SMS stands for short message service and refers specifically to texting. There are all sorts of services around that allow you to send and receive text messages on a phone network, with most sharing the same basic parameters. In the world of marketing, SMS campaigns are highly effective ways to promote particular products and your brand as a whole. You can reach a lot of people if you’re able to construct and carry out the right sort of campaign. Here are some of the best practices you can employ in order to construct and carry out a successful SMS text-based marketing campaign.
Familiarize Yourself with Broadcast Texting
A broadcast SMS campaign is a very far-reaching, involved campaign that involves sending out arranged text messages to a bulk list of recipients. This means cultivating a list and sending predetermined messages out in order to drive recipients to a specific destination you have in mind. The first step here is to really start to understand these campaigns and how they work. It helps to view other campaigns that have achieved success for others in business so that you might follow the formula. It’s also a good idea to check out a service that allows you to centralize your campaign so that you can cultivate, design messages, and send them from a reliable hub.
Research Your Market
Another solid practice you will need to implement is market research. This is the same in every sort of competitive business, but it’s especially true in the digital marketing world. You run the risk of having your campaign seen as nothing but spam, and this just ends up getting you blocked by your recipients and developing that sort of reputation. Researching the market properly is what’s going to allow you to construct the right sort of mailing list and also the right sort of messages that speak directly to your audience’s desires. This is a crucial practice.
Build Your Marketing List
Next up, after researching SMS marketing and your particular market, you want to build up your actual mailing list. You need to cultivate numbers. If you’re simply sending your messages out to random working numbers, you are definitely going to be seen as a spam service, and you will likely fail. SMS marketing does still work, but you need to gather numbers and build a relevant list. You do this by honing in on your market and gathering a list of very specific numbers. These lists can be bought or cultivated manually through sign-ups, forum submissions, email marketing, etc.
Design Your Messages
Perhaps the most important practice here with your SMS campaign is sending out the right message. You only have a single shot at this. Once your recipients look at the text they’re receiving from a non-contact number, they’re going to decide then and there to either follow through, delete and ignore the message, or outright block you from messaging them again. This is why researching and narrowing down your niche is so important. Find a way to truly speak to the desires of those within your market. There’s no way to reach everyone; what you want is a decent click-through and conversion rate.
Test and Measure Your Impact
The best practice in terms of finishing and launching your SMS campaign is to start small. You don’t want to just plaster your message out to the entirety of your list. Even though you’ve thoroughly researched and carefully crafted a message, you still want to split-test and tweak your campaign. So, the best move here is to start with just a few percentage points of your list to send SMS messages to. This could be a few people or many people, depending on the size of your list. You want to test the waters here to see how well your messages are received. This allows you to perform necessary tweaks before delivering to your entire list.
In Conclusion
SMS marketing is highly effective when done correctly. You just have to realize that there are some good practices to implement to increase your odds of success and that it all starts with researching and understanding the genre and your market.
