SMS Marketing Myth 1: One Size Fits All in Messaging Solutions

Reality: Every car isn’t a Lamborghini, right? Initiated in 2008, SMS-Magic has never stopped evolving. Beyond traditional text messaging services, we focus on creating genuine engagement and fostering customer relationships. Our SMS platform prioritizes results, evidenced by clients experiencing a staggering 40% hike in conversions.

SMS Marketing Myth 2: It’s Just… Texting

Reality: Think of a master chef crafting a gourmet dish: whether they use secret ingredients or everyday food, they always deliver something fantastic. That’s how we view messaging! SMS-Magic elevates business text messaging into an art form. By prioritizing genuine, resonant content, we’ve become the go-to choice for high-stakes conversations such as finance and healthcare.

SMS Marketing Myth 3: Platforms are Too Complex

Reality: Ever tried assembling a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle? Daunting, right? But with SMS-Magic, the experience is more like snapping together Lego bricks. By designing a user-friendly interface, we let businesses focus on what they excel at, leaving the SMS intricacies to us.

SMS Marketing Myth 4: Compliance is a Constant Battle

Reality: Imagine a world where you can set-and-forget rules and regulations. Welcome to the SMS-Magic realm! We actively monitor and adapt to regulatory updates and changes , ensuring your SMS campaigns remain compliant. Say goodbye to those tedious manual updates.

SMS Marketing Myth 5: Integration Nightmares Await

Reality: Imagine effortlessly blending paint on a canvas so every color is clear, bright, and tells a story. That’s the integration experience with SMS-Magic. Whether you’re using Salesforce, Zoho, or other CRM systems, our seamless integration ensures fluidity in your communication processes.

SMS Marketing Myth 6: Setting Up is Like Climbing Everest

Reality: With us, it’s more of a walk in the park! Begin your SMS marketing journey with SMS-Magic in a day. Should you encounter any challenges our top-notch support team is just a call away.

SMS Marketing Myth 7: Termination Equals Data Loss

Reality: Consider us the guardians of your digital memories. Even post-cancellation, your data is safely and securely maintained, ensuring your hard work and customer interactions aren’t lost to the void.

SMS Marketing Myth 8: Texts Play Second Fiddle to Emails

Reality: In our digital age, timeliness is the name of the game. While emails sit unread, SMS messages boast a jaw-dropping 98% open rate. Makes you wonder: Who’s truly leading the customer engagement race?

SMS Marketing Myth 9: Bulk Messaging Equals Spam

Reality: We believe in quality over quantity. Rather than bombarding users, our personalized SMS strategies ensure that each message feels personalized, leading to a whopping 75% of users feeling more connected to brands.

SMS Marketing Myth 10: SMS Lacks Engagement Power

Reality: If engagement was a dance, SMS would be leading the Conga Line! Brands that weave SMS into their strategies witness a soaring 30% uptick in engagement. It’s time to join the dance!

SMS Marketing Myth 11: Serious Businesses Don’t Text

Reality: Think of professional SMS communication as the modern-day briefcase: sleek, efficient, and indispensable. From appointment reminders in healthcare to transactional updates in finance, secure business messaging has become a keystone in professional communication.

SMS Marketing Myth 12: SMS Isn’t ROI Friendly

Reality: Here’s some economics 101: for every dollar channeled into SMS campaigns, businesses often see returns exceeding $40. It’s an investment that truly pays dividends.

The prowess of SMS marketing isn’t just about numbers or open rates. It’s about resonance. It’s about conversations that matter. Dive deep with SMS-Magic and watch your business narratives turn magical, one message at a time. After all, in this age of fleeting attention spans, it’s not merely the message, but the connection that counts. Stay ahead, stay engaged, and remember: Magic is just an SMS away! 

Offering your marketing digitally can also give your leads and clients access to resources and information about your products and services. If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry. With some front-end work and a reliable messaging partner, automations can make your digital marketing more manageable — and cost-effective.

1. Automate marketing messages to improve your customer’s experiences

It’s likely that your potential customers are looking for financial information at all hours of the day, and you can greet them each time with personalized messaging automation. Your first step in creating this positive experience is to ensure you aren’t sending any messages, directly or with automations, without their express written consent. Giving your leads and customers the ability to opt in to messaging can be painless when you add opt-in and compliance language to your digital and printed marketing materials or with a button on your website. Once you have the tools to capture consent, you can automate with a little upfront content creation.

