The effectiveness of SMS messages continues to grow as marketers use SMS messages to connect with their target audience on a personal level. Let’s face it,  your customers increasingly live on their mobile devices In 2018, 52.2% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones, up from 50.3% in the previous year (Statista, 2018).

Once you have decided to use SMS campaigns, three factors are key initiate campaigns.

• Business Text Messaging Solution: A business text messaging platform that integrates with your CRM, records conversational histories to lead objects and enables you and your team to easily manage consent and connected conversations, send automated campaigns and measure performance (like an email marketing platform) is your foundation for SMS marketing.
• Active Database: To start SMS marketing, you’ll need mobile phone numbers for your contact database to send text messages. This data can be acquired via opt-in invitations at various touch points with your target audience.
• Customer Consent: Consent from a prospect or customer is required by various regulations, including GDPR, TCPA, and others. Fines for non-compliance are expensive. You’ll want to make sure that the business text messaging solution you choose provides a process flow that ensures you meet compliance regulations.

Once you’ve addressed these factors, you can initiate your SMS campaign. To ensure your SMS marketing campaigns are successful, you’ll want to incorporate best practices in execution.

Best Practices for SMS Messages and Campaigns

• S.M.A.R.T. Goals: Setting a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reliable and Time Specific (S.M.A.R.T.) Goal before starting SMS campaign defines the objectives and business goals for each SMS marketing campaign.
• Call-To-Action: A all-to-action is what you want your customers to do interact with the brand/company. A call-to-action can take a variety of forms, including a keyword response, clicking a link embedded in the message or redeeming an offer or promotion presented in a message. A keyword is a unique word or phrase that people text to a short or long code to opt-in or participate in your campaign. For example, Rachel, a salon owner, is opening a new salon. To build a customer base she posts signs around the location with this message: Text HAIRCUT20 to 520520 and get 20% off your haircut.
• Leverage Incentives: Incentives provide something valuable to your customer, something relevant to them that will motivate their intent to engage with and buy from you.  Incentive can be monetary as well as non-monetary.Examples of non-monetary incentives include:
  • Personalization – “We’ll notify you when your favorite item comes in.”
  • Reminders – “Your shipment will be delivered today.”
  • Engagement – “Tell us how we can help you.”
  • Access – “You’re receiving exclusive early access to this New Summer Collection because you’re a VIP.”
  • Privileges – “Earn VIP points with every purchase to redeem as you choose.”
• Permission required: A customer’s consent is essential for a successful SMS campaign. Opt-Ins can be achieved in two ways:a) The Call-To-Action as mentioned in best practice #2, above
  b) A prospect or customer including their mobile number via a web form or personally, during an event in agreement to receive text messages from you.For example, a real estate broker holds an open house for home buyers and asks those who tour the home to sign a guest log and check a box to receive text messages alerting them to similar listings in the future. When a suitable listing becomes available, she sends these contacts a text message, alerting them to the listing. She also includes: “To learn more, reply 74OAKST or you may reply STOP to opt out from receiving messages.” This information ensures the prospective home buyers have the option to choose whether to permit the broker to continue sending them text messages or not.
• Timing: You want to make sure you’re sending messages that align with your business and your customers. Best practices follow business hours of between 9AM and 6PM.Of course, if you’re a night club and you’re promoting open seats right before a show at 9PM, your customers’ expectations will vary. The key is to understand that the nature of text messages is considered in real-time. Sending your messages in a time frame that relates to your offer and your audience will generate better response.
• Consistency: Timing and consistency are related and can help build expectations from your prospects and customers. For example, a restaurant that sends a text offering discounts every Thursday at noon for weekend specials will have customers come to expect these texts on Thursdays.
• Less is Better: Text messages allow for 160 characters. The format forces brevity. It’s best to write concise messages using correct grammar, rather than try to fit too much in by using acronyms or emojis your audience wouldn’t expect from you. Focus on one key point and make clear what’s in it for them and what you’re asking them to do.
• Measurement: SMS Marketing is measurable. You can easily track messages sent, messages delivered, keyword responses and conversations, as well as promotions redeemed, as long as the promotion has a code used only in your SMS marketing campaign. After every SMS campaign, you should evaluate your strategy and iterate for improvements in future campaigns based on what you learn from the results.

The Bottom Line

SMS messages and campaigns are growing in receptiveness for your prospects and customers due to their increasing reliance on their mobile devices. Business text messaging platforms, like SMS-Magic, can help you comply with regulations and embrace best practices to build relevant conversations that grow your business more easily than other channels where it’s becoming more difficult to rise about the noise.

