Top SMS Marketing Best Practices to Follow in 2023!
SMS marketing isn’t dead. Consumers spend a significant amount of their day texting and making phone calls. As a brand, you should leverage this opportunity and introduce your brand via SMS to your target audience. This article reviews the seven top SMS best practices to elevate your audience engagement.
Indeed, SMS marketing can seem quite intrusive as you are pushing consumers to open their phones and read through the text message.
However, you can also design highly ethical SMS marketing campaigns that will drive high open rates and conversions. In this quick post, we will share our top SMS Marketing best practices you can implement to make your SMS marketing campaigns non-intrusive and highly successful. Let’s cut to the chase and dive right in, shall we?
1. Ensure compliance (most important)
Never forget, SMS is highly personal. You are reaching out to consumers on their phones directly. To ensure your text messages aren’t impacting consumer privacy, we suggest you follow industry guidelines depending on the country and state of your recipients. Once you ensure that regulatory requirements are met, it’s time to move on and establish compliance. Always ask for permission before sending any text messages by introducing the double opt-in method. Also, make sure your CTAs for sign-ups are clear. Don’t forget to add your company’s name in all the text messages so the recipients know where the messages are coming from.
2. Double down on providing value
Don’t send text messages just for the heck of it! Every text you send should revolve around a specific idea and provide value to your customer. After all, you want to leverage the opportunity to communicate with your target audience via a very personal channel. Your text messages should engage, entertain, and/or inform the recipients. In other words, you should use SMS marketing to make the subscribers feel special. More importantly, brands should take advantage of SMS to share time-sensitive information. However, to make the most of this opportunity, you will have to nail the SMS marketing copy. Check out our guide on how to write the best SMS marketing copies.
3. SMS shorthand is a NO NO!
You want to be using a common language when running SMS marketing campaigns. This is because SMS shorthand is not widely understood. Not everyone gets it. Also, SMS shorthand can make your brand look annoying and unprofessional. As you practice writing more and more SMS copies, you will learn that sentences can be shortened while keeping the message intact. Here’s the idea you should stick to when writing text messages — SMS should be easy to read and quick to translate.
4. Let recipients opt-out easily
Are you providing subscribers an opportunity to opt out? Make this a staple in all your SMS marketing campaigns. People should be able to easily exit from your SMS subscriber list any time they want. Most importantly, you should tell them how they can successfully opt-out. Shortlist special ‘opt-out keywords’ like STOP, CANCEL, END, UNSUBSCRIBE, and others that subscribers can use to reply and successfully exit the list. To stay compliant, you should share the instructions to opt out when notifying people about their subscriptions.
5. Stay consistent but not too frequent
Your send frequency matters. If you send fewer messages, chances are, your subscriber base will forget about you and your offers. If you send many messages, you’ll come across as desperate, intrusive, and annoying. The idea here is to hit the sweet spot when it comes to timing. We suggest you begin with one message a week. Keep track of your open rates and unsubscribe rates as you increase the message frequency.
6. Practice clarity and conciseness
We have already discussed why you shouldn’t use SMS shorthand. But, there’s more you need to do to ensure clarity in all your text messages. First, lean into a conversational tone so that the messages can reflect your brand’s voice. Second, don’t use abbreviations until you can’t make things work without them. Lastly, use the characters efficiently by putting the most important information first. Always lead with attention-grabbing power words and phrases.
7. Test, learn, and optimize!
You cannot pass over this best practice. SMS marketing, like every other marketing campaign, should be tracked and monitored for key performance metrics. SMS marketing campaigns can be data-driven and hence, they can be extensively tested. Run A/B tests to identify the best SMS copies for each customer segment. Keep experimenting with the campaign, check what your competitors are doing with their SMS marketing campaigns, and always be willing to adapt and adjust. Test to find out the best text lengths, types of offers, time to send text messages, and more.
SMS Marketing Best Practices - Final thoughts!
There you have it. We have shared some of the most crucial SMS marketing best practices you can implement right away. So, what are you waiting for? These SMS marketing best practices are quite easy to follow. Don’t let complacency get in your way of developing highly effective SMS marketing campaigns! Always stay up to date with the latest best practices and trends for SMS marketing.
Additionally, you should be prepared to pivot your SMS marketing strategies to cater to the changing customer and marketing trends. Now that you are well-versed in the best practices, we highly recommend you check out other SMS marketing resources we have on our blog. 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.