One of the easiest ways to start your customer off with a positive experience with your company is by sending an automated welcome message. When a lead submits a form from your website or asks for more information and agrees to opt in to your messages, your preset welcoming message automation can send them an instant response. 

Filling out the form and submitting it triggers this message, and it doesn’t have to stop there. Your welcome message can also lead to an automated message flow that can gather information about your lead’s user metrics, like their financial goals and knowledge level. These messaging flows might ask your lead questions and ask them to reply using a keyword. Each keyword response triggers another automated message that may provide them with links to resources or applications, or it can trigger a response that explains when you will contact them.

These flows and automations improve the customer’s experience from the initial interaction and can keep it going throughout their journey with your company.

2. Increase profitable hours without sacrificing personalized interactions

With marketing automations in place, you and your team won’t have to spend their profit-making hours responding to each customer request personally. Your automated marketing responders can handle many tasks on your behalf, whether an initial welcoming message or one aimed at nurturing clients with links to educational posts or newsletters catered to their interests. 

Remember that data collecting flow mentioned above? This crucial data, combined with your CRM database, can help you personalize each automated marketing campaign. You’ll save time without sacrificing the quality of each interaction when you add personalized touches to each automated message.

Automated marketing doesn’t mean you’ll relinquish complete control of your marketing and communications to automations. With messaging services like SMS-Magic, you can easily switch from automated to personal conversations. Plus, your automations should be reviewed and adjusted regularly based on your read and response rates to your automated marketing campaigns. This will require updated content creation and adjustments to your keyword triggers and flows to keep automation marketing working its best for you.

3. Promote efficiency and reduce event no-shows with automations

Reminders about upcoming meetings or seminars or gentle nudges to download or read marketing content are other benefits that make adding marketing automation a priority. Once a client agrees to a set appointment date and time, it, unfortunately, isn’t set in stone. You can reduce no-shows by setting up automations to send reminders days and hours before the meeting. Add in the ability for clients to reschedule, and you’ll have time to slide another client into a vacant slot — keeping you on track and increasing your productivity.

SMS-Magic’s analytics lets you see what marketing messages aren’t read or responded to. This vital data — paired with your CRM database — can fuel your follow-up campaigns, specifically targeting those groups that haven’t taken action. Follow-ups and reminders are crucial to maintaining your customers’ forward momentum so they can experience all you offer. Automating these follow-ups frees you up and keeps you moving toward your business goals. 

The Bottom Line

Engaging in thoughtful marketing tactics means you’re nurturing leads and delighting your existing customers, but that doesn’t mean you’re always doing it from your mobile phone or computer 24/7. With a little up-front message creation, you can set SMS marketing automations to work for you — any time of day.

Ready to get started using messaging automations to work for your wealth management firm? To get started with SMS-Magic, contact our customer support team for a demo or a free trial!

The Rule of 7 was devised in the 1930s to quantify how many times a person needed to see a movie poster before they bought a ticket for the movie. During the ensuing decades, the rule held true for most products. A consumer needed seven “touches” from a company before they would internalize the marketing message and act on the call to action.

These days, with all the noisy messages surrounding us, a consumer may need more than seven touches. They may need up to 25 touches before they are ready to respond to your message. Fortunately, we have more channels to try than just movie posters. Multichannel marketing relies on your ability to create the mix of channels that will supply the needed touches to convert a prospect into a customer.

So maybe the Rule of 7 still applies, but it needs updating. Your mix of channels may need a little overhaul, too. Here’s a list of the channels you’re probably already using:

• Email
• Direct mail
• In-person contact at a trade show or conference
• Print, television and radio ads
• Social media
• Online ads
• Sponsorships
• Online communities
• Billboards
• Phone calls

We’d like to make the case for adding messaging to your channel mix. And here are five great reasons this could work for your marketing campaigns.

#1 – Your Customers Are Digital-First

Your customers have been “rewired” to be digital-first, according to a recent report by Adobe and eConsultancy. The lessons of the past several years have taught them to rely more heavily than ever on their mobile phones, their tablets and their laptops. Non-digital channels are still effective, but your customers look first to their digital devices. Messaging can be central to a digital-first marketing strategy.

