Do's and don'ts for setting up a successful SMS marketing program.
Do
- Set expectations with your audience about how frequently you’ll send an SMS message, e.g. once a week or once a month
- Send SMS on a regular schedule so recipients know when to expect messages. A great outcome is if customers start to look forward to your content and asking for more
- Send at least once a month so that recipients don’t forget about what they opted into
- Include a trackable link for each campaign so you can track your SMS marketing Click-Through Rate (CTR). Expect an average of 10% of your list to click on any given campaign. If you have 10000 opted in customers, that’s 1000 visits to your site
- Personalize your messages based on customer attributes, preferences, and purchase behavior, especially when sending lifecycle marketing messages like “Hi {{customer.firstname}}, I saw your order was delivered. How does everything look?”
- Send at different times during the day and different days of the week to see what engages your audience best. Don’t forget that consumers have more time to shop when they are not at work, e.g. Saturday and Sunday
- Test different content e.g. with an image or not. An image is not required to have a successful texting campaign, but we’ve found that consumers are more likely to engage with messages that have a picture (MMS)
- Create hold-out groups so some opted-in customers don’t receive the messages you send. This will enable you to compare on an apples-to-apples basis the incremental impact that texting has on various cohorts
- Ensure your site is prepared to convert mobile traffic; Consumers open text message links from their phones
- Survey your opted-in customers to understand their preferences. What content do they want to hear about? How frequently do they want to hear from you? The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to generate engaging SMS content
Don't
- Don’t send a message you wouldn’t want to receive yourself
- Don’t send messages to people who have opted out (replied “stop”, “cancel”, “unsubscribe”, etc.) or never opted in to receive text messages from you
- Don’t replicate your email strategy with texting; come up with novel offers and creative content to engage via SMS. Campaigns that work well are timely and personal, e.g. a limited supply of the customer’s favorite brand just came back in stock
Want to get started with SMS? Sign up for a demo of Concierge. We’d love to hear about your unique customer needs.
About Concierge
Concierge works for Performance Marketers at customer-obsessed brands. You're the hero in our story. We help you grow repeat revenue with personalized broadcast, triggered, and one-to-one text messages throughout your customer lifecycle. Concierge is not like all that “text blast" software that grows revenue but reduces your net margins and annoys your customers in the process. We're an extension of your team that works for you behind the scenes (also known as in a Slack channel) to devise thoughtful, personalized messages that emphasize the quality of your merchandise and the exceptional service your customers expect. We’ll deploy text messages for you that your Founder/CEO would be proud to send or receive him- or herself. We know rolling out new sales channels takes work; we roll up our sleeves so we can make your workday easier. We’re game to demonstrate measurable ROI from your texting program, in fact, we’ll guarantee it. Sign up for a discovery call with the Concierge Team.
