The most effective advertising methods have the ability to reach customers on their most comfortable platform. In addition, effective advertising entices prospects to engagement, builds brand trust with customers, and then tracks the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. While many advertising campaigns effectively match a few of the characteristics, SMS advertising effectively satisfies each of the requirements with an amazing level of efficiency.
Traci Reed, a sales manager with Textedly shares a few statistics, “SMS advertising boasts an impressive 98% open rate with 83% of the text messages being opened within the first three minutes. After the message has been opened, the efforts from SMS advertising result in 8 times more responses than email campaigns.”
The following information explains 3 ways you can effectively use SMS for advertising.
1. Modernize SMS Advertising
Since people are generally drawn to shiny and new things, you can bolster your SMS advertising campaign with a splash of color, sound, or even motion. Simply put, text messages have evolved from its original 160-word limits that featured only black and white text into a brand new appealing message. With the inclusion of pictures, songs, videos, and several other forms of digital content, SMS advertising has been infinitely enhanced. Multimedia rich or MMS is the newly revamped text messaging service that approximately 95% of the mobile devices in the United States can handle, which leaves no reason for your SMS advertising campaigns to be bland.
2. Engage Interested Customers at the Right Time
While consumers will quickly and nonchalantly opt-in an email marketing campaign, they use more discretion when it comes to mobile text messaging campaigns. Users limit themselves on to the brands that they are genuinely interested in for SMS advertising campaigns.
As with most facets of life, timing is everything. The best practice is to use a little common sense in determining when you should send messages. Instead of sending out text messages in the middle of working hours, you can increase your response by sending the message at a more appropriate time.
Over-texting is another problem that will result in prospects opting-out of your SMS advertising campaign. To prevent this, you should always monitor your customer engagement and set limits on the number of times you send the text messages. Additionally, if you use the text messages too often, it will lose its sense of urgency. Around 2-4 messages per month has been found to be a good frequency.
3. Tracking
Undoubtedly, the most important part of engaging in any type of advertising campaign is to measure its performance and extract as much data as possible. If you fail to measure your results, you risk the possibility of running an ineffective campaign and pouring money down the drain. SMS advertising programs offer several different customer acquisition points that enable you to easily track certain criteria of their participation. A few of the most common performance indicators are listed below.
Click Tracking
Click-tracking can be used when the message has a URL link that the user is prompted to follow. As one of the most powerful forms of measuring return on investment, click-tracking can be used to learn about the purchasing habits and interests of the people who click the links and a plethora of additional information.
Keyword Tracking
You can track the performance of your keyword by using different keywords in different locations and in different media. You will know the effectiveness of the keyword by the change in the customers’ participation rate.
Call Tracking
By prompting your customers to call a 1-800 number to make a purchase or get more information, you can measure the campaign’s rate of conversion.
Coupon Tracking
When coupons are integrated into a point-of-sale system, you can effectively measure the results of your marketing efforts.
One of the downsides of SMS is on a company scale it will end up costing more money than email. However, you may be trading better customer engagement. For more information on SMS see How SMS Works.