5 Essential elements of SMS marketing
As a business owner, you’re always looking for ways to boost your sales, enhance customer relationships, and stand out from your competition. This is why you should engage your customers through SMS marketing.
If you use it the right way, it can be your most powerful marketing tool. It’s an indisputable fact that many people are now hooked to their devices and are spending more time on them. You can exploit this and connect with your audience at a more personal level.
So, how do you use SMS marketing in the best way possible? Here are five essential elements that have been tried and tested for all businesses.
1. Valuable Message
This is one of the core pillars of SMS marketing. Before sending text messages to your audience, you should sit down and seriously consider what you’re offering your customers.
Before sending an SMS campaign, always ask yourself whether the message offers any value for your audience. If your answer is ‘No’ or ‘Not Sure,’ then you should reconsider the campaign or have a brainstorming session with your team to come up with a message that’ll have your audience see your campaign through your eyes.
Always put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Ask if you’d like to receive the kind of message you’re sending. Nobody wants to feel their precious time is getting wasted by reading a message with no value.
When it comes to SMS marketing, the trick is to center the message around your customer. Your texts should address your customers, their problems, and the solutions you’re offering to make their lives easier. Make the value in the message captivating and timely. Doing so will boost your response rate.
2.Call-To-Action
Call-to-action can be described as a marketing phrase that prompts a specific action or sale. A call-to-action gives your audience a direction on what next to do. It’s also meant to keep them going.
As small as it may appear to be, a call-to-action plays a huge role in the success of your SMS marketing campaign. This is because, with SMS, you don’t have a lot of space to convince your clients to take action. When you give your audience a direction on what to do next, you eliminate the possibility of indecisiveness.
A good call-to-action is clear and straightforward. Remember, it should give your readers the direction to take. The most common call-to-action phrases include:
- Buy
- Subscribe
- Call
- Contact
- Start
- Click
Your call-to-action can come at any place within your message. Either way, make sure your readers understand what benefit they’ll enjoy by clicking the link.
3.Sense of Urgency
When sending your SMS marketing campaign, you don’t want your readers to vow to reply or take action later, then end up forgetting. You should motivate them to act there and then. The most common way to do this is by including a limited offer.
You don’t really have to shout to show it’s urgent. Simply create a sense of urgency in your readers such that they have a ‘fear of missing out.’ One way of doing this is to have an expiration date for your offer or service for a limited number of subscribers who act first.
Phrases that can show urgency to your audience include, ‘now,’ ‘fast,’ or ‘quickly.’ For example, ‘Act now as this offer runs until today midnight’ or ‘This offer is only limited to the first 20 subscribers.’
What most people don’t understand is that this strategy also brings in social proof. It shows your readers that your products and services are already on demand.
4.Brand Identity
No one wants to receive a message without knowing who the sender is. This is why your audience needs to know who’s sending the text. Your entire SMS marketing campaign will be meaningless, regardless of how amazing your offers are, if you fail to identify yourself.
Proper identification is not only necessary but also a requirement by law. Some countries require that you either identify yourself through a sender ID or within the message. To take it a notch higher, include your site’s link in the text.
You should prioritize including your brand name in all your messages. Brand identity also helps build a relationship with your customers. Besides, your brand will stay at the top of your client’s minds.
5.Measure Results
Your SMS marketing campaign should be measurable. You should be able to track how many messages you sent, to whom they were delivered, the number of responses received, and who unsubscribed. You can also go into the details such as how many promotions were redeemed. These details enable you to measure the success of your SMS marketing campaign.
After each campaign, make sure you see and carefully analyze such data. By using data on sales from your SMS marketing campaign and customer traffic, you can come up with a strategy for an enhanced campaign in the future.
Key Takeaways
SMS marketing can be the most significant marketing tool for your business. To maximize it, make sure your messages offer value to your customers. Also, include a call-to-action and a sense of urgency to increase the click rate. Remember, your marketing campaign would be pointless if you omit your brand name.