One of the most underrated yet incredibly powerful marketing strategies we have available right now is text messaging.
SMS has been around since the early ’90s and thanks to the widespread use of mobile phones it has exploded and become the go-to weapon of choice for businesses who want to be able to reach customers on-demand.
With bulk SMS services popping up everywhere we now have the ability to send one-to-one direct text messaging campaigns to highly engaged customers.
Currently, there are few marketing channels that offer a 98% open rate and a 19% response rate which is what makes online texting so powerful but the problem is that most businesses aren’t using it to its fullest potential so in this article I’ll share 4 essential SMS growth tactics you should be using to grow your business.
1. Increase Relevancy
One of the major keys to a successful SMS marketing campaigns is relevancy.
The less relevant your message or promotion is to the people on your list the higher the occurrence of unsubscribes or even complaints.
How do you increase your relevancy?
The best place to start is to segment all of your subscribers into similar groupings, for example, if you own a hair salon then you may have groupings like the following for men, women, women cut and colour, etc.
This means that if you have an offer for women that the men on your list won’t see it.
2. Boost Your Other Marketing Channels
Almost no one does this.
Few businesses ever use cross-marketing methods, that is, using one channel to help boost the performance of another to dramatically drive up the overall performance of the campaign.
The great thing about SMS is that when you receive a text message you can’t help but look to see who just texted you which requires you to open that message this is incredibly powerful.
What is the biggest weakness of email marketing? Open rates.
You can use SMS to dramatically improve the open rates of important email campaigns just by sending out a scheduled reminder letting your email subscribers know that you just sent them an important email.
Watch your opens rates explode!
Do you hold webinars? If so, then you know that attendance rate is incredibly important so why not send an online SMS campaign leading right up to the webinar event?
Think of areas inside your business where you can use text messaging to grab attention and then convert that attention into improved performance from your other marketing channel.
3. Remove Non-Responder’s From Your List
This is especially important when it comes to paid list building marketing strategies like email and SMS.
As you begin to grow your SMS list there will be non-responders, people who don’t click on your links or purchase your products which bring down the overall ROI on your campaigns.
The goal is to remove non-responders from your list so your list is filled with people who are most likely to purchase or take the desired action you wish them to take.
We typically see businesses remove non-responders after 90 days but it depends on your business if you are only sending out campaigns once every month then you may want to remove people after 12 months of no activity.
4. Test, Result & Scale
Before launching a large campaign it’s a good idea to run a small test to feel out the temperature of your offer.
Test two offers against each other and look at the results.
Pick the winner and then send that offer out to your list.
Each test gives you valuable data into what your customers respond to which means that you may then decide to scale that offer into your other marketing channels.
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