What is SMS Marketing?
For many local businesses, SMS Marketing (short for Short Message Service Marketing) may seem like a complicated or near-impossible task. This tactic of marketing simply involves the use of text and multimedia messaging to communicate with your customers. If you haven’t tried SMS Marketing or have always thought about giving it a try, now is the perfect time.
The beauty of SMS marketing is that you can reach a wide range of audiences with near-instant delivery, no matter where they’re located. This year, SMS marketing will be more critical than ever for businesses looking to stay ahead of their competitors and thrive in the digital era.
This article discusses effective hacks you can implement into developing, or perfecting, your SMS marketing strategy to maximize results. We’ll also examine how you can leverage SMS marketing to gain insights about how you can better communicate with your customers in 2023 and beyond.
Top Hacks for SMS Marketing Success in 2023
91% of customers prefer to text businesses that they work with. Plain and simple. Now more than ever, texting customers turned into one of the impactful ways to reach customers and, if done correctly, significantly benefit your business’s bottom line.
The key to success with SMS marketing in 2023 is understanding your customers’ needs and how they like to digest information. Let’s dive into some of our top hacks to help you find success with your next SMS marketing campaign.
Hack #1: Integrate Chatbots and SMS Messages
An SMS chatbot is a 24/7 digital receptionist that can reply to customers via SMS to help them answer frequently asked questions, explain service or product offerings, and more.
They can save you hours each day responding to countless messages and answering numerous phone calls.
By integrating chatbots with SMS capabilities, you can improve the process of responding instantly to customers, giving you a 78% higher chance of closing the deal and never missing a lead.
Hack #2: Infuse SMS Messaging with Your Additional Marketing Channels
SMS marketing can be an even more effective tactic to connect with customers when combined to your other marketing channels like email and social media.
Before you can send your first SMS message and combine it with other marketing channels, it’s important to organize your customers’ contact information and receive written permission to send them SMS messages with an SMS opt-in message. Once you’ve accomplished that, you can then begin the process of sending your customers SMS marketing messages.
SMS Marketing and Email Marketing
Use SMS messages to send customers time-sensitive messages or reminders and then follow up with an email containing additional context and information regarding your original SMS message.
Not to mention, you can also use SMS messaging to encourage customers to sign up for your email list to receive exclusive offers and discounts too!
SMS Marketing and Social Media
You can drive additional traffic to your social media pages by providing links in your SMS messages and encouraging audiences to follow you on your company’s social media platform(s). It’s a great way to build your social media following and provide your customers with exciting new content.
Another great tip is to use your social media accounts to promote enrollment in your SMS marketing program with your text marketing number. In your posts, you can encourage enrollment by offering exclusive messages, discounts, etc. that they’ll get by enrolling in your SMS program so it’s a win-win from all sides!
Hack #3: Leverage SMS Marketing to Obtain User-Generated Content
User-generated content, also known as user-created content, is any form of content about your business, such as images, videos, testimonials, and audio clips posted by customers and users on online platforms. One of the best ways to leverage user-generated content is through SMS marketing.
You can ask your audience to submit photos of your work, but more importantly, you can also request reviews and testimonials which can benefit you in a number of ways.
Gather Customer Reviews and Testimonials
You can collect customer reviews and testimonials by sending an SMS message to your opted-in customers requesting a review. We recommend directing them to leave their message on your business’s Google Business Profile. Then, once you’ve collected those reviews and testimonials, you can always repurpose them in places that garner visitors like your website, social media channels, or even printed marketing materials (like signage and advertisements).
If you don’t want to take the time to manually request reviews via text, you can always automate this task to save you time. You’ll see that by automating review requests with SMS marketing messages your online reputation will improve over time.
Hack #4: Use SMS Marketing to Further Connect with Customers
SMS marketing also offers a unique opportunity to engage with your customers on a personal level. By creating regular SMS marketing campaigns, you can open up possibilities to get a pulse on customer satisfaction and reinvigorate past customers to do business with you again.
Survey Your Customers
Customer survey responses can be sent via SMS messages to help you better understand customers’ sentiments towards your products and services. It is also a great way to basically tell your customers that you value their feedback and appreciate their experience.
Drive Repeat Business
If you are looking to improve customer retention, consider offering promotions, discounts, or referral programs to incentivize past customers to do business with you again. You can use SMS marketing as your vehicle to reconnect with these past customers.
Research shows that after one job, a customer has about a 30% chance of doing business with you again. Be sure to harness the power of texting to reconnect and improve your retention rate.
Tips To Optimize Your SMS Marketing Strategy
SMS marketing is a great way to collect insightful data from your audience(s), but you need to make sure that you are analyzing performance to make sure you’re making progress. By understanding what’s working and what isn’t, you can make data-driven decisions that help your business grow and better serve customers. Let’s take a look at what you can do…
Identify Patterns and Trends
Examine when your customers are active, what kind of messaging they respond to, and when they are most likely to engage with your company. This information can improve your overall messaging strategy and ensure you reach your audience when they are most likely to pay attention.
SMS marketing can provide valuable insights into customer behavior that can be utilized to identify patterns and trends. You can make better decisions about how you communicate with customers to improve the overall success of your SMS messages.
Conduct A/B Tests
This method of experimentation involves creating two versions of a message (Version A and Version B) and seeing which one performs better. This could be something as simple as testing different images or call-to-actions in your texts. By testing your messages, you can fine-tune your messaging strategy until you find your winning formula.
To conduct an A/B test with SMS marketing, send out two versions of your message (with different variations) to a small sample of your customer base. Then, track the results to see which version performs better. Once you’ve determined the winner, you can roll out the winning message to your entire customer base!
Make Data-Driven Decisions
Data is critical for making informed decisions about your business, especially when it comes to texting your customers. Without data, you’re essentially flying blind.
SMS marketing provides a wealth of information to help you make informed decisions about where you should focus your efforts so you can maximize customer satisfaction in the long run.
Measuring the Success of SMS Marketing Campaigns
Understanding the effectiveness of your efforts in using SMS marketing may seem difficult, but it’s made easy when you track the following key metrics and we’ll tell you which ones to watch out for.
Open Rates and Click-Through Rates
Open and click-through rates are two of the most critical metrics for any text message campaign. The open rate measures how many people opened your text message, while the click-through rate measures how many people clicked through to whatever link was included. These two numbers will tell you how effective your message is and whether or not it resonated with recipients. Typically, SMS messages get over a 90% open rate and almost 20% click-through rate!
Many messaging tools, like Signpost’s text campaigns tool, track this information automatically.
Conversion Rates
Conversion rates measure how many people took action after receiving your SMS message.
This could be anything from purchasing to subscribing to a newsletter, completing a survey link, or filling out a form to request a service. Whatever your goal is with each message, tracking the conversion rate will tell you if you’re reaching it. This is arguably the most important metric, as it is what you care about – driving conversions and getting those new customers!
Return on Investment
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) is the best way to determine the success or failure of any SMS marketing campaign. ROI considers all of the other metrics mentioned above and tells you whether or not your efforts are paying off in terms of revenue generated versus money spent on the campaign itself.
Take Your SMS Marketing to the Next Level
As we navigate a period in time where SMS marketing is growing more and more popular, growing your customer base and boosting engagement is more critical than ever. SMS marketing is an increasingly popular tactic to reach customers quickly and efficiently, but leveraging it successfully requires a few essential hacks.
With these tips in mind, 2023 is an excellent year for your business to implement a successful SMS marketing plan. Integrate SMS marketing with your business using Signpost!
Request a demo today to get started on your next SMS marketing campaign!