By PAGE Editor

SMS marketing is by far one of the most effective strategies in today’s technologically evolved world of business. For starters, text messages are mobile-friendly, making them an excellent way to reach a wider pool of customers engagingly. They are also fast, cost-effective, and quite reliable when a proper campaign strategy is put in place.

In other words, the success of your campaign will largely depend on how well you strategize when setting it up. So, how exactly do you go about creating a great SMS marketing campaign? Here are a few pointers to put in mind as your guide.

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Before creating any marketing campaign, it is crucial to, first of all, have a deep understanding of your target market. This means knowing where your intended audience is, what they’d want, and when they are most likely to receive text messages without ignoring them. This way, you can put in measures to tell whether the message was indeed sent, delivered, and read by your target customer. 

In other words, understanding your target audience will help you choose SMS marketing software that best suits their description as well as the needs of your company. In a recent article, Messente’s Uku Tomikas explains how you can deal with failed texts due to technical glitches from the messaging carrier. Apart from timing your messages right, you could use adaptive routine systems that provide alternative connections to avoid technical issues from the operator’s side.

2. Ensure Compliance 

A successful text message marketing campaign also needs to fulfill regulatory compliance requirements. This means securing the legal right to communicate with target customers via SMS, usually from the Federal Communications Commission in the United States. Bulk messaging is usually governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which protects consumers from spam messages from businesses yet they didn’t give consent.

3. Provide Value 

The main essence of using SMS marketing is to not only promote your products and services but also to gain customer loyalty and trust for your brand. To achieve this, your SMS texts will have to give value to the recipient, of course, with their consent. The last thing you want is to send marketing texts that sound intrusive or annoying to your intended reader. Let every SMS provide value and you’ll be building trust while gaining a reputation for your brand.

The following tips can help you create marketing SMS’s that are more striking and valuable to the recipient.

• Providing personalized deals: If you monitor the product preferences of your clients, it is easier to lure them into purchasing by offering discounts or giveaways via text messaging.

• Use friendly reminder texts: Reminder and follow-up SMSs can be used to show a person that you care and that you understand they might have been busy when you sent the previous message. Again, ensure reminder texts are tailor-made to the customer’s needs and preferences.

• Seek feedback from customers: You can also ask for feedback via SMS from customers about their opinion on your business, products, and services. Often, ask about their take on what you can do to improve the said products or services.

4. Have a Plan to Track Results 

An SMS text message marketing campaign needs to have measurable goals and objectives. After doing all the hard work and you’re ready to roll, it is important to have a way to track results. Luckily, most of this will come from the marketing platform you choose to use. At the very least, the platform should be able to reveal metrics such as:

• Sent and received text messages

• Click-through rates

• Engagements trending

• Response rates

From such data, you can determine what’s working and what’s not, meaning you can adjust accordingly.

5. Don’t Forget Clear (CTA’s) 

Now that you know who you'll be marketing to and what you're hoping to achieve, it's time to start writing your first text marketing messages. As a general guideline, each SMS advertising message should have a call-to-action or next step for your clients to take. Oftentimes, this improves customer engagement rates as well as your relationship with customers.

An SMS opt-in message will most likely be the initial call-to-action you send. This will inform your clients that they will be receiving SMS marketing communications from you. This is not only necessary for establishing your text marketing campaign but it is also required by law as mentioned earlier. After you've completed this, you'll be able to start fine-tuning your campaign.

Launching an SMS marketing campaign can be a satisfying endeavor. At the back of the mind, you know that you will be reaching hundreds or thousands of potential customers from one or a few clicks of the button. However, a text marketing campaign should be properly set up from the very beginning if at all it will be successful. The above few tips can help with this, luckily.

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