The Basics to Creating a Killer SMS Marketing Campaign
Creating an SMS marketing strategy involves getting your customers to immediately respond to your campaign. It can be beneficial to enable texting on your advertising. Text-enabled advertising are shown to be a campaign winner. The good thing about SMS text messages is that 97 out of every 100 sent will actually be opened. That is a whole lot more than an e-mail campaign. A text message is where our personal and private text messages are sent back and forth. When that SMS notification goes off we automatically respond to open the message, thinking it may be from a loved one or something personal, so it is always likely it’ll be read.
No Bombarding and Get your Timing Right
It is important not to overcook the campaign by bombarding customers with SMS messages as eventually recipients will feel this is unwelcome and block the campaign. Timing is always of the essence too; if your campaign is advertising a local pizza takeaway and delivery store then you should send your SMS campaign ideally around 5pm to 7pm on a Friday or Saturday night. Ask any retailer of the Italian bread with cheese on when they are at their busiest and they will tell you unreservedly that Friday and Saturday early evenings are when they carry out about 75 percent of its trade. Avoid off peak times like late on a Sunday night and early Monday morning. However, SMS offers can be used to boost those quite times, providing it’s the right offer at the right time.
SMS marketing campaigns can have a huge head start over an email marketing campaign because there are so many text messages being read. Emails are often deleted without ever being opened because the recipient can clearly see the sender and the email title just spells another spam rich content mail. Estimates from marketing business research groups shows only around one in four are actually opened. How can you get your customers to respond and do so quickly? An SMS marketing plan will involve the recipient responding to the SMS text message it is estimated within one hour, often earlier.
Make it a Good offer
It is always important to make some kind of offer in your marketing campaign. Customers love a good offer. Again, using the pizza shop analogy, if you offer 10 percent reduction upon collection or a buy one get one free offer then you are more than likely to get a positive response from your potential customer. Its here that your campaign will bloom; the more responses, the better the campaign. Also, it is worth considering allowing your customers to send an SMS in and guarantee them a special offer or two if they do so. It is vital that you keep your campaign plain and simple. This will encourage a response from the customer and keep them engaged. If you send an offer that tells customers they will get a free bet of around £20 but only if they gamble three £20 bets that must be taken on different days and different events, then you are likely to scare the customer so far away they’ll not bother touching your campaign again. Remember to keep it simple; a far better offer would be to tell the customer if they bet £10 and that bet loses then they will get another £10 bet for free.
Use incentives
Always tell your customer to respond in a reply on your SMS marketing text. Do not get them to register on a website via SMS. Recipients of SMS advertising do not want to be writing down a web address from an SMS appointment. Mobile vouchers are a great way to forward your SMS special offers. Many smartphones these days are capable of reading QR codes so you could utilize this feature. Polling in an SMS text message is also a great way to grab the interest of your customer. In the UK you could ask a simple question like which is your favourite football player? Then offer a list of four maybe five (no more) top star football players and you can create a poll. Make sure the poll results are always displayed after the poll has been taken. Then do not forget to offer an incentive after the poll has been taken. Once the recipient has answered you then have a moment to offer them a coupon or message as a kind of thanks for responding to the poll.
One of the more popular methods in creating an SMS marketing campaign is to have a text to screen service. The screen may be one that is watched in a sports bar or snooker hall. You may be able to advertise on the screen during breaks in the sporting play broadcasts. You can create SMS appointment reminders too; these will be used to give the customer prompts to use your products at key moments (like those Friday and Saturday early evening slots, eh pizza lovers?) These are just some of the features of the system that will work a treat for your SMS marketing strategy.
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