How to Make Sure You Don’t Spam People with Your Marketing Text Messages

There is one big question that every business needs to ask when it comes to marketing: how much is too much? SMS marketing is the gateway to establishing a brand, it gets customers through the virtual (and physical!) door, and it can lead to sales. It is one of the best tools that you have at your disposal when marketing your brand, but sometimes, too much of a good thing can literally be too much. Under-marketing your product or service means that you’re losing out on potential sales. Over-marketing your business means that you’re losing potential customers. Nobody wants to get bombarded with marketing; marketing is an art form. SMS marketing needs to strike that delicate balance between being subtle but interesting, valuable but special, and informative but sales-driven. Just as there are a thousand and one ways to excel at SMS marketing, there are a number of ways that you can go wrong. One of the biggest of these, and perhaps the least attractive to consumers, is spamming people with marketing messages. Want to optimize your SMS marketing campaign with the golden number of test messages? Let’s take a look at how!

Think Quality over Quantity!

The number one rule with SMS marketing is quality over quantity. This is something that you should bear in mind at the start of your campaign, in the middle of the campaign, and at the end of the campaign. Before you commit to any decision, always stop and ask yourself: is this going to improve quality, or just add quantity? You can achieve a higher quality, with less quantity, by ensuring that four key aspects of optimized SMS marketing are always achieved:  

• Call to Action – This is whats going to get your customers to act. If you want them to do something in particular, then make sure you clearly state it. Make things easier by displaying where to claim an offer, how to take part in a survey, or where they can find additional information.

• Value Added – One motto that should follow you through your SMS marketing campaign is ‘value, value, value’. Quality is all about giving value to your customers and getting value back in return. A quality text message will always contain something desired, special, or beneficial.

• Professional Tone – Your message is a small reflection of your business, but a reflection nonetheless. A professional tone makes your text feel like a quality message and puts your brand across in the best possible light.

• Style and Design – One captivating text message is going to do a lot better than two, three, or even four, boring and uninspiring ones. Be creative and depart value and quality with a design that is going to catch the attention of your audience.

Understand Your Customers

Next up on your quest to get that perfect number of texts, is understanding what your customers want. This is where things start to get very varied, depending on what it is that your business has to offer. The key to understanding your customers is understanding just how often they need your product or service. In the US, 46 pizza slices are eaten per person, per year. In contrast, the most common number of haircuts that Americans had per year in 2017, was 2-3; making up 78.11 million consumers. Just these simple statistics show that marketing as a salon and marketing as a pizzeria, are already very different. Some businesses will benefit from a higher frequency of SMS marketing, while some will benefit from a lower frequency. For a service that consumers use regularly, the golden number of messages may be 1 or 2 a week. For a service used less frequently, the golden number may be 2-3 a month.

Provide Information Elsewhere

Packing all your information into a single text message is more likely to look cluttered than appealing. Providing different sources of information, and linking them within the text, is a great way to unclutter and still get other information out there for people to see. Survey’s, for example, are a great way to condense the information you need, without packing information into a lot of unnecessary texts. There are multiple benefits to this practice, including expanding your list. By spreading out your content, to one or more of the leading social media platforms, you can expand your reach and direct consumers to a place where there is additional useful information. Providing pictures, videos, and blog posts about your brand, is a fantastic way to get more people interested.

Get Feedback on Your Messages

No matter what business you’re in or what your trying to achieve in your SMS marketing campaign, feedback is always going to be a great tool. Unsure how many texts your consumers want? Then go directly to them and ask! Bringing surveys back into the equation, these are a wonderful way to enhance engagement and communication. Testing the waters and trying a slightly different number to what your customers state, won’t do much harm, but by asking, you give yourself a ball park figure to work off.

Monitor Your SMS Marketing Campaign

Over-marketing can also be the result of not enough campaign management. Monitoring your campaign is incredibly important, both so you can add additional value into your content, but also so you can keep track of just how many texts you’re sending and what their conversion rates are. One type of text may be better than another, you may be sending too many, or not enough – you’ll never know until you take a closer look at the analytics and reports from your campaign. Comprehensive SMS marketing software is a great place to start with this, giving you full control over your campaign. By putting quality first, mixing things up a bit, and asking the important questions, you can get your SMS marketing campaign on track and really get the most back from the highly-effective marketing strategy.