Organizations of all sizes have turned to bulk SMS marketing to reach their target audiences in real-time, and in a cost-effective and easy-to-implement way. Bulk SMS marketing is quickly becoming popular among businesses, as it lets them maintain relationships with existing customers while reaching out to potential new ones. With the right strategy, bulk SMS marketing can help brands engage with customers and prospects more effectively.
To make a bulk SMS marketing strategy work, these 10 steps can help marketers implement, improve, monitor, and optimize their messaging strategy.
- Ensure customers opt-in to receive messages
Firstly, marketers should not send text messages to customers or prospects who have not opted in to receive messages. Organizations are legally required to obtain permission for these types of communications.
Customers that opt into communications also provide marketing teams with increased engagement and deliverability — two key metrics for success in bulk SMS texting programs.
- Research the target audience
When marketing teams develop campaigns to target prospects and customers, they must do the necessary research to understand customers’ demographic information, interests, and preferences.
This information helps teams craft effective messaging tailored specifically to their target audience and is more likely to resonate with them when they engage with the content.
- Segment customers to improve engagement
After marketers research their target audience, they can build segments within a database to ensure customers receive the right message targeted to them.
Marketing teams can base segments on customers’ demographics, interests and preferences, so teams can personalize messages. Segments can also take information from past purchases or engagement to tell marketers to interact with an audience that has shown high interest in the brand’s products or services. This personalization can lead to increased open rates and higher customer engagement.
- Create message templates
If marketers take the time to create and set up text message templates, they can simplify how they distribute bulk SMS communications with minimal investment or effort.
Message templates should outline the information that teams plan to share with each audience. This information can include promotional offers, product updates, new product releases, or special seasonal communications.
- Schedule messages
Marketers must decide when it is most appropriate to send a message to a recipient in a bulk SMS marketing campaign. To identify the best times, teams should identify customers’ habits and patterns in engagement data, such as open rates or click-through rates.
The timing of bulk SMS sends can affect engagement rates because they are designed for customers to see and act on them quickly without much effort.
- Automate bulk message sending
If an organization plans to execute SMS marketing campaigns to a wide audience, automation can benefit the overall strategy.
Marketing teams can use automation triggers based on end-users or around promotional periods, like holidays. These triggers ensure customers receive messages based on a set of rules set up by the automation, making message delivery more effective and timely.
- Design engaging campaigns
The message templates are central to full campaign design, as they can ensure the messages and campaigns will grab the recipients’ attention and encourage them to interact.
The campaigns can also be a part of a larger multichannel effort, where marketers can send out bulk SMS messages in support of other channels within the campaign, such as email, advertising, account-based marketing, and social media.
- Monitor campaign performance
After marketers launch the bulk SMS marketing campaign and ensure they send messages in a timely fashion, they must monitor and track the campaign’s performance. This can include the following metrics:
- Response rates.
- Conversion rates.
- Open rates.
- Click-through rates.
This monitoring can help marketers quickly adjust the campaign with little effort based on metrics and feedback.
- Analyze results and optimize
When marketers monitor the campaign’s performance, they should identify optimization opportunities. This could relate to when messages are sent, the accuracy of the list segmentation, the calls to action, the length of the messages, etc.
The measurement and optimization of campaigns enable a cyclical campaign to go to market, with the model to plan, launch, measure, optimize, and repeat the process.
- Provide an opt-out option
Just like marketers should ensure recipients opt-in to receive text messages, it is equally important to provide an opt-out feature. Giving users an option to stop receiving communications can enable a positive experience. It also helps marketers monitor key metrics, as they can avoid sending messages to users who either do not want them or no longer find value in them.
Giving users control over their experience also helps make the audience more relevant, so marketers only send messages to people who truly want to hear from the brand.
