Friday, November 9, 2012
By Anonymous (not verified)
Business2Community recently released a best practice guide to SMS marketing on the 3 Dos and Don’ts of SMS marketing. The guide highlights the benefits of the medium. Texting is a perfect medium if you want to communicate with your audience immediately. Text messages have an open rate of 97%. These high open rates make it an ideal medium to connect with consumers.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Some Do’s
1. Choose the right time
It’s never a good idea to wait to send an SMS text message late at night to wait for opens in the morning. SMS is an immediate point of use tool—so send it when your audience is most likely to see it and react.
Also, if you rush to inviting people to an event by SMS, they may forget it. If you are too slow, they may miss special sales. So calculate a precise time to send text messages and stick to the schedule.
2. Call to action
SMS messages are only limited to 160 characters. This limited real estate only allows you to explain: What, When, Where and Why. No matter the tool you choose to use for communicating, email or text message, you have to make sure you have a compelling call to action. It must be clear exactly what you want people to do after reading your message. Considering the length of the text message, your message should really consist of one single call to action phrase.
3. Allow answering
Make sure that your text messaging strategy allows for dual communication with the recipient. Invite people to reply to your message, and send them additional information or some type of reward in email or another SMS. Keep them coming back for more.
And don’t forget about permission. In your text messages, include instructions on how to opt-out of the list. Usually people just have to reply STOP. Include this short information phrase in every message you send.
Some Dont’s
1. Don’t send everything to everyone
Mobile is considered to be more personal than email. So by receiving text messages people will be more irritated than by sending irrelevant email. And when you deliver highly relevant content, with the open rates of text messages nearly 97%, text messages can bring exceptionally high results.
To make your messages relevant consider segmenting your audience groups with as much details as possible and then send relevant information to each of the groups.
2. Don’t send because of schedule, send because of necessity
Those familiar with email marketing are know how important it is to send consistent messages. In text marketing, it’s all real-time. Use text messaging only to inform about “real-time and immediate” news.
3. Don’t explain everything, choose catchy wording
In text marketing, less is more. You’re better off focusing on clarity, directness and easy to understand messaging. If the wording and call to action are eye catching, don’t worry, people will seek additional information