10 tips for a successful SMS marketing campaign
SMS is an effective communication channel for reaching your target audience quickly and directly. But succeeding with an SMS marketing campaign, like email campaigns, is not always easy. To maximize its impact, it is important to follow certain best practices and use the right tools. Find ten tips to make your SMS campaign a success and achieve your marketing goals.
1. Obtain consent from recipients
The very first thing to worry about for a successful SMS campaign is probably the most important. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary to obtain the consent of your future recipients as to the use of their telephone number, because “if he has not said yes, it is no”. This is called opt-in, and it is possible to obtain it by ticking mentions such as: “[] I accept that my telephone number be used to receive offers from company X by SMS. It is possible to include this choice in a form, when creating an account on a site for example.
2. Define the objective of your SMS campaign
Before starting your campaign, it is important to clearly define its objectives, in order to avoid sending poorly targeted messages which could harm the commitment of your targets. To do this, you can ask yourself a few simple questions: what are you trying to achieve? Announce a new product, a special offer, an event? Or simply maintain the link with your customers or partners? The answers to these questions will guide your SMS campaign and give it a framework that can avoid pitfalls, ensuring that your messages will be well targeted, relevant and effective.
3. Segment your mailing list
Segmenting your contact base can be a good option to improve the targeting of your marketing campaign. Depending on the preferences or behavior of your recipients, it is possible to identify priority groups of people for a certain type of communication. You can thus offer a specific product to a group with similar purchasing habits, revive customers who have been inactive for some time, etc.
4. Choose the right tool for your campaign
Once your campaign framework is set and you've precisely targeted your recipients, it's time to choose the right tool to help you succeed with your campaign. With a large database, it is recommended to turn to professional services allowing automation and mass sending of SMS. These tools can accompany you throughout the process and offer many options, such as personalization, planning of mailings, link tracking or even analysis of the results of your campaign.
5. Opt for a short and explicit message
If text messages always have a character limit, habits have made us forget it. However, when sending marketing SMS, it is recommended to keep it short and to the point. Even if the recipients have given you their consent, these messages remain intrusive, it is important to keep this in mind. To optimize your message without disturbing your target, you can make sure to include the most important information from the beginning of the SMS by remaining as clear as possible on the subject of the message.
6. Personalize your text messages
Personalization is a key part of marketing today. It is increasingly recommended to consider each member of your audience as an individual to provide personalized experiences. Of course, this requires collecting certain data on your customers or prospects beforehand. But for an SMS marketing campaign, it is quite possible to start with small details, such as using the recipient's first name in the message, addressing him personally, offering him products that he may like depending on his shopping preferences or wish him a happy birthday!
7. Use calls to action
Your SMS campaign can aim to promote products or events. To optimize engagement, you can opt for the implementation of CTAs in your messages. For example, with links that lead directly to a page in your store, to a product or to a ticket office for an event. It is also possible to encourage your recipients to discover your new products, to subscribe to a newsletter, by offering or directly proposing special offers, discount coupons, etc. Simple links leading to your landing page, with messages like “Take advantage of our special offer” or “Reserve your place now” can be very effective.
8. Schedule shipments at the right time
The choice of the best times to send SMS as part of a marketing campaign will depend on your target and your objectives. However, it is important to keep in mind some general ideas:
Avoid sleeping hours, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.,
Avoid working hours, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., unless you are targeting a professional audience,
Choose the days of the week, avoiding weekends and public holidays, considered as cut-off times, and preferring Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, where engagement is better.
9. Avoid too frequent messages
The frequency of sending is an element not to be taken lightly in the context of an SMS campaign. No one likes to be overwhelmed with messages, especially from a business entity. An excess of SMS and it is the risk of seeing your audience unsubscribe from your mailing lists. To avoid this, it can be helpful to set up a sending schedule that takes into account your campaign objectives and the behavior of your target audience. 1 to 3 SMS can be enough to, for example, promote a special offer: an announcement beforehand, a reminder during the offer and a last message on the final day of the promotion.
10. Analyze campaign results
The analysis of the figures of your campaign will allow you to understand the functioning of your target, the effectiveness of your SMS with the opening, engagement or conversion rates. All this data will help you identify what worked and what didn't during your campaign and adjust accordingly for your future operations. For example, if you notice that many people have unsubscribed on the third SMS received in a week, it may be that the sending frequency was too high. It is therefore recommended to test, measure, in order to then be able to optimize.
