Text, SMS, and RCS
Sam Hollis
Text messages aren’t just for connecting with friends and family anymore.SMS is a hugely effective outreach channel for marketers, with significantly higher open and click-through rates than other forms of communication.
But traditional email marketing or social media tactics won’t translate to such an intimate and personal channel. To help your team take advantage of this promising medium, create a clear strategic vision for your SMS marketing campaigns. Here’s what to include in your strategy:
What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing or mobile marketing, is a way for businesses to connect with their audience via text messaging campaigns on mobile phones. It gives your company a direct line of communication with customers and prospects in a channel they typically use for interacting with friends and family.
There are three core types of SMS campaigns, each giving you a different way of connecting with your audience and sending links at scale.
3 types of SMS marketing campaigns
Understanding how to use SMS message marketing to connect with your audience is the first step toward building clear, easy-to-execute SMS marketing campaigns.
- Promotional SMS marketing campaigns: Send promotional messages when you have something valuable to offer customers or prospects. Use these for flash sales, discount links, and special offers. Include a compelling CTA to increase click-through rates.
- Transactional SMS marketing campaigns: These functional messages connect to specific actions or events. You can send transactional messages via SMS, such as shipping notifications, appointment reminders, dinner reservation notifications, and order confirmations.
- Conversational SMS marketing campaign: Commonly used for more in-depth campaigns or customer support interactions. For example, an existing customer is following up on a support request about returning a product, and you want to provide standardized answers for how to submit their item for a refund. Conversational SMS marketing is an opportunity for your team to use AI to encourage customers to take action at scale.
SMS messages help you move potential buyers along the customer journey and provide essential updates for new subscribers.
Benefits of a robust SMS marketing strategy
Building an effective text message marketing strategy provides many benefits for your business. Understanding these benefits helps create the best possible strategy for your team while also impacting overarching company goals.
- Personalize content at scale. SMS is an intimate marketing channel, and personalizing the content and links you send in each text message helps you connect with a larger audience while providing them with relevant information.
- Boost customer engagement and conversation rates. SMS messages have an average open rate of 98% and a conversion rate between 21% and 30%, meaning your campaigns have a much better chance of positive results.
- Connect with people at each stage of the marketing lifecycle. You can use SMS campaigns at any marketing funnel stage, depending on your goals. And each message can nudge your target audience further along their buying journey.
- Gain insight from campaign performance. With higher open and conversion rates, you can easily gather analytics to optimize future campaigns. Using Rebrandly Analytics in these campaigns helps you capture additional first-party data on each campaign, making those insights even more powerful.
- Get customer feedback quickly. Text message marketing feels more time-sensitive for many consumers, so SMS campaigns help you gather feedback quickly.
5 SMS marketing strategies that connect you with your audience at scale
Creating relationships with your audience takes time and effort, regardless of size. A streamlined SMS marketing strategy gives your team clear direction and focus.
For success, combine SMS marketing with complementary marketing channels and communication strategies.
When executed properly, these plans help create and strengthen customer relationships at scale. Start with a solid foundation:
1. Define clear SMS marketing campaign objectives
Like any digital marketing strategy, SMS campaigns need transparent, data-driven objectives. These best practices guide your team, set achievable goals, and give purpose to every message.
Start by defining what you want from SMS campaigns. Create specific objectives such as: “We want our SMS marketing campaigns to increase account demo requests by 10% over the next 3 months.” This statement includes all the requisite information you need to clarify objectives for your team. It has:
- A specific metric you want to impact,
- The change in that metric you want to achieve, and
- A timeline for when you’ll assess the success of the campaign.
Including all of these elements ensures there’s no confusion about how to move forward and helps your team start thinking about the different types of campaigns they can use to impact your key metrics.
2. Understand your audience segments for SMS
When creating a strategy for your team, you must also consider the audience you want to reach. Determining your target audience for each campaign provides additional guardrails for your team and helps you tailor the message content to their specific wants and needs.
When defining this audience, look at shared characteristics you can leverage to personalize your text messages. For example, with Rebrandly, you can use dynamic traffic routing to personalize link destinations based on user behavior and characteristics.
Dynamic traffic routing ensures that whenever someone clicks a link in your text messages, they’re taken to the best possible customer experience, whether on a mobile device or desktop and in their native language. Providing this kind of tailor-made experience boosts conversion rates and engagement even further, helping you create the best possible outcome for anyone who clicks through.
3. Put your brand front and center
A consistent brand presence builds relationships and customer loyalty. Anonymous messages with generic links can cause suspicion in savvy consumers and reduce CTR. Even worse, they might raise red flags with networks and reduce message deliverability.
Branded link shorteners make your messages recognizable. Rebrandly’s custom-branded links show recipients exactly who they’re interacting with when they click links in text messages.
4. Follow all legal considerations and opt-in best practices
Recipients must first opt in to receive messages from your company. This process ensures you’re not sending unwanted messages to your audience and helps cut down on the potential for marking your message as spam. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) privacy laws outline additional laws and regulations for marketing communication via text message.
The right SMS marketing software will guide you through meeting these standards and provide protections for your brand.
5. Choose the right SMS tools and infrastructure
There are many messaging tools you can integrate SMS into your martech stack. Choosing the right ones means understanding how you want to send messages and what you want to get out of them. To find the right one for your team, evaluate functionality, pricing, and any other criteria to ensure you’re getting the best fit for your needs.
Rebrandly Relay™️is an excellent option for many reasons, primarily because we work directly with Wonder Cave to create a seamless integration between their SMS marketing software and our link management tools. This 1:1 connection and ongoing partnership ensure that your text messaging and link management needs are met from the comfort of a single interface, giving your team the functionality they need without adding complexity to their daily responsibilities.
Create a winning SMS marketing strategy today
Having a strategic vision for your SMS marketing is the key to building successful campaigns that make a tangible impact on your company’s goals.
Rebrandly is an important tool to help you run more effective SMS marketing campaigns. Find out more by setting up a demo of the product with our team!