What is a text message campaign?
A text messaging campaign allows you to interact with your customers through text messages, which can feel more personal than emails.
Also known as SMS marketing text message campaigns have an engagement rate that’s three to seven times higher than with emails and a nearly six times conversion rate.
The following are six things you should know before starting your first texting campaign.
Segment your customer audience
You can still segment your audience (just like you would with your email marketing) so that you’re getting the right message to the right people at the right time. Automated text messages can also boost your interactions and ultimate campaign results.
There are limitations, though. You must work with a character count of 160 characters, and you have to fit the parameters of any included visuals, i.e. MMS messages.
Set text message campaign goals
Thinking through your goals will help guide the direction of your first texting campaign.
Setting goals increases the success of your marketing strategy by about 429 percent.
Consider your overall business goals and how SMS marketing can support any or all of them.
Still not sure what your goals should be? Check out our seven expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business.
Choose a text messaging service
It’s important to identify and sign up for the technology that will enable you to create and deploy texting campaigns.
When surveying what text marketing services are out there, you’ll want to understand all the features available, whether those features make sense for what you want to achieve (or if you need something more) and the total cost associated with a subscription.
Features to consider
Regarding features, consider:
- Ease of use
- Any complementary tools (such as data-capturing forms)
- Audience segmentation
- Automation capabilities
- Campaign reporting
DailyStory offers SMS marketing, as well as email marketing and more as well. Explore with our free edition.
Who can I text?
Before you launch your first text message campaign, it’s critical that your customers gave you permission to send them SMS messages.
Only send text messages to opted in contacts
It’s a best practice but also the law (as it relates to distributing promotional content via texting). But about 91 percent of consumers would opt-in for text messages from brands.
Of course, there are many ways to opt-in your customers and even potential customers, including:
- Including a contact phone number field and permissions checkbox in your contact or sign-up forms.
- Using a “text to join” strategy, where consumers text a keyword to a specific number that you give them.
Check out our four tips to grow your SMS text message marketing subscribers.
Honor and manage opt-outs too
Just remember to give a clear option to opt out of your texts within each message sent. For example, a subscriber can reply “STOP” to opt out. While this feels countintuitive to your marketing goals, it is required by law, and you wouldn’t want to accumulate frustrated and uninterested subscribers anyway.
What should I text?
The sky’s the limit within 160 characters, creatively speaking. But you do have some guidelines to follow to avoid getting carrier violations and the resulting impacts from them.
Understand carrier violations
A carrier violation occurs when carriers (such as Verizon, AT&T and such) receive an outbound SMS and opt to not deliver the message to the destination phone number. In other words, carriers monitor and filter SMS traffic, and if your message triggers a perceived violation from the carrier’s perspective, your text will not be delivered.
When your text messages are flagged, it becomes very likely that future messages from the same number (or those with similar content) will be filtered out as well.
How should I track my texting campaign?
The metrics tied to texting campaigns aren’t as robust as what you might be used to with email marketing due to technological limitations.
Within whatever texting campaign service you choose to use, you should be able to track the number of sent SMS messages as well as the click rate. You also should be able to see your deliverability rate, depending on the service.
Of course, to take this a step further, it’s a best practice to track any resulting sales from your texting campaign as well to give you a bigger picture view of how your text messages are performing.
In conclusion
Before you dive head first into texting campaigns, make sure you have a plan. Knowing your goals as well as the “rules of the road” that come along with texting can help you start strong. From there, be sure to experiment and measure so that you’re continuously optimizing your texting campaigns.
