How to avoid cheapening your SMS program with discounts
The case for avoiding a discounted, short-term strategy
As you begin to craft your strategy for connecting with your audience through SMS, here’s a hot tip, avoid discounts as the CTA to sign up. Across most online stores you’ll see the same thing, sign up for our newsletter for 10% off your first order. It’s become so common that customers make sure to look for it before they make their purchase, refreshing their emails until they receive the code. While it’s easy to forget to opt-out from an email newsletter (that’s probably why these lists are easy to grow but have continuously decreasing engagement) no one will ever forget to opt-out from an annoying and non-relevant SMS program. With text, your subscribers will never forget to opt-out. After they get their discount, most of the SMS programs out there today turn into an automated, and not personalized discount automation tool. By sharing the long-term value of your SMS program that is rooted in an exclusive membership, you’ll be starting off the relationship on the right foot. First-time buyer discounts can contribute to higher first-time purchase conversions, so how do you replace this strategy with a long-term one? Here are a few ways you can set up your SMS program for long-term success.
Don’t run on auto-pilot
Think about ways in which you can give value to your subscribers, without asking for anything in return. Using the theory of reciprocity, you’ll be strengthening your customer relationship for the long run. Whatever you offer to your SMS subscribers, it’s key to never run these programs on auto-pilot, for this will be the only value proposition that will dry out quickly (the classic sign up for 10% off your order!). Focusing on the early adopters, different acquisitions strategies, and segmenting your audience by their points of entry and behaviors, you can target, test, and learn what resonates the most to each niche to keep churn low. If you keep growing your SMS list but its strategy resembles a bucket with holes, it’ll be an endless effort to keep it filled up.
Show empathy
Any great conversation includes two participants that listen to each other. Make your SMS subscribers feel heard by using interactive multi-step campaigns to ensure each user is interested in hearing your marketing message instead of pushing messages onto them. Using the same idea, create segmented groups of customers based on interests and interactions to personalize the experience even further. Additionally, unlike email, text programs make it easy to get instant feedback and set up automated responses to various sentiments. Once you set up these capabilities, you’ll be able to show instant empathy and care to your customers making them feel seen and respecting their space.
Reward loyalty
Building on your customer’s feedbacks, launch a referral campaign that gives happy users the chance to be rewarded for sharing your product, spreading brand awareness through word-of-mouth.
Don’t always talk about $
Don’t wait for an order, sale, discount, or promotion to engage with your SMS audience. Instead, weave pure engagement-driven campaigns into your text marketing program, from behind the scenes look at your brand or messages straight from your owners. Your biggest fans will appreciate the content, breaking up the conversational thread to not only be about transactions.
Make it conversational
Applying all the above ideas, you’ll be training your SMS program to be conversational. From segmenting users and personalizing messages, confirming interest through interactive campaigns, and automatically answering customer feedback, you’ll be enhancing your text marketing experience’s likability and usefulness.
Think outside the SMS box
With the mobile-first web experience becoming more and more powerful, look into sharing rich media and web apps along the way to enhance the subscriber experience outside the SMS channel. Additionally, you’ll probably be growing your text subscriber list outside of SMS, so focus on creating beautiful landing pages that share the value of your program during the acquisition phase.
The Takeaway…
While there are many more ways to make your SMS program more valuable to your subscribers for the long term, these are a few low-barrier methods to achieve that strategy! If these approaches spark new ideas on ways to create meaningful relationships with your SMS audience, let us know and we’d love to brainstorm and help you roll it out!
If we’ve piqued your interest in conversational marketing, want to learn more about Drop, or simply want to connect, send us a text at 1–833–217–4200 or sign up to get early access here.
