SMS is a powerful tool in your digital marketing strategy, and you can level up with automated text message marketing.
About 96 percent of marketers using text messages said it helped them drive revenue.
This is especially true for eCommerce businesses, but truly, any type of business can benefit from SMS automation because it helps you increase your conversion rate through personalized texts that spur your customers to action.
Automated text message marketing involves pre-written SMS messages that send automatically based on specific criteria and/or actions, such as:
- A trigger (like sending when a customer completes a purchase)
- A schedule (like sending before the launch of a big sale)
- A timeline (like sending a month after a customer’s last purchase, for example)
Automating your text messages helps you connect and build better relationships with your audiences in an efficient way.
Here are just a few examples of automated text message marketing:
- Sending transactional messages (such as order confirmations or shipping notifications)
- Sharing special offers, sales and promotions
- Reminding clients about upcoming appointments
- Requesting customer reviews and/or testimonials
- Recovering abandoned shopping carts
Don’t miss our 10 best practices for SMS text message marketing.
But let’s get specific about automation. The following are five tips for automated text message marketing so that you can boost your sale conversion rate and grow your business.
Sign up for an automated text marketing service
The first step, before anything else, is to identify and sign up for the technology that will enable you to automate your text messages.
When surveying what automated 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.
Regarding features, consider:
- Ease of use
- Any complementary tools (such as data-capturing forms)
- Audience segmentation
- Campaign reporting
DailyStory offers automation for not just SMS text messaging but email marketing and more as well. Explore with our 21-day free trial.
Start building your contact list (if you don’t already have one)
If you already have an SMS opted-in contact list, great! Go ahead and upload it into your new SMS text marketing service.
If not, you’ll want to focus on growing that list, especially since it’s a best practice (and the law) to send text messages only to those who are specifically opted into receiving those texts. (In other words, you can’t just add everyone in your customer database to your text message contact list without their explicit opt-in.) The good news is that about 91 percent of consumers would opt-in for text messages from brands.
Definitely start with advertising across all platforms and even within your business if you have a physical location for customers.
Dive deeper with our four tips to grow your SMS text message marketing subscribers.
Plan your automated text message marketing campaigns
Successful automated text campaigns don’t just happen. Based on some of the examples you’ve already seen, list out the types of automated campaigns you want to put in place. The best campaigns come down to the structure of your business, the needs of your customers and your overall business goals.
Then, flush out each campaign idea with an outline that identifies who’s targeted, when they’re being text messaged (what triggers need to happen), the general messages you want to convey and your goals for that campaign.
For example, if you’re looking to have an automated Welcome text message series, you’ll likely decide that it will go to new text subscribers immediately and that the overall content is to educate these new subscribers on what they can expect from you, with the goal of them clicking on a special offer link later on in the series.
Create your message content
Now that you have an idea of the automated text message marketing campaigns you want to run and a service to deploy them on, it’s time to flush out exactly what each text message in your campaigns will say.
Remember that you’re working with 160 characters, but within that, you want to identify who you are, be clear and concise, include a call to action if appropriate and give them directions on how to opt out.
That can be a lot for 160 characters, but MMS text messages can help convey more information in that limited space.
Refer to our 10 best practices for text message marketing for more.
Monitor your performance
The only danger of automated text message marketing is the tendency to “set it and forget it.” And truly, the benefit of automation is that you can focus your energy and time elsewhere, but you do want to understand what’s working and what’s not along the way.
Some metrics that you’ll want to stay on top of:
- Bounce rate (where carrier violations can prevent some text messages from delivering to your recipients, as well as incorrect phone numbers)
- Click rate
- Resulting sales (which you’ll want to tie back to your specific automated campaigns)
- Unsubscribe rate
By monitoring your automation performance over time, you can easily tweak anything that’s not driving the results you’re looking for.
In conclusion
The power of automated text message marketing can boost your business revenue over time, so if you’re not currently using this tactic, now’s the time.
As you’re diving into automating your text messages, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation, powerful SMS text message marketing and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.