1. Know Your Audience

This key ingredient belongs to many marketing recipes. In fact, it’s a staple ingredient in business. If you aren’t sure who your target audience is, this alone could be the factor that can be negatively affecting your results.

The content and message created by your business would work best when it resonates with your audience. Imagine spending so much time on a campaign for your new offer or product before even understanding what message would resonate best with your intended customer.

Spending some time learning about your target audiences such as demographics and psychographics could have a significantly positive outcome. You’ll learn about their preferences, behaviors, and interests.

If you’re just starting out, you can also start with basic audience info and learn as you go. We’ll touch on this point later, but tracking and managing your data will help you gain insights about your audience.

You’ll want to gather as much data from new and existing customers to help you get a better picture of the type of customers you’ll want to target.

From all this information, you’ll be able to pick up on trends and specific characteristics for certain groups of people. Then, you can start segmenting your audience based on their interests and preferences to send out laser-focused messages for each audience segment.

To learn more about the power of using data in SMS marketing check out this blog post here.

2. Craft Engaging Messages

What does it take for a message to be compelling enough for someone to engage with? The answer isn’t clear-cut, but there are certain things you can do to improve your engagement rate.

1. Keep things interesting: Remember that most marketing is you-focused. Meaning the spotlight is on the customer. What are the outcomes of joining your SMS list or what’s in it for them? Going back to the first point, understanding what your audience is interested in or needs will help you position your messaging in an interesting and appealing way to increase the chances of your audience engaging with your message.
2. Emphasize Brand Identity: No one wants to receive boring standard messages. Unless you’re sending transactional messages (learn more about the different types of SMS messages here) then you may want to focus on delivering informational messages. But, even that can be an opportunity to show off your personality. Don’t be afraid to infuse your tone of voice, include specific phrases or words your brand uses, or include images or videos like GIFs to emphasize your message.
3. Message Intent: Knowing the type of message you want to deliver is also crucial in understanding the level of engagement. If the message is transactional, you won’t expect a high engagement rate unless they’re reaching out to contact you if they need something. And if that’s the case, then a high engagement rate would warrant a need to take a look at what’s going on. Consider knowing if your message is to be informative, useful, or entertaining. From there, you’ll know if you need to include a CTA (Call-To-Action).

3. Timing and Frequency

If you Google the pros and cons of SMS marketing, the first con is usually the customer stating they receive too many messages resulting in them feeling overwhelmed. This leaves a bad taste in their mouths and can lead to a negative experience with your brand.

These are the common results when businesses don’t understand their audience’s preferences. To avoid this note the times your messages are being sent. If this is automation, take a look at your open rates. Are people signing up but not really clicking on your message? Consider changing the time to improve your open rates.

This will ensure your messages are being seen and that customers are happy with the frequency as well.

Another reason to review timing and frequency is the effect on cost. If messages aren’t being engaged with, you could potentially be wasting resources.

4. Incentives and Rewards

Using incentives and rewards in your SMS campaign can serve as a motivator to join your SMS list or to engage with your business.

Typically, incentives are promoted to attract new customers to sign up. Offering discounts, or an exclusive bonus are strategies businesses use to grow and build their SMS list. Doing so can help boost sales by encouraging them to take action using scarcity and deadlines.

If customers are signing up to receive a chance to win something or to receive an “immediate” benefit, engagement trends will most likely see an uptick in the beginning. But, maintaining that same level of engagement can be challenging. Understanding that engagement will go up and down is relevant when reviewing expected results on any given campaign.

Using this method is great to get customers to the top of the funnel but it’s not a long-term strategy. What some brands have done to maintain their customer list is to create loyalty programs that continue to incentive customers the more purchases they make. Although this structure may not be the best option for every business, you can still reward your customers for their loyalty over time.

5. Optimize Landing Pages and Forms

Do you already know if you plan on using landing pages or forms to attract new subscribers? Whether you plan on using one or both, optimizing each one is crucial as it directly affects the conversion rate of your campaign.

Here at SUBFLOW, when you create an SMS Product (campaign), you will be prompted to create a landing page so users know what it is they’re signing up for and what benefits they can expect to gain from signing up. Ensuring that your landing page is clear and concise is key to avoid them from being distracted and clicking elsewhere. No need to over-complicate your landing page/form, include the information that’s relevant and necessary, and then also include the legal requirements required to stay in compliance.

For more information about staying in compliance, check out this blog post here.

If you choose to create your SMS campaign with SUBFLOW, we automatically include the required information to obtain Express Written Consent on the landing page so that you can confidently send your leads to sign up and know you’re in compliance.

If you want to obtain crucial information from your leads at this stage of awareness consider adding no more than a couple of questions at the time of signing up. Asking too many can deter them from signing up.

Remember that you can always go back and change what questions you’re asking at any given point in time if you need to.

The more you learn about your audience, the better your message will be at targeting them. Messages that resonate with a segment of your audience can provide you with better and more accurate data resulting in a better experience for your customers.

Conclusion

SMS marketing is an easy and effective way to reach potential customers. To maximize its potential, it's a good idea to remember to understand your audience, craft interesting messages, review the timing of your campaigns, provide benefits to users who engage with your content, maintain optimized and effective landing pages and forms.

Doing this research and implementation can be time-consuming but well worth your resources and time. Consider using a platform like Subflow to create your first campaign in minutes. Sign up for our 14-day free trial and see how quickly you can get your messaging underway! Of course nothing is without risk - keep in mind that SMS isn't a silver bullet of marketing solutions. It can take testing different approaches to find what works best for your audience. So why not give it a try? It could be the key to unlocking engagement with your customers!

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