Over the past few months, there has been a huge interest in Bulk SMS as a way to help businesses not only drive more sales but to communicate with their customers one-to-one.
The interest in Bulk SMS is largely to do with the rise in mobile usage, mobile marketing becoming a more dominant part of the overall marketing strategy, and businesses looking for a different and more affordable way to promote themselves and of course its ease of use.
In addition to the above the open rate, engagement, and ROI are unmatched even in 2024.
“SMS works right out of the box and performs better than virtually all marketing channels today” – Roger S, Marketing Specialist, SMSpapa.com.au.
That said, even with all of these benefits like any communication channel there are still ways to further optimize and squeeze more performance from your marketing campaigns.
In this article, I’m going to give you my best tips on how to squeeze the most juice from your Bulk SMS campaigns.
Segmentation
One important note about customers is that they will often buy the same product and service for a wide variety of reasons.
For example, think about a personal trainer, they will have clients that may want to:
- Lose weight
- Get stronger (strength training)
- Build muscle
- Increase mobility
- Rehab
- Sport-specific training
- Get in shape for a specific event (i.e. marathon, fighting, wedding, etc.)
There are many reasons for people to hire a personal trainer and speaking to those people like they all share the same goals is a major mistake, especially with Bulk SMS because SMS subscribers are a lot less forgiving than email subscribers.
For example, imagine sending out an SMS to help a person building muscle and it is received by people who want to slim down or train for a marathon – that would be considered spam in most people’s books that is, irrelevant information.
3 major benefits to segmentation
The first major benefit is that you