#2 – Messaging Is Available 24/7, 365

Your customers are trying to solve problems in their own lives. Sometimes, it’s an ordinary task like scheduling a haircut or taking advantage of a great sale. But sometimes it’s a life-changing event like securing the right attorney after an accident or applying to college or buying a home. In those cases, your customer might want information about your company, product and services after hours. They might search for a lawyer in the middle of the night. They might wonder about interest rates in the middle of the afternoon. They might ask for a campus tour when you least expect it. With automated messaging, you can provide a personalized, but automated, response whenever your customers contact you. Once the first contacts are made, you can switch to in-person conversations, increasing your chances of making connections.

#3 – Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter

You don’t ever have very much time to attract attention, and messaging helps keep your appeal short and sweet. SMS messages are 160 characters long. Multimedia messages can be longer, but they often contain images or videos, making them very appealing. Customers expect messages to be short and to the point, and they are generally willing to give you the 30 seconds it takes to read your message. Use the message wisely and you can have a real impact. Customers trust that you won’t waste their time.

#4 –Premiums Are Effective In Most Campaigns

You probably offer incentives when you make an appeal. Coupons, sweepstakes and bonuses, among others, can help spur your audience to action. Offer something your audience values and you’ll see your response rate rise. Messaging allows you to ask for immediate action. For example, a university might send this message: “Text APPLYNOW to 534567 to waive your application fee.” The reply text might trigger an automated message that leads to an in-person conversation with an admissions counselor. In other industries, you might link to online coupons or offers, tailoring the offer and the response to your situation.

#5 – Compliance & Analytics Are Critical

You probably use a CRM to segment your audiences, direct your campaigns and report on the results. After all, knowing how your campaign performed is critical to your continuing success. The essence of marketing is to design and launch a campaign for a particular audience, gather data about how it performed, and use the analysis to design even more effective campaigns in the future. You probably are also impacted by privacy laws and regulations. They protect consumers and require certain adjustments for marketers. Messaging allows you to work seamlessly with your CRM and to prove compliance with its reporting capabilities.

Increasing your use of messaging in your multichannel marketing mix makes sense in today’s world. People are using messaging systems for an ever-increasing list of tasks, including very private functions like their banking. Other channels are also effective, but messaging can give your marketing an added boost.

If you’re ready to give messaging a try, contact SMS-Magic for a demo or a free trial today!

In a normal economy, it could take weeks or months to advertise, interview, offer and accept. Slow-to-hire companies often lose out on the best prospects, leaving themselves with average workers. That’s in a normal economy.

In 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 47 million people voluntarily quit their jobs, many of them responding to life changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Low-wage workers led the pack, but they were followed by women with increased childcare responsibilities, retiring Baby Boomers and people who wanted better pay, greater flexibility and less stress in their work lives. Job openings have increased to records highs. Welcome to the “Great Resignation,” aka the “Big Quit.”

So what’s an excellent company to do? Home Depot, a Fortune-500-ranked company, plans to hire 25 percent more workers for its spring season this year by speeding up the application process. The company plans to offer jobs in as little as one day, up from an average of five days previously. The company is also holding virtual job fairs to fill 100,000 full- and part-time job openings.

Your business may not involve selling building supplies and you may not be able to offer jobs in 24 hours, but evidence shows that speeding up your hiring process can help you fill open positions with the talent you need. Hiring fast allows you to recruit top talent and to give them a better candidate experience. You’ll experience higher acceptance rates because a faster timeline gives candidates less time to consider other offers.

It also keeps the candidate from “ghosting” the hiring company. The term ghosting comes from the dating world where it means someone has simply disappeared from all communications. A recent Indeed survey indicates that 76 percent of employers have been ghosted – even after a candidate has accepted a job – and 57 percent believe ghosting is more common than before.

Some ghosting occurs when a candidate receives a better offer and chooses not to inform other interested companies, but lack of communication also plays a large role in candidate frustration. A recent CareerBuilder survey finds that 51 percent of applicants are discouraged by a lack of information. More than a third of respondents said that need to know what their status is during the process and employers don’t share that information. Slightly less than a third of respondents said employers don’t even acknowledge receiving their applications.

The results? Frustrated applicants are more likely to ghost the employer.

Liz Cannata, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder, said in a Fast Company interview: “If the candidate doesn’t understand where they’re at in the process or how long the process will be, they can lose interest and become disengaged. Similarly, if the process is too long and feels like it’s dragging out because the employer keeps adding one more interview or they’re unsure of when they’ll have a decision, that can also lead to drop off.”

