How To Leverage Your SMS Marketing

SMS marketing is one of the most underrated forms of direct marketing. Get it right, and you can create a direct line of communication with your customers. People don’t expect to be contacted by businesses through their SMS, so it can often have even more of an impact. Here’s how to leverage SMS marketing for your business.

Create An SMS Marketing Team

For many businesses, simply handing out their phone number to customers will work as a rudimentary SMS marketing strategy. But if you really want to leverage your SMS marketing efforts, you should create a dedicated team within your business to manage it.

The SMS marketing team should be made up of at least two people, ideally with one person dedicated to customer acquisition and another dedicated to marketing. You should also consider including a professional who is good with numbers in your SMS marketing team, as they will provide you insight into metrics like open rates and response rates.

Know Your Customer

Before you can begin SMS marketing, you need to know your customer. This is particularly important if your business operates in a high-turnover industry or offers transactional services and products. You need to know who is using your service and when they are using it for the best results. At the very least, you should be able to identify common factors that your customer’s demographics have in common.

Write Clear Messages

People are more likely to read an SMS marketing message if they understand it. Take the time to look through your messages before you send them, and ask yourself whether or not each might be misunderstood. When it comes to texting for political campaigns, the clarity of the message is one of the most important considerations. The simpler the message, the more effective the campaign.

Use Call-To-Action Buttons

Even though SMS marketing is a form of direct communication, there are limits to what you can say. With this in mind, you should include call-to-action buttons in your messages to encourage customers to visit specific parts of your website or mobile app. This will help them engage with your business more easily because they’ll be able to find what they want quickly and easily.

Get Your Timing Right

The timing of your SMS marketing messages is just as important as their content. You should send a message to a customer in a timely fashion to ensure that they receive them. For instance, if you’ve emailed someone and haven’t received a response within an hour, it might be time to follow up with an SMS. If you want to be a real SMS marketing pro, you should send a message before your customers know that they need something. If you can provide a solution in time, that will help you build customer loyalty and encourage repeat sales.

Promote Opt-In Across All Media

To maximize the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns, you need to encourage customers from all parts of your business – from sales and service through to billing and administration – to opt-in. If they don’t opt-in at every point, some of them will miss out on important messages later down the line. Therefore, you should only send SMS marketing messages to people that have opted-in, and you should always follow up with an email.