marketing a car wash facility, something customers may use fortnightly or monthly, then more regular reminders may encourage them to use your service. If it’s something like having their carpets professionally cleaned, which they may do once a year at most, sending a bi-annual message may be all it takes. It’s about staying on their radar without becoming too annoying. In the case of more frequent use of services, it is also worth offering things like loyalty bonuses to keep customers keen on hearing from you and add value to your SMS messages.
5. Craft Your Message
Next is to decide what your message is going to be and personalise it. You only have people’s attention for a limited amount of time and they’re going to read your message very quickly. Keep it short and sweet! Establish what the incentives are early on and add any URLs if needed – with smartphones being so popular, this is a great way to drive people directly to your website. From here, they can immediately make their orders. Also, be sure to structure your Calls to Action (CTAs) around tried and tested power words and phrases.
6. Keywords
Think about whether you’ll be using a keyword in your message to allow customers to respond easily and automate your system. If you intend to allow real-time, two-way messaging, you’ll need to set this up within your fastsms account before launching your campaign. Click here for more information on receiving SMS Messages.
7. Timing
Getting the timing right is key. During the working day, chances are higher that people are busy. Unless your SMS relates directly to their job, you’re most likely better off waiting until the evening when they’re sat down with more available time. If you can, look at your website analytics to establish what time people are usually researching your business or your products. Are there key trends in terms of buying times? Saturdays perform badly for e-mail marketing, but for SMS they can be productive. If you’re sending across different countries, keep in mind that time zones will change.
Interestingly, the research by the DMA discovered that the optimal period for brands and businesses to distribute text messages to their opt-in database is between 12:00-15:00.
Whatever timings you choose, try not to become a spammer (in most cases send no more than one message to each recipient per week – though there are exceptions!).
8. Call-to-Action
What is the incentive driving the text? Think back to the goal of your campaign and make sure you’ve added a call-to-action and, if needed, a URL to your product (use a shortlink from a service like bitly.com). Try not to keep your message open-ended but give it an end time that will spur action, i.e. offer on until the end of today/the week, etc. Given that most messages are read within three minutes, there is clearly a natural sense of urgency, so make use of this by making your CTA’s timebound.
9. Consistency is Key
Be consistent in your messages and the tone you take. This includes keeping the frequency at a consistent level so it doesn’t fluctuate too heavily between receiving lots of messages and then none. Of course, when you are pushing a certain product or offer you may want to increase the contact to a degree, but just keep it appropriate to the usual amount you’d be in touch with customers – e.g. if you usually send a bi-annual message, suddenly sending a text every other day for a week might seem too pushy.
Make sure that the tone and style of your messages also reflects your brand personality to ensure that the message is consistent with that of your other marketing channels.
10. Analyse Your Campaign
At the end of your SMS campaign, it is important that you analyse it. Look to measure the response to your campaign based on the market research and information you put together at the very beginning. This will help you to ascertain how effectively you spent your marketing budget, how useful the process was for driving sales or raising awareness, and where you can improve next time for even better results. As mentioned previously, using SMART objectives to design your campaign will help greatly with this.
To find out how FastSMS can help you launch a successful SMS campaign with low cost business bulk SMS messaging, get in touch now on 0800 954 5305.
Related Articles
Double Conversion Rates with SMS Marketing
According to Internet Retailer, data conversion rates for text messages are double that of email when the link goes to a mobile responsive landing page. Even with a small list, this can result in a huge increase in sales, signups, lead generation, contest entries or whatever the goal of your campaign is.
The Psychology of SMS Marketing
In marketing, everyone wants to be more influential and persuasive in order to build loyalty and return custom. To gain the highest ROI, businesses want their marketing campaigns to speak to every individual in such a way that makes them feel connected and yet, with every will in the world, an SMS marketing campaign is only going to achieve this high conversion and success if it manages to tap into consumer psychology.
Build Brand Loyalty with SMS Messaging
In a world where your competition can be found in just a few seconds, instilling brand loyalty in customers is a greater challenge than ever. One way to proactively reach out to customers is via SMS. The personal nature of SMS messages, combined with high read rates, gives you the opportunity to develop relationships with each customer.
4 Simple Steps to Staying Compliant When Using SMS Messaging
Yet another company (Quigley and Carter Limited) have been fined by the ICO for not having permission to send SMS messages. In this case, they had outsourced their marketing to a third party who then sent messages on their behalf. So is staying compliant with the regulations regarding SMS messaging so difficult? It doesn’t have to be.
4 Basic Metrics for Your SMS Marketing Campaigns
One key to successful marketing is to know when you’re doing it right. And when you’re doing it wrong. The great thing about SMS marketing is you can get that information pretty quickly. But to understand how your messages are performing, you need to do a little maths. Thankfully, it’s all rather simple once you see it.
Top Three Things Retailers Should Do to Keep Customers on Their SMS Opt-In List
You've run a successful SMS opt-in campaign for your retail store. Now that you have your list, do you have a plan to keep them from opting out? Wait, you mean there's more to this than just sending out coupon codes? There is if you want to keep your customers from opting out.
How to Avoid Failing at SMS Marketing
For many businesses it's often a knee-jerk reaction to create an app, or to run mobile ads, or to start an SMS list. But without really understanding what it’s all about, you can waste a lot of time and money before realising what you actually need to do.
The 3 Biggest Benefits of Using a Shortcode in Your SMS Marketing
Over 92% of people in the UK have mobile phones. SMS marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to them in a personal way. But for your marketing to be a real success, you need to get replies. Using a shortcode with keywords offers many benefits for your marketing. Let's take a look at the top three.
Why you want to keep your SMS marketing database clean
To Txt Speak, or NTTS. TITQ.
Is it a good idea to cram more information into your precious 160 characters by using "txtspk" acronyms and abbreviations? Yes and no! It depends on the audience and the message. In this post you can pick up some insights into this question and join us in dissecting a real life example.