We would like to suggest that using text messaging during your hiring process can make a big difference, especially for staffing companies. By including permission to text the candidate on your application, you can communicate with applicants initially via a series of automated texts. When you’re farther along in the hiring process, you can send group texts to let applicants know they aren’t progressing in the hiring process and send individual texts to those whom you’d like to interview.

Once you’ve narrowed down the selection, you can move to one-on-one conversational messaging to set up interviews and gather any additional information you need. Your applicants get the information they need quickly in a format they prefer.

We know applicants prefer texts because globally we send 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes. You can bet that job applicants are just like the rest of us.

We also know that managing the flow of information is critical, too. If you use a CRM like Salesforce or Zoho, SMS-Magic can help you track of all your applicant interactions. All of your incoming texts, emails and phone conversations, as well as your responses, can be archived in your CRM.

It’s a competitive world and if you’re able to respond to candidates faster than your competition, you have earned an amazing competitive advantage. Quick responses to applicants help you recruit the best possible candidates while enhancing your hiring brand in your industry.

Being authentic in your hiring process is increasingly important in today’s business world. Staying in touch with talented applicants has become a requirement. SMS-Magic, through conversational and automated text messaging, can help you reach out to applicants faster and with better results.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how you can engage applicants in new ways! 

If you’re like most people in the United States, you use a combination of payment methods. Using a mobile app or paying bills from a laptop computer is just so much easier than trudging to the bank or writing checks used to be.

It’s how we do business. If you were anywhere else in the world, however, you would probably be conducting business using a text messaging app like WhatsApp or WeChat. Think that sounds farfetched? Text messaging is a communication trend that will soon be widely used in the U.S., and we don’t need a crystal ball to tell us so.

We’ve been watching the billions of people who are using text messaging apps around the world. Like mobile phone adoption, the U.S. is slow to start using text messaging, especially with apps like WhatsApp, but it’s coming. To keep your business healthy and growing, you need to understand and leverage new communication channels as quickly as you can or risk losing customers and sales.

If It’s Broke, Fix It

If you’ve been trying to reach your customers and potential customers with conventional channels like phone calls, direct mail or email, you probably are wondering why your results are mediocre, at best. It’s because we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Phone calls have a lower response rate.

Conversely, we send more than 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Asurion’s research shows that Americans look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

Most texts sent in the U.S. today use the native texting capability that comes packaged in mobile phones – Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Message Service (MMS). SMS messages are limited to text only but are quick and inexpensive, great for reminders. MMS messages can contain photos or videos and are often very eye-catching. They can create high response rates, but they are more expensive to send and take longer to transmit.

The rest of the world, however, is using an assortment of “over-the-top” apps that use the internet to send the message, not a cellular service. Facebook Messenger is the top app in North America and Australia, WhatsApp is most popular in most of South America, Russia, India and parts of Africa, and WeChat is the leader in China. If your company is based in the United States, you might not be familiar with apps like Viber, Telegram, Line, Discord, KakaoTalk, Phoenix, or Zalo, but if you’re trying to reach customers in specific countries, you may need to become familiar with the favorites in that area.

When someone in India uses WhatsApp to do their banking, they are using a Facebook service that offers end-to-end security. Security is one of the priorities for most OTT apps, but it isn’t always available in the initial download. Most of the apps are free to download but may charge for business uses. They allow users to share files, to set messages to self-destruct, to make voice calls and to chat with groups of up to 200,000 users. Some also allow voice calls even to those who haven’t downloaded a specific app.

Are You Ready to Use OTT Apps Now?

The downside of using OTT apps is that the people you send to must also have the app. That limits your audience in the U.S. right now, but trends indicate that OTT app usage will grow rapidly in the next few years.

Here’s what we recommend: start using text messaging to reach your customers and potential customers. We have a customer who increased customer responses to their campaigns from less than one percent to over 15 percent just by changing from emails to texts.

Work the kinks out of your campaigns now. As OTT app adoption accelerates, you will be perfectly poised to take advantage of the technology while your competition struggles.

Our system, working with your CRM, can keep track of all your customer interactions in one place. It can also keep track of messages sent from a variety of platforms, starting with native mobile text capabilities and expanding to OTT apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, SnapChat or the others as needed.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. We’ll share what we see in our crystal ball. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in a new way!

When you blend text messaging with other marketing channels, such as email, you get more value from all your marketing programs. That’s why we make it easy to use text messaging with your Marketing Cloud platform. You easily get 6X more responses, personalize engagement and accelerate lead to opportunity transitions.

