Summer is well underway, and peak season is just around the corner. Especially for retailers, it’s never too early to start checking in on your SMS campaign performance and ensuring that your marketing funnel is running as smoothly as possible.
In this blog, we’ll be recapping everything SMS marketing in a checklist format including best practices to boost customer engagement and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that’ll show you how your SMS campaigns are measuring up.
Your summer-ready SMS marketing checklist
- Clean your customer data
Before launching any new SMS campaign, clean out your customer datasets. You can identify and remove any dud mobile numbers by comparing read receipt insights from your previous SMS marketing sends. Any mobile numbers that seem to be working but belong to customers with inconsistent activity, could be put into a group and earmarked for a ‘win back’ campaign.
Not only will weeding out dud numbers clean your dataset, but it’ll also make it easier for you to gain those all-important insights into what your customers are actually responding to.
Through segmenting your customer base by purchase activity and intent, and lower the cost of your campaigns (saving credits for active numbers only).
- Ensure your SMS campaign is ultra-targeted
There are two things that you have to do to achieve this. The first we touched on in our above point about getting the most out of your customer data – segmentation. Once you’ve cleaned your data, you can start digging into the open and read receipts from your last SMS campaign and grouping your customers by transactional qualities like order frequency and the kind of products that they’ve purchased before, or by more personal qualities such as their age, gender or location.
As a bonus, you could also send out an SMS survey to gather even more information about your customers’ interests, and what they’d like to see from your brand moving forward. Basically, the better you know your customers, the more targeted your SMS campaigns will be.
The next technique you’ll need is personalisation. Not only will this help ensure you’re providing customers with relevant information, but it will also help them feel valued. It could be as simple as inserting personalisation tokens in the SMS message such as first name and last order date or sending content curated especially for the individual recipient.
It might look something like this:
Hey [first name], did you know that we’re opening our new flagship store in London this week? It’s been [number] months since we’ve seen you!
And this is just a basic starting point. The more information you acquire, the more personalisation fields you can fill and the more valued your customers will feel. Sending irrelevant or generic messages can hurt your ROI.
- Add an offer or incentive
So we’ve got our customer data, and we’ve segmented our bulk SMS sends to personalise the campaign – what else can we do to enhance engagement? We can make them an offer they can’t refuse!
Adding exclusive discounts, offers or incentives is a proven method of boosting engagement. Did you know that shoppers prefer to buy products with coupons even if it means spending more money overall? Plus, 93% of all shoppers use discount codes throughout the year. As a society, we love a bargain – and that’s why it works!
This includes making sure your CTA is clear. Ask yourself what the point of this SMS campaign is what you want customers to do. Do you want them to ‘ buy now’, ‘sign up for early access’, ‘start a free trial’ – I’m sure you get the idea.
If you really want to stand out to your subscribers, you could combine all three of these points by making a personalised discount. For all of the do’s and don’ts of discount strategies, check out our recent blog here.
Another way to give idle recipients a push is by adding a time-sensitive element to your copy. Putting a deadline on something makes it seem more urgent and valuable as it’ll only be available for a limited amount of time. If one of your most popular products or services is half-price for a short period of time, you might find that sales sky rocket, even from those who wouldn’t usually purchase because they don’t want to miss out.
As long as you’re crafting your SMS copy thinking about what your customers will get out of it, then you can’t go wrong.
- Track your KPIs
It’s not just about launching your campaigns and making them visible online, it’s about understanding how well they’ve performed and making the most of the insights that you gain from this.
To get a good look at how your SMS marketing campaigns are doing, track certain KPIs such as: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and more. These metrics are just as important to maintain as customer data because without it you’re building campaigns and launching them blindly.
Here are some important KPIs you could pull into a report for a thorough analysis of your last SMS campaign:
- Open rate
- Delivery status/rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Opt-out rate
- Opt-in rate
- Conversion rate
- Cost per conversion (CPC)
- Lead generation
- Customer lifetime value increase (CLV)
Together, these pieces of information will let you know the effectiveness of your SMS campaign (how well you achieved your goal), the engagement level of your customers (did you get more open/response rates than last time?), and the ROI (what opportunities were created?). The overall picture that you’ll get from this will be your biggest ally when it comes to fine-tuning your strategy and ensuring your business meets its targets.
SMS marketing and why it’s really that simple
We’ve broken down SMS marketing into 4 clear steps for success. Preparing customer data, being ultra-targeted, adding value, and measuring the bigger picture of performance. When it comes to engaging customers and boosting conversion rates, these 4 tips really are all you need to perfect for a winning customer communications strategy.
Once you get into the rhythm of maintaining your customer data and your campaign performance metrics, you can start to look at refining your strategy even further by A/B testing your messaging angle or replying to negative customer feedback. Build your success through continuous improvement and you’ll see the results.