Sales Campaigns

How to Run an SMS Campaign? (A Beginner’s Guide)

Did you know that SMSes are the customer-favorite channel for receiving brand updates? With a huge 48% share, text messaging surpasses other popular channels such as emails (22%), app notifications (20%), and direct mail (8%)!

As such, whoever claimed that SMS marketing is dead couldn’t be further from the truth. While SMS marketing is more powerful than ever, it is how to run the SMS campaign that businesses struggle with. Fortunately for you, if you are here already, then, you are already one step closer to sending impressive SMS campaigns. So, let’s get started!

What is an SMS Marketing Campaign? And What Makes it Useful?

SMS marketing employs short text messages to convey offers, promotions, news, and updates to customers. Despite its intimate nature, it is one of the simplest and most popular forms of modern-day marketing. You can think of it as a personalized and concise form of email marketing.

Here’s why sending marketing SMSes can be beneficial to businesses:

  • It is a direct and immediate channel with room for message traceability. You can also use it for two-way communication.
  • With the 160-character limit, it is often used to convey more in less.
  • It requires opt-ins from customers, which means that they are more likely to be opened as they are sent to targeted audiences.
  • You can send promotional SMSes using shortcodes or keywords to improve customer engagement.
  • It complements and integrates with other online and offline marketing channels.
  • It can be used for capturing customer feedback or responses to surveys.
  • The high open rates, conversion rates, and cost-efficiency increase the return on investment in SMS marketing.
  • The deliverability of SMSes does not depend on internet connectivity or the make and model of the device.

When Should You Send Marketing SMSes?

Before you understand how to do bulk SMS marketing, you need to understand when it is appropriate to send these text messages. SMSes are often used for sending timely promotional or transactional details. It is also useful for sending to-the-point information as quickly as possible. Here are some common high-conversion campaigns where sending marketing SMSes would yield favorable results:

  • Flash sales, product offers, limited-time deals, and other short-term promotions
  • Retargeting campaigns in case of cart abandonment or leads turning cold.
  • Appointments or event details and reminders.
  • Personal alerts, such as account updates, transactions, notifications, etc.
  • Periodic updates or alerts on orders placed, business timings, stock availability, etc.
  • Quick access to crucial information
  • Supporting social media or email marketing campaigns

Apart from external marketing purposes, SMS can also play a crucial role in internal communications. However, choosing it over an instant messaging platform makes sense mostly when you have to broadcast information amongst your employees and when you have a good number of them.

How to Run a Successful SMS Marketing Campaign?

Now comes the part everyone’s been waiting for – how to send marketing text messages. 

Here is a step-by-step guide to how to do a text campaign:

Identify Your Campaign Goals

The versatility of an SMS campaign is one of its greatest advantages. You can use it to generate awareness or retarget lost leads. It can also work as an additional channel to complement your entire digital marketing mix.

As such, the first step of how to send advertising text messages involves the identification of the campaign goals. Once you are fixated on the same, identify the key metrics that you will measure to measure the progress in this direction.

For instance, if your SMS campaign aims to increase customer engagement, you will have to track KPIs like open rate, click-through rate, etc., to see whether the campaign is a success.

Conduct Market Research

As with every new marketing campaign, SMS campaigns should include detailed market research. It allows marketers to identify existing gaps in their marketing strategy, measure up against industry-set benchmarks, and even compare performances with their competitors.

You can think of market research as the medium of generating actionable strategies through which you can achieve the aforementioned goal. And when we say “market research,” we also mean that you should study your existing customer base and get to know them better.

Segment Your Audience to Personalize

Let’s continue on the topic of knowing your existing customers. Once you know about them and can profile them, what do you do with this information? Use it to segment them into groups! Segmentation of customers into closely-related persona-based cohorts allows you to appeal to them through tailored SMS campaigns.

For instance, price-sensitive customers can be lured in with SMS campaigns containing promo codes. Such personalization of your SMS campaign makes it even more powerful as it indicates that you care about your customer’s individuality rather than blasting bulk messages.

Figure Out the Timing

Everyone talks about how to send promotional text messages, but they hardly talk about when to send them. Like every other marketing campaign, the timing of your SMS campaign is everything. If anything, getting the timing right is all the more crucial while running an SMS campaign, as text messaging is seen to be a more intrusive form of marketing.

Your customers may not care too much about the email received at 2 am, but one text at 9 pm could get them on the unsubscription list! You will need deep insights into your customer behavior and expectations to nail this category. It would still be an educated guess, but one backed by data would be less likely to let you down.

Follow a Reliable Cadence

Much like formulating the perfect time to send text messages, you will also have to devise a consistent cadence for it. However, SMS campaigns run on limited frequency, with as many as eight text messages in a month. This is so since most businesses prefer to use SMS campaigns very sparingly.

As such, they would typically follow an event – cart abandonment, new registration, purchase, customer support ticket, appointment booking, etc. In other words, you send text messages only when they offer value to the receiver; such an approach ensures that your customers actually look forward to hearing from you rather than thinking of your business as an annoyance.

Add a clear CTA

How can we talk about how to send advertising SMSes and forget about the mission-critical call-to-action (CTA) link or button? After all, an SMS campaign lacking CTAs would leave customers confused and guessing the next course of action. And every marketer and sales rep knows that the lack of clarity is the enemy of a frictionless sales funnel.

So, keep your prospects moving with a compelling and click-worthy CTA in your text message so that you can successfully guide the prospects towards sales.

Monitor, Analyze, Repeat

This is the final stage of how to run an SMS campaign. SMS campaigns are iterative, which means that they need to improve with every marketing cycle. After all, you would not know how to send marketing SMSes exactly the first time.

Such a path to continuous improvement is only possible when companies diligently monitor every campaign and analyze its effects. It would highlight what works and does not work for the campaign so that you can improve it.

Once again, key metrics like deliverability rate, open rate, conversion rate, click-through rate, etc., would come to play while monitoring and analyzing your SMS campaign. Set ideal values and monitor historical data to witness the progress of your SMS campaign.

How to Do a Text Campaign Using JustCall?

Using an SMS platform is one of the most valuable tips one can give for how to do bulk SMS marketing. All-in-one business communication systems like JustCall come equipped with features and facilities to support your SMS campaign. You don’t just send or receive SMSes using JustCall; you can use it to curate the entire customer journey through text messaging.

For a start, we offer competitive pricing, which makes SMS campaigns affordable and effective, which essentially ups their ROI. Pair this advantage with JustCall’s reliability in maintaining 99.99% delivery rates, and you have a sure-shot way of connecting with your customers quickly and efficiently.

Next, you can integrate JustCall with your business CRM tool to kickstart personalized SMS campaigns at the click of a button. Each message would be tailored according to the receiver. Finally, you can set up SMS marketing automation by defining trigger conditions that relieve your sales and marketing teams from a series of redundant, routine tasks.

JustCall serves as your integrated business contact center where you can switch from calling to SMSing to dropping voicemails. Passing the baton in such a boundless manner ensures that your customers enjoy a truly omnichannel experience while your sales and marketing teams maintain their sanity.

In short, JustCall is everything you can dream of while sending SMS campaigns that are set to win. So, what’s stopping you from scheduling a demo with us?

Sid heads the global Sales Team at JustCall. He has been instrumental in establishing the foundation for the GTM functions at JustCall, driving the organisation into a growth phase. He is passionate about enabling organisations to build great customer experiences using technology. He is always looking to help startups beyond work, advising early stage companies on all things Sales & GTM.

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