When you launched your last messaging campaign, did you make sure all the messages were delivered? And then, did you check to see how many responses you received from those messages? If you did, congratulations! You’ve begun a process that will help you understand how your messages are influencing your audience and will allow you to fine tune your messaging campaigns so they are as effective as possible.
When you craft a messaging campaign, you should establish your goals and decide how you will measure success. Is your campaign designed to provide information to prospective customers? Are you helping customers with their buying decisions? Are you helping solve problems with a customer service team?
Whatever your campaign goals are, you are sending messages to reach your audience with a specific intent. You might want your customers to learn something, to do something or to decide something. Your messages help them take action.
Analytics help you understand how effective you have been in accomplishing the goals of the campaign. The SMS-Magic team is proud of our easy-to-use dashboard with standard analytics that are ready for you as soon as you send your first message. We can help you analyze and report on the metrics that matter most to you. We can even provide a free trial or a demo.
Of course, we think our messaging platform is the best, but let’s get back to what you should know about your campaigns. Here are some of the key metrics you’ll want to review:
Message Delivery You’ll want to be sure that your messages are reliably delivered, so be sure your software solution for text messaging provides end-to-end delivery statistics across all involved carriers. You can’t help customers if you can’t reach them. Message delivery stats will help you understand how many of your messages are reaching your customers and may highlight issues that prevent delivery. You might have a problem that is easily remedied, if you know about it.
Response Rates If you’re sending a campaign to a list, you’ll want to measure how many of your leads or contacts responded to your message. Low response rates should spur testing of both your message and content to improve results.
Response Times – Messaging Users One of the key values of messaging is the ability to create a conversation. This means that when you receive a response from one of your target audience members, you need to respond quickly, either with an automated message or with a message from a team member. Be sure to evaluate response times for your individual users and teams overall. When you see slower response times, be sure to understand why they are occurring, perhaps refining your process to eliminate slow responses. Pay attention to response rates for your industry. What is a “quick” response in one industry may be a very slow response in another.
Managing Consent to Text Privacy laws around the world require you to track who opts in and who opts out of your text marketing campaigns, and you must have explicit consent to collect and process a customer’s personal information. Campaign analytics help you monitor each recipient’s status and can provide reports to prove compliance individually and in aggregate. It’s critical that you abide by a customer’s requests for compliance reasons, as well as to foster good relationships with customers and prospects.
Pipeline Progress As you create and deliver campaigns and individual messages designed to move your prospects through your pipeline, you want to be sure that you monitor their progress. Be sure to evaluate measures such as which content moves a prospect forward, which content gets little reaction, and which content or messages drive conversions.
Conversion Rates If you’re using conversational messaging to drive any type of conversion – a product sale, a subscription, signing up for a course, a candidate accepting a job – be sure to measure your true success rates. All too often we focus on getting a response, responding in a timely fashion, meeting dates, etc. Yet the ultimate measure of a successful conversational messaging campaign is converting your prospect successfully into a customer.
Test and Refine Your Message
If your analytics indicate that something is wrong – response rates have declined, conversions are not what you’d like, customer-service rates are fluctuating wildly – it may be time to do some testing. The most common type of message testing is called A/B or split testing. It’s a proven method of learning what content works and what doesn’t.
Create two messages or two pieces of content. If you’re testing your messages for example, Message A is your control message, and it stays the same. Message B is the test message, and you’ll change only one element in this message.
Send the two messages to enough of your list to be able to draw conclusions about the entire list. That means your test group is large enough to be statistically significant.
Check your analytics. If Message B rates a higher response, you’ll know that the element you changed made the difference. You can then send to the entire list, expecting a higher response.
Response rates aren’t the only way to test effectiveness. Depending on the type of message you’re testing, you could check your dashboard for other changes due to the test message – requests for information, participation in a contest or survey, or sales.
Use a similar procedure for content testing.
Don’t change more than one element at a time. If you change two or more elements, you won’t know which change made the difference. If you have several items to test, conduct an individual test for each element.
The elements often tested include, but aren’t limited to:
Changing the first line of the message.
Adding or deleting a single image or a video in a multimedia messaging service (MMS) message.
Moving the call to action (CTA) from the bottom of the linked content to the top.
Changing the color of the CTA button or link.
Personalizing the message or removing the personalization.
The more you know about how your messaging campaigns perform, the easier it will be to reach your best customers. You’ll know more about what products or services they want and what approach is best for them.
We suggest that you segment your audience as much as possible and personalize all your messages to your customers, patients, clients and applicants. Integrating your messaging platform with your CRM makes communicating effectively very simple.
Our customer support team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make reaching your customers easier. Ask for a demo. Or you can test drive SMS-Magic with a free trial.
