SMS Marketing Tips
1. Create a Genuine Value Offering
Your customers need to feel that they are getting something that others aren't when you approach them with an SMS. Your value offering needs to be compelling and it needs to be well timed. As a rule of thumb, ask yourself if you were interested in receiving and taking action on the SMS yourself?
If the answer is yes, you are very likely to enjoy a great response rate. If the answer is no, you might wish to reconsider the value offering in the message. Good SMS content can come in the form of freebies, discounts, mobile coupons, reminders, links to free applications, competition entries, mobile video, alerts etc. Just sending out a vague sale alert tends to come across as spam and will most likely result in an optout.
3. Don't Forget Call-to-Action
Always engage your customer by adding a call-to-action. You can use SMS keywords to have people reply to the message or you can guide them to a mobile optimised site, ask them respond with a phone call etc. Use verbs like go, see, click, reply and call.
If you would like to view how our mobile site landing page works and looks like, just go to www.slinteractive.com.au on your mobile. You will automatically be presented with a mobile optimised version of our site.
2. Use Your Business Name as the Sender
By displaying the business name as the sender of the message makes your communication look and feel professional. Remember that since it's not a number, recipient cannot reply to it so you still have to have an opt-out method in your message. We recommend using a our special short URL - www.stoptxt.info
This short URL links directly to our mobile optimized SMS Blacklist Tool, allowing people to optout from SMS campaigns. You can also add URL's to mobile web pages, Google Maps, Mobile Coupons and even streaming video.
4. Aim to Measure Your Success
Having a specific call-to-action is essential, but it should also be measurable. With our SMS sending solution you can easily track the success of your delivery, such as how many people received your message and how many people opted-out. These statistics are a good guideline as to how successfull your campaign is, but there are many additional measurement techniques that you could use.
If you have included a short URL in your SMS, you should always track how many clicks that link is generating. You can also use analytical tools, such as Google Analytics, for measuring the clicks on your landing page or on your mobile site. Naturally, one the best ways to measure your SMS campaign succeess is to measure its impact on sales, customer traffic or number of received calls or enquiries.
Anatomy of a Great Mobile Marketing Campaign
SMS Competition Tips
1. Know What You Want
Every successful SMS competition or Trade Promotion campaign starts with careful planning. Before you proceed any further, define exactly what your business objectives are and clearly identify how you will engage with your target audience.
Here are some specific business benefits to consider:
- Generate leads and sales
- Drive traffic to: in stores, online, mobile site, Facebook etc.
- Increase brand equity
- Engage and delight customers
- Grow fan base, generate opt-ins and subscribers
- Gain user data and insight
- Collect consumer generated content
Take your time to define key objectives and be realistic and specific about your goals before you launch. We have been doing promotions for years and are always happy to help you and provide our insight to maximise your value.
3. Use Autoresponders To Your Advantage
Autoresponse messages provide not only an excellent opportunity to thank users for engaging with your campaign, but they are also great in driving traffic your way.
Every campaign should take full advantage of this with a clear call-to-action that you can measure.
2. Keep It Simple
If you are looking to maximise the number of entries you should keep things as simple as possible. SMS contests can have different barriers to entry depending on the format of the entry.
Asking people to MMS videos or images demand more time and attention and have the highest barrier to entry as compared to a simple call-to-action with just one word.
For example: 'SMS the word DEMO to 0400 733 733'.
4. Only Use Approved Promotion Systems
If your competition has a random draw element in it, you must use providers, such as SL Interactive, that have an approved Electronic Drawing System by all relevant Australian Gaming and Lottery Authorities.
SMS Marketing Compliance Checklist
Spam Act Compliance Info
The guide below provides practical information to businesses that send electronic messages. It explains the main requirements of the Spam Act 2003 (the Spam Act), and outlines business practices that comply with the legislation. The guide has been developed in consultation with key industry stakeholders to provide a clear explanation of the legislation´s requirements.
The three key steps you should follow are:
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Consent
Consent - Only send commercial electronic messages with the addressee's consent - either express or inferred consent.
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Identity
Identity - Include clear and accurate information about the person or business that is responsible for sending the commercial electronic message. We recommend always including your website in all your commercial SMS messages.
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Unsubscribe
Unsubscribe - Ensure that a functional unsubscribe facility is included in all your commercial electronic messages. Deal with unsubscribe requests promptly.
Our Messenger system makes abiding to the unsubscribe rule very simple. All you have to do is make sure that all your commercial messages have the following link at the end of your message:
This link takes the user to a simple mobile optimized black listing tool where they can optout at their convenience. The same URL also works from a normal computer in case the user cannot access with their mobile phone.
If you are using one of the system default numbers as the sender of the message, you can also ask user to optout simply by replying to the message with the word STOP.
The built-in Address Book keeps tracks all unsubscribe requests and flags all such contacts as 'Optout' in your Address Book. The system remembers these contacts and it will not allow you to send any more messages to them in the future.
Purely factual messages with no commercial content whatsoever are exempt from the Spam Act.
Excel Spreadsheet Tips
How To Quickly Sort Data in Excel?
The below tutorial video demonstrates how to quickly sort data in Excel. This is a very handy feature to use when you wish to make sure that you only have valid mobile numbers in your column.
Simple choose the column that has mobile numbers in it and sort it numerically. After the column has been sorted it's easy to remove rows that do not look like valid mobile numbers.
How To Remove Duplicate Values in Excel?
In this video you will learn how to remove duplicate values from your columns.
How To Create a CSV File in Excel?
This demo will show you how to copy and paste email addresses from a text and save them as a CSV file in Excel. You can use the same process for mobile numbers too.
The Right Medium
Choose a medium that resonates the best with your customers. SMS fits particularly well for this target demographic and this campaign extends its reach even more by linking it to Facebook as well.
Remember that by using the business name as the sender your communication looks and feels more professional.
The Right Message
Your customers need to feel that they are getting something that others aren't when you approach them with an SMS. Your value offering needs to be compelling and it needs to be well timed. As a rule of thumb, ask yourself if you were interested in receiving and taking action on the SMS yourself?
If the answer is yes, you are very likely to enjoy a great response rate. If the answer is no, you might wish to reconsider the value offering in the message. If you look at this particular offer in detail, you will notice that it is an exceptionally good deal that will guarantee increased traffic through to the store.
It's also worth pointing out that there is a clear set of instructions for customers to opt-out from future communications.
The Right Call-to-Action
Always engage your customer by adding a call-to-action. You can use SMS keywords to have people reply to the message or you can guide them to a mobile optimised site, ask them respond with a phone call etc. Use verbs like go, see, click, reply and call.
Here the creative is urging people (note the capitalisation of NOW) to come to the store right away. They are also encouraged to click on a link that displays the deal inside Facebook, which adds a level of engagement and sharing into the campaign.
The Right Measures of Success
Having a specific call-to-action is essential, but it should also be measurable. This particular campaign contains several metrics that are trackable: delivery rates and optout ratios can be measured through our SMS sending solution and click-throughs and 'likes' are measured through Facebook.
However, in this particular case the best measurent is its direct impact on sales and customer traffic instore.