We put together this infographic to give marketing leaders a quick overview of how you will grow your pipeline and funnel leads with text message marketing from SMS-Magic.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your team and want to learn more, schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your business results.

Challenges with Personalization

Traditionally, the most common way to provide personalized content to audiences has been to progressively profile with web forms. This method has presented several challenges, including:

• Regulations Regulations are increasingly limiting for form profiling via web pages. GDPR eliminates the ability to “gate” content by forcing a form fill to receive content. A vendor MUST deliver content without the form if requested.
• Configuring the Technology Configuring Web forms and marketing automation can be complicated and sometimes requires deep technical help and customization.
• Site Traffic Your leads, contacts, and customers don’t visit sites that frequently or may not visit again for a long time, decreasing the chance to collect more data points.
• Gated Content If you don’t have much gated content, you can’t collect as much information, and people that visit the site may not go for gated content, meaning they don’t see the second form. Also, many prospects exit the process when presented with a form.
• Behavior Tracking Concerns Many customers are concerned with behavior tracking on websites. This is an increasingly significant issue for marketing.

How to Send Personal and Relevant Content with SMS Messages

Text messaging is a great way to provide a personal and relevant experience to your audience. You can leverage SMS progressive profiling and increase results. Text messages have a 95% read rate, and over 60% response rate, which means you can streamline profiling with texting. Get the most specific and accurate insights about your audience with simple questions, provide the most relevant content, buying journeys, offers, and event invites, and build robust personas to understand your prospects’, customers’, or market’s needs. Here are some pointers on where to start:

1. Start by asking simple questions that matter to your audience.
Instead of assuming, ask them about their preferences. Start with the basics; how they want to communicate with you, how often they’d like updates, their specific areas of interest.

2. Share insights to get more information.
You know that customers who buy a specific product often need help in 3 potential areas. Tell them that and then ask what they need.

IF you know a candidate needs 4 specific skills to qualify, ask them about those skills. You’ll save both of you time and energy.

3. Show them you understand their world.
Offer a relevant set of keywords to answer a question. They’ll recognize that you understand their needs.

Simple keywords also make it easy to quickly respond, and to analyze responses to deepen your personal profiles.

4. Be thoughtful.
Building relationships takes time. That’s true in business and in life. Send 1-2 questions a month. Don’t SPAM. Ask questions that matter to them, not to you. After all, it’s about their needs, not yours.

5. Go deeper.
Create stages of profiling. Start with the basics to develop pertinent segments or personas. Develop profiling questions that relate to these specific personas, so you can deepen your insights in an even more relevant way. When you identify the next layer of personas, go even deeper.

Bridge the Personalization Gap with Converse SMS Messages

We built Converse with features that empower you to easily send the most personal and relevant messages to your audience.

Compliance peace of mind
Assured compliance means you never have to worry about consent, audit trails or opt-outs. Converse manages compliance for you. We also offer a report designed to give you the tracking and control you want and need to measure text messaging compliance

Easy configuration
Converse automatically generates native Visualforce components as you use the Clickable Wizards to define your configurations and settings. Messaging components including Send SMS Button, Send SMS Page, Conversation View page, and Converse Desk are all automatically generated in Visualforce pages. All you have to do is drag and drop them to the appropriate pages and you’re ready to message.

Content Templates
Converse provides industry-specific content templates for several popular use cases, including profiling and surveys, which can then be tuned to fit your specific messaging needs. You can also develop your own message templates and save them to use across multiple campaigns.

Automated profiling
Take our pre-built automated profiling program and tune it to collect the right information from your audience at the right time.

Seamless SMS messages across the customer lifecycle in Salesforce
The Converse Inbox is a Visualforce component that dynamically configures itself to its environment, across Classic and Lightning, Sales and Service consoles, utility bars, records or full desks. We offer pre-configured desks for specific user needs.

Full message history
The 360° message history provides a holistic view of all of a lead or contact’s interactions with marketing, sales and service across your business. You can quickly get the context you need to provide more relevant messages.

Dashboards
Use our dashboards to know what your audience really wants. Analyze keywords and behaviors. Gauge the success of your campaigns and learn where your messaging can improve.

Implement profiling with text-messaging to send the most personal and relevant content to your audience. Profiling with Converse gives you reliable insights that you can leverage to increase engagement and build stronger relationships. If you are in the midst of or planning to implement personalized messaging, make sure to check out a demo that includes progressive profiling with Converse. Just text CONVERSE to 36343 to experience it on your phone.

