SMS Marketing Best-Practice and Tips for Marketers

As with any marketing strategy, there are good, bad and very bad ways to use SMS.

We, at Sendmode, have put together a list of tips and best-practice to help you through SMS in 2018.

  1. Consent is Critical

Making sure that every customer who receives SMS communications from your brand has opted-in is crucial – get fully informed consent from people signing up for your messages.

By law, consumers must explicitly opt-in to receive commercial messages, and it is up to your business to get consent and to maintain a record of consent.

Remember, that as well as opt-in’s you must also offer an opt-out service, by law! All SMS marketing campaigns must respond to the universal SMS unsubscribe keyword and send an opt-out confirmation message.

Data protection in Ireland specifies that opt-outs of electronic marketing messages should be offered in the same medium as the promotional message; so if you send a promotional SMS, you should enable customers to opt-out of future SMS marketing by sending you an SMS.

  1. Consistently Add Value

Make sure every message you send has some value to your customer. Your audience has signed up for your messages because they thought they would get something out of receiving them.

Make sure every effort to communicate with a current or potential customer is relevant, informative and adds value. Keep messages precise using simple informative language. Be brief and focused, know our target audience and speak directly to them.

Adding value to your messages will give your customers the impression that you are a trustworthy brand.

  1. Keep it Short

You may have seen Monday’s SMS tip over on our Twitter account:

SMS Tip: Keep campaigns short. Create something short, succinct and well within 160 characters. As a rule of thumb, 100 characters is the optimum amount.

One SMS is 160 characters; if you include unsubscribe instructions in every message, you have roughly 140 – 150 characters. You can say a lot in 140 – 150 characters!

  1. Timing

Timing is everything. You should take extra care with the timing of your SMS. Making sure your timing is right is crucial to your SMS campaigns success, not only do customers not want to receive a message late at night or early in the morning but, the chances of them reading or paying attention to your offer are significantly reduced.

You don’t want to overwhelm your customers with texts, you also don’t want to neglect them. Create a specific schedule and stick to it.

  1. Measuring Success

The key to a successful SMS campaign is being able to measure all facets of your campaign. Measuring a campaign means you can learn from previous mistakes and develop future campaigns on what has already proven to be a success.

 

SMS best practices have been developed around those of email and online marketing practice, and as such have evolved from these, so benefit from the relative maturity of those tactics. Follow the above tips and best practices for success with any SMS campaign.

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I hope you found this blog helpful. For advice on SMS or potentially setting up an account with us please get in contact, we’re always happy to help.

Saoirse