The Top Techniques For Creating SMS Marketing Messages Users Will Read

Find out how to improve your SMS reach and customer experience with these top SMS marketing tips straight from the experts

SMS marketing can be daunting for small businesses, especially since having a smaller budget for marketing in the infancy stage of a business means that you need to be more vigilant and specific with your efforts than ever.

Luckily, it’s possible to increase customer engagement, return on investment (ROI), and click-through rates (CTR), all while improving customer satisfaction with your SMS marketing campaigns. Let’s have a look at how you can create high impact SMS marketing messages for your customers.

Be personal

Businesses simply must include the name of the sender and the receiver. It’s pretty much an unwritten rule. The customer needs to know who’s messaging them otherwise it will be perceived as spam. Similarly, not using their name makes it easy for them to spot that this was a message sent to the masses, making them feel like nothing but a number, and leading to decreased customer engagement and brand satisfaction.

Choose the timing of your messages carefully

Customers want timely communication — a delayed message won’t have half the impact it could have — and that’s if it has any impact at all. Transactional messages should be sent as time-critical messages so that they’re delivered immediately. Whether it’s a payment confirmation, OTP, flight confirmation, etc., make communication with customers timely to increase efficacy.

Related: Marketing Trends That Will Never Die — Like SMS Marketing

Why so serious?

The last thing customers want from businesses is serious messaging that reads as being just plain robotic and impersonal. Your audience needs to feel like there’s an actual person sending them messages, not that it’s coming from a computer-generated text creator and sent at random. Be silly or lighthearted if that’s your brand tone, or keep it more conversational and quirky if you have a more professional brand identity.

The importance of immediacy

Just as businesses need to send SMS messages timeously, the need for customers to act immediately is crucial too. If customers aren’t asked to act quickly, your SMS marketing efforts may be lost on your audience. If you add immediacy by using terms like “limited time only” or “subscribe today”, customers will be more enticed to act with some urgency.

Related: Combining SMS and Social Media to Elevate Your Small Business Advertising

Create segments within your databases

By introducing subgroups, or segmentation, into your SMS strategy, the customers you reach will be based on key data: when they shopped, when they last visited your website, when they subscribed, what they are interested in, and so much more. All of these are opportunities to market specific products and services to specific customers, increasing the impact of your message and improving the relevance of your brand.

Exploring consumer behavior in more detail

Customer tracking and data analytics are worth investing in, especially since consumers demand more personal, relevant, value-driven communications and marketing than ever before.

Businesses need to track which of their customers or potential customers are registered, how many visits they’ve paid to your site, whether they’ve purchased or not, what they’ve bought, the specific categories they favor, and so much more, to have the desired impact on the customer.

Market to your customers geographically

Using a customer’s location — country, state, city, and suburb — can personalize the interaction on a different level. Letting a customer know the events and sales closest to the branch near them, or sending them promotions relevant to the closest store, shop, restaurant, or bakery in their area will do wonders for your marketing efforts.

Ask for permission

If you’re messaging a customer who isn’t subscribed, you’ll need to ask for their permission to continue to market to them. Always be sure to offer an opt-out option, as well as a ‘yes’ option which will allow you to send them more information once they’re subscribed (remarketing is key!).

Include a strong CTA

A great way to incite action with your customers after they open and read your SMS is by including another level of interaction. If you’re sending an SMS welcoming a new customer who’s just signed up, use that welcoming SMS as an opportunity to lead their journey with your brand. For example, if they’re female, you could send them a link to products that women would appreciate, or a specific category of your site that you know they’ve browsed before.

Related: Top 6 Dos and Don’ts for SMS Application Use in Small Business Marketing

Send them coupons

It might sound a little cheesy but customers love to be rewarded for their loyalty — whether you’re sending a seasonal discount, new product promo, or new subscriber discount, SMS coupons are an effective way of getting customers to engage further with your brand. Additionally, they build loyalty, which is great since long-term purchasing is what businesses really want from their marketing efforts.

Analyze your SMS marketing efforts

After spending so much time on polishing your SMS communications and marketing strategy for your customers, it makes sense that tracking needs to be put in place. Many businesses fall short when it comes to data tracking and analyzing the customer journey, but tracking any form of marketing is one of the most important steps in the process.

Use the latest technology

Lastly, when it comes to the effectiveness of your SMS marketing tactics, it’s worthwhile investing in SMS technology you can trust to support your messaging. Clickatell offers just that — a trusted and reliable SMS platform which enables you to take control of the conversation and SMS-enable any application, system, or website. In just a few clicks, your seamless integration will be up and running and won’t leave a massive dent in your marketing budget.

All of this can be daunting, but the key thing to remember is that there are many ways SMS can be used to market to your customers in ways that add value to them, strengthen loyalty with the brand, and which will save you time on future marketing efforts.

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