SMS Deliverability Could Be Killing Your Text Marketing Performance

You’ve probably heard the rather ubiquitous statistic that SMS messages have a 98% open rate.

Or maybe you’ve heard that 90% of SMS messages get read within 3 minutes.

Then there’s the one that says SMS messages get 209% more responses than phone calls.

All these numbers sound great. But then you send out a text marketing blast and end up wondering why your performance numbers don’t match up with these claims.

What’s going on here?

Your text marketing efforts are likely suffering from SMS deliverability issues. Here’s what’s happening.

How SMS deliverability works

SMS deliverability is simply a measure of how many of your messages actually reach the intended destination. It’s expressed as a percentage of the total messages you send.

If your deliverability rate is 90%, it means that 90% of your messages are reaching the intended recipients.

It’s an important metric because you’re paying to send the messages whether or not they reach a cell phone. And most other performance metrics are measured as a percentage of the total messages you send.

So, undelivered SMS messages negatively impact every aspect of your text marketing performance.

That’s bad. So, here’s how you fix your SMS deliverability problems.

How to improve SMS deliverability

Much of your deliverability rate is determined by your carrier service and how you send your messages. The good news is that these are easy things to correct, once you’ve identified the problem.

Here’s what to do:

Evaluate your SMS provider

Some SMS carriers send SMS messages through indirect routes that cross a whole bunch of networks. The trouble is that many SMS providers use these indirect routes to avoid paying network owners for sending the message. These indirect routes are called “gray routes.”

Obviously, communications regulators have rules against this. So, most SMS carriers avoid gray routes if they can. But, these carriers often pay third-party network owners to send data. The carrier has no control over whether these third-party network owners send messages through gray routes.

Any messages caught being sent through gray routes get stopped and are therefore left undelivered.

So, it’s best to work with an SMS provider that only sends messages over a private network that’s owned by the provider. Or, use a carrier that uses a 1-hop strategy to connect to third-party networks and avoid the gray routes that reduce deliverability.

Use only numbers in your sender name

SMS spam filters usually assume that any sender name with numbers and letters is spam. Dodge the spam filters by using only numbers in your sender name.

Send SMS messages from more than one phone number

SMS spammers usually use a single phone number to send tons of messages. So, if you’re sending all your messages from one phone number, it looks like spammy behavior, and spam filters may reject your messages because of it.

So, it could be a good idea to get multiple phone numbers and distribute your SMS sending between all of them. If one of your numbers starts getting a lot of rejected messages, stop sending messages from that number for a while.

Create segmented customer lists

If you send the exact same message to hundreds or thousands of phone numbers, it looks like spam to spam filters.

Therefore, it’s best to segment your customer lists and craft custom messages for each customer segment. This will improve your SMS deliverability. And, it will usually increase your text marketing performance, because personalized messages almost always perform better than generic messages.

Always include opt-out instructions

There are customer data protection regulations that require that you include opt-out instructions in your messages. So, sending messages without opt-out instructions ensures data protection compliance, and makes your messages appear more legitimate to spam filters.

Remove unusable numbers from your phone lists

If you send an SMS message to a disconnected phone number, a landline or an invalid phone number, that message is considered to be undelivered. Therefore, unusable phone numbers in your phone lists decrease your deliverability rates and waste a lot of time and money.

So, regularly clean your phone lists and quality control phone numbers as they enter your database to avoid sending undeliverable messages.

That’s it. This might seem like a long list of SMS deliverability fixes. But, they’re all easy fixes. And, if you follow these best practices, you’ll get the best deliverability rates and improve all your text outreach, whether that’s marketing, SMS payments, customer service, or anything else.

So, give your SMS outreach program a checkup, fix it up a bit, and watch your SMS performance improve.