People check their phones every 15 minutes or so, even without the ping of a notification. Smartphones have become the device of choice for nearly all of us—young or old. We use them to message our friends and family, search online, play games, use apps, read email, and occasionally to make a call.

Because our mobiles have become second nature to us, we also prefer to use them to contact businesses and brands. But that doesn’t mean we want to call them. According to a recent survey by Ellie Mae, 97% of consumers asked want texting to be part of the sales conversation.

Interestingly, Gartner’s 2017 Channel Survey found that there’s a place at every stage of the customer journey for messaging.

This means that both marketing and sales can use text messaging to advantage. The better aligned the two functions, the more consistent and relevant the communication. An advanced conversational text messaging platform enables this to happen because the entire texting history for every prospect or customer is captured in an ongoing conversational flow that allows everyone involved to see what’s been said and responded to in the past.

You’ll know instantly how to be relevant and what will add value to the conversation given the customer’s relationship with your company. And that’s powerful, considering that visibility into prospects and customers remains one of the biggest challenges to both marketers and salespeople.

Before you start messaging your prospects and customers, you’ll need to get their consent via a compliant opt-in. This is critical, and it’s a regulation, so make sure to do this first.

Tips for Real-Time Marketing and Sales

1. Make it Conversational. SMS messages are seen as personal because it’s on the device we’ve integrated so completely into our lives. Business casual as a style works for both dress codes and texting. Be respectful and professional, but don’t be afraid to have a bit of fun. An SMS message is 160 characters, so you’ll need to be brief, but also compelling.
2. Make it Useful. The fastest way to get someone to text STOP to opt out of your messaging programs is to send them communications they consider to be irrelevant or spammy. Ask yourself if the message is something they can act on right now or in the near term. Does whatever you’re sending provide something your prospect or customer will find valuable based on where they are in the customer journey?
3. Make it Actionable. What are you asking them to do? Is it easy? Or will it take more effort than a person will want to expend on a mobile device? The call to action (CTA) is the most important part of your message, so plan it carefully. Walk through the entire experience yourself, just as your customer will to make sure the experience is what you want it to be.
4. Make it Personal. With an advanced messaging platform, you can see the prospect or customer’s record in your CRM, in addition to their conversational history with you. If you’re lacking insights, send a message asking them to take a brief survey so that you can tailor your messages and offers to their specific wants and needs in relation to your products or services. You can also do this by asking for keyword responses that will trigger related follow-up messages or conversations.
5. Make it Fit the Relationship. Based on your relationship with the prospect or customer, your messaging should match their expectations. For example, if they’re new to knowing your brand or business, be careful about making assumptions or being too familiar. However, if you’ve just met with them, sending a follow-up text message with an answer to a question they asked that you couldn’t answer at the time will be welcome.

With SMS Messages, Make it Human

The best part about using SMS messages for real-time marketing and sales is that keywords can be used to trigger alerts to a member of the team to step into the conversation in real time and engage with the prospect or customer. The speed of response and the ability to blend automated messaging with human messaging is something that is complex and difficult to do with other channels.

Advanced messaging platforms are built to enable this combination. This means that real-time can become a reality for marketing and sales, rather than the pipe dream we’ve had for years that technology has promised but not lived up to. Well, now it has.

Get a free trial and see the magic of real-time messaging for marketing and sales. We’ll support you every step of the way.

SnapApp defines interactive content as “Content that requires the participants’ active engagement — more than simply reading or watching. In return for that engagement, participants receive real-time, hyper-relevant results they care about.”

This sounds pretty wonderful when compared to the self-serving, static content and irrelevant emails that so many brands push out to consumers.

You may think of quizzes, assessments, ROI calculators, and dynamic infographics when the concept of interactive content comes up. And when done well, those do fit SnapApp’s definition.

But they are still, for the most part, one-way content. There’s an end date to the engagement. Once you’ve taken the quiz and learned which is your spirit animal, you’re not likely to take it again. Its value has been played out.

Purposeful Conversations Require Back and Forth

A conversation is an active exchange of ideas. This infers more than one participant. And it also allows for a following of those ideas to hone in on what’s meaningful to someone.

Relevance is a prerequisite for a continuing conversation. And businesses need to have the flexibility when communicating to adapt to what their prospects and customers want to talk about.

Your boutique may have a special on boots, but if your customer is interested in tennis shoes, your conversation will be short lived.

