Sending effective SMS campaigns is about more than reminding your prospects and customers you exist every so often. Each message in your SMS campaign should have a purpose and maintain relevance to the person you’re sending it to.
It’s prudent to track your success when you send SMS campaigns and SMS reminders, evaluating which messages match your goals.
In addition, remember that the purpose of all SMS campaigns and individual messages isn’t just conversion, but also retaining customers and their interests and providing options for customer support. With these tips, you should understand the basics of planning and writing SMS messages and how to get the most out of an integrated marketing platform such as Mitto.
SMS Campaigns: The Basics of SMS Messaging
Effective SMS campaigns are about more than matching the vibe of your audience: You have to understand the limitations of the medium and what works well for any audience you can reach via text.
If you’re more accustomed to writing email campaigns, you can use this knowledge to your advantage. SMS messages have many of the same components, but on a smaller scale. For example, the first few words of your SMS messages are like email subject lines. Always keep your text messages just a few short sentences long, and keep in mind that readers of text messages may get previews of the first line of your message on their phones. Remember that 75 characters is the ideal text length, but 160 characters is your limit.
A high-performing text message focuses on one idea and inspires action, all while keeping it brief. Here are some examples for a fictional pet supply company:
- April showers bring wet fur. No worries: We’ve got three new dog raincoat patterns to keep your pooch dry.
- Is [Fido] having trouble keeping things moving? Order Glandex, our most popular digestive supplement — it’s made with pumpkin.
- Show your love this Valentine’s Day with matching pet and pet parent pajamas.
Crafting an Engaging SMS Campaign Message
When you’re writing a message, remember the campaign it’s planned for. In the above examples, we’re focusing on February through April, with another evergreen message about digestive health. But with a segmented SMS list, you can use your SMS application programming interface to send messages only to people with puppies or small dogs, targeting their areas of interest.
And the part where it says [Fido] represents your ability to customize your messages before you send them through the SMS gateway. You can also add visual elements like pictures and cute emojis to enhance your message or make sure it stands out.
SMS Campaigns: What’s Your Purpose?
Campaigns can have different goals, so a business should craft messages and encourage actions designed to achieve different outcomes. SMS campaigns can be promotional, transactional, meant to remind, or intended to solicit feedback. Using integrated marketing software like Mitto, a sale could trigger some of these messages: new sale notifications, updates about order status, and a post-delivery check-in to make sure the customer is happy and to collect more suggestions for future feedback.
What To Avoid in SMS Campaigns
When it comes to SMS campaigns, marketers often make the same mistakes; they feel that brevity means being too sales-focused when that’s not true at all. Many of the same principles that apply to email campaigns still apply to SMS. Maybe instead of selling, you’re simply wishing your customer a happy spring and sending them a silly photo of a pug wearing a flower costume.
Marketers often over-message with SMS — and SMS audiences have a lower tolerance than email readers. A campaign limited to weekly SMS messages rather than daily will do better at avoiding unsubscribes. Even if an SMS is simply wishing your customer a great spring, remember: You’re still delivering a call to action.
In addition, keep in mind that not every customer should or will want to hear about everything. If a customer has an aging pet, they might want to hear about supplements for aging dogs but not collars for puppies. Segmenting a client list will lead to messages relevant to each customer.
To succeed with SMS campaigns, consider the overall campaign as well as each individual message. Think about where, when, and why you’re sending the message and the type of customer you’re hoping to target with a message. And then, using omnichannel marketing software like Mitto, track your results.
