Six Simple Steps to Grow Your SMS Marketing List in 2023!
SMS marketing works for brands that are willing to take actionable steps to grow their contact list. Most companies find it overwhelmingly challenging to grow their SMS marketing list because they don’t know where to start! Building an SMS marketing list isn’t just about collecting phone numbers. It’s more about striking transparent communication with people and giving them reasons to subscribe to your SMS list. Don’t sweat it. We have created this SMS marketing list growth guide to help you with simple and easy-to-follow steps. Let’s dive right in to six ways you can grow your SMS marketing list.
1. Keep compliance on point
Know the law! You cannot text anyone anything without explicit consent, especially if you're a company. If you don’t comply, you can face harsh fines per violation. The best way to ensure compliance is by introducing double opt-in to the process. This is how it works — once someone subscribes to your SMS list by sharing their phone number, send them a code that they will have to enter to finalize their subscription. This simple tactic will help you comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
2. Give customers a “why” to subscribe
Setting the right expectations cannot be more important in this highly competitive world of business. Customers can get fiercely annoyed if you don’t deliver content or product that you promised, or, on the flipside, if you bombard them with information that isn’t what they asked for. Therefore, we suggest you cover your bases before asking customers for their phone numbers. You should let them know what they will receive through the SMS communication channel, how often you will communicate, and what benefits they can capitalize on upon subscribing to the SMS list. Most importantly, you should make sure the campaign-driven pop-ups and interactions are non-intrusive. We highly recommend you create a separate page on your campaign that helps people learn the details of the SMS marketing program.
3. Create a context/segment-specific campaign
You cannot run the same SMS marketing list growth campaign for your entire audience. Context is crucial to success. Therefore, we suggest you create campaigns specific to where your prospects are in their buying journey. This can be done successfully by segmenting your audience based on different factors. Create different campaigns for the segments, since you want to be as personal as possible with the communication. Segmenting will also help you come up with different contexts and situations where your audience can encounter your brand, products, and services.
4. Incentivize subscribers
Customers love when their favorite brands take good care of them. Growing an SMS marketing list is an excellent reason to fall back on incentivizing your audience, especially the users willing to subscribe. However, the incentives have to be interesting enough to excite your audience! You can start by creating a VIP club or an insider program that provides SMS list subscribers with special perks.
The most important thing to note here is that the perks have to be exclusive to the subscribers. This will also help you boost customer loyalty and generate presale or pre-product launch buzz. You may also create a text message deals program that gives the subscribers exclusive discount coupons. Another effective way to boost SMS marketing list entries is by running a giveaway contest. All you have to do is tell people that they can participate in the free giveaway just by signing up for your SMS list.
5. Use other marketing channels to grow the list
Are you using social media marketing, email marketing, or other forms of marketing? Well, you are in luck because these marketing channels can also be used to grow an SMS marketing list. Use your existing marketing mix to let your audience know that you also have an SMS marketing list! Let them know that they can opt into SMS. However, you will have to be very specific with your campaign. It is important that the users know that subscribing to your email list doesn’t make them automatically subscribe to your SMS list. Clear communication is essential when building your SMS list!
6. Add sign-up forms on your website
Did you know that you can use your existing official business website and landing pages to attract more subscribers? This is an excellent place to let your website visitors know about your SMS list. Give them complete information about the list and how it will benefit them if they subscribe to it. The best way to do this is by embedding a sign-up form on key performing pages. You can even add the sign-up form on the website homepage. Other areas you can add to the SMS sign-up form are the website footer and sidebar. You may even develop non-intrusive website pop-ups to capture customer data. Don’t forget to track which forms are doing well, so you can remove the ones that aren’t.
Final thoughts!
As a modern-day marketer, it’d be foolish to rely solely on one marketing channel when there are several other effective channels available. Therefore, we suggest you combine SMS marketing with other forms of marketing channels to generate the best results for your brand. For example, in one of our previous posts, we showed how beneficial it can be to combine SMS and email marketing.
Both of these marketing channels can feed off of each other’s data sets to develop highly optimized and targeted marketing campaigns. Combining SMS marketing and other channels will help you collect more consumer data and create better marketing strategies. Did you find this post helpful? Let us know in the comments. Also, don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!