However, if you can let your customers steer the conversation to their interests while still being responsive, you have a huge opportunity to continue the conversation.

Keywords Enable Purposeful Conversations

Advanced text messaging platforms enable businesses to use keywords to allow prospects and customers to initiate conversations. But you can also initiate conversations with them by giving them choices.

Please note: In the conversations below, green represents an automated conversation, yellow represents a 1:1 conversation.

Taking the example above about footwear, you could invite a conversation by texting and asking your customers to respond with a keyword that identifies what they’re interested in:

When Sherry texts back SNEAKERS, you know exactly what to send her next.

Sherry receives your text, clicks the link, and looks at the shoes.

Once Sherry replies with HELP, an alert is sent to the staff at FancyFootwear so they can step in and respond. But your automated message flow buys you time by triggering a response.

Gain the Advantages of SMS Messages

The advantage of using SMS messages to create purposeful conversations is that they motivate inquiry and action relevant to your customer.

In the series above:

• The first message activated a customer to let the store know what type of shoes interested her
• The second message motivated Sherry to go look at the new inventory of sneakers
• She got her question answered quickly, which removed the doubt she had about making a purchase
• The store made a sale that may not have otherwise happened

If you want to have more purposeful conversations with your customers, try automated text messaging that alerts you when to step in and keep the conversation flowing.

Email Gives Marketers a False Sense of Security

For decades, marketers have pushed out information, promotions, and messaging in a one-way format based on their timeline and what they want to say. Buyers and customers have minimal opportunity to respond in the moment, let alone take control of the conversation. Even with social media, brands aren’t responding as quickly or as well as customers would like.

Email remains the channel of choice for marketers. Marketing automation has enabled them to schedule more email to be sent on a schedule in a set-it-and-forget-it sort of way. But these emails are mainly outbound, one-way pushes of information. Response rates have plummeted to around 4%, yet marketers are still saying this channel is the most effective tool in their technology stack.

Even if response rates climb to 10% or 20%, will this be enough? It’s not likely, as more marketers are tasked to prove contribution to revenues, customer retention, and account expansion from their marketing programs.

Reliance on Mobile Means More than Responsive Content Display

SMS messages for business can change this lack of responsiveness. Yes, the technology has been around for 25 years, but it’s also the most used function on smartphones today – above email and internet. Everyone texts. Young and old, most of us find texting to be a reliable form of conversation. Many of us prefer it to any other form of communication.

Research has found that millions of customers have opted-in to text with businesses. Thirty-seven million of them in 2017. With a 90% open rate and a response rate of 45%, text messaging with your customers is certainly worth consideration.

Keywords Put Customers in Control of the Conversation with SMS Messages

A keyword is a word tied to a short code or text-enabled phone number and used for a customer to opt-in for messaging based on the promise of the keyword.

For example, you can use a keyword to invite your customers to opt-in to a loyalty program by putting this notice on your website or in a confirmation email after they’ve purchased a product:

Text “VIP” to 123456 to join our loyalty program and receive exclusive promotions and discounts.

Or, let’s say a business executive has just finished reading a blog post about some new research your company has conducted. You could have a call to action at the end of the post that invites them to text a keyword to get the full report:

Text “Research” to 123456 to get the full report.

Now consider that, if the full report is a PDF, you may want to give them the option of having it emailed to them. When they text the keyword, an automated response is triggered that allows them to download it or request the report via email.

You can use keywords to invite your prospects and customers to start conversations with you about anything relevant to them and to your business. The key is that they get to choose to do so on their schedule and at their convenience.

The expectation when texting is near-immediate responsiveness. An advanced messaging platform can help you blend automated messages with the human touch to seamlessly converse with your customers.

Let’s go back to the example of your customer texting “Research” to get the report. In a couple of days, you might trigger an automated follow-up message to continue the conversation.

Should David reply with the keyword “Question” an alert is automatically sent to Sam so he can step in and respond personally.

The Bottom Line

Keywords not only allow your customers to start messaging conversations, but they allow you to continue them. They help you identify what your customer is interested in and share information back and forth, rather than just pushing it at them as you do with email.

SMS messages are meant to be conversational. It’s intuitive and easy for your customers to use. Your conversations will be more relevant because you’re allowing your customers to control the conversation. And it’s hard to argue with the open and response rates you can get with messaging.

If you’d like to see how intelligent messaging works,
Text “DEMO”, “FirstName”, “YourCompanyEmail” to
36343 (USA),
447860017097 (UK),
61427142795 (AUS).