Anyone can execute an SMS marketing campaign, but the success of the campaign depends on rules, compliance and using the right strategy. Without a strategy, marketers may be executing campaigns completely unaware that their text message marketing tactics are causing them greater damage than good. SMS marketing campaigns requires Opt-In and Opt-out options to be given to your audience.

If you do not want to become one of those businesses that sees more customers opting out than opting in, note the following reasons people Opt-Out from SMS Marketing campaign and what can you do to increase Opt-Ins.

Why Consumers Opt-Out Of SMS Messages & Campaigns

1. SMS Marketing Tone and Content: What you say is important, but it’s also how you say it. Make sure your message is professional, that your company is identified and that the intent is clear and easy to grasp at a glance. Don’t be too casual or use jargon or emojis that can have your message be misinterpreted.
2. Irrelevance: Relevance is an imperative in an inbox considered by many to be a personal communication channel. Irrelevant messages will harm your relationship, rather than enhance it. Irrelevant messages result in customers opting out. If you have not provided an easy Opt-Out option, they could choose to mute the conversation which is the equivalent of sending an email to the junk folder.
3. Too Many SMS Messages: Frequency is a careful balance. Best practices indicate 4 messages per month. Your audience may expect more or even less. Make sure to set expectations when customers opt-in (also required by compliance) and then stick to the expectations you set.
4. Wrong timing: Sending messages at the wrong time can greatly impact opt-out rates.The Frost & Sullivan report found that the rate for opt-outs on messages sent during the week was only 1.8 percent, but that number jumped up to 5.8 percent when messages were sent out on the weekends.
5. No Incentives: If you fail to provide incentives to customers, then you can count on them quickly opting-out. They expect some kind of offer from the brands and companies when they Opt-In for your text marketing campaign. Give them a reason to take action, learn something or be entertained; otherwise your messages become clutter they can live without.
6. Lack of Responsiveness: Remember that texting is a two-way dialogue. Should a prospect or customer reply to your text, make sure a team member is ready to respond quickly or that an automated response is set to trigger. Consumers consider it rude when their text messages aren’t met with timely response.

The reasons above provide plenty of motivation for your prospects and customers to opt-out of your SMS marketing Campaigns. Let’s look at the flip side to the steps you can take to give customers reasons to opt-in to your text marketing campaign.

Steps To Increase SMS Marketing Campaign Opt-Ins:

• Invite Your Customers to Text You (integrating SMS across all channels): Advertising and promoting your SMS campaign is essential for building an opt-in list. Make people aware of the value they’ll receive by including a mention in emails, promoting your campaigns on your website, and via social media. You can also offer a reward just for opting in. Customers love to receive discount coupons, free desserts, and exclusive access to new collections, for example.
• Be Clear and Respectful: The clearer customers are on exactly what they are signing up for, the more successful your SMS campaign will be. Tell them why they should opt-in, what they’ll get, and how often they’ll hear from you. SMS opt-in promotions must follow compliance regulations and the more transparent you are in your SMS marketing campaign promotions, the more trusting consumers will be and the more willing to opt-in for the value you’ve promised.
• Personalize Your Messages: With an advanced text messaging solution, you’ll have a full history of all your conversations. You can ask questions to profile your customers and learn more about their wants and needs. You will know what they’ve responded to in the past. Align your messages to their behavior, purchase patterns and responses to increase the performance of your SMS marketing campaigns. Give them a reason to stay.
• Maintain Value: Make sure that every message delivers on what you promised for the program people gave their consent to participate in. If some new reason comes along to communicate with your prospects or customers, start a new campaign. Because you have their consent, you can text them to invite them to reply with a new keyword to also receive the new messages. If they don’t respond, respect their rights.
• Humanize Your Messages: There’s a difference between marketing language and language that engages your customers. Because SMS text messaging is considered a personal exchange, make sure your messages sound human. Because of the length limitation to 160 characters, marketers often try to put too much in one message. It’s harder to write short than long. Take your time and craft a message that demonstrates empathy. This is what drives engagement and invites people to respond to your offers.

The Bottom Line

It’s just as important to be aware of what causes consumers to opt-out as to opt-in to your SMS messages and campaigns. Use these steps to proactively manage your text message marketing to expand reach and solidify a position in your target markets. These dos and don’ts for SMS marketing campaigns will help you formulate a winning strategy to drive high-performance outcomes. Given the noisy channels you’re up against, text message marketing definitely has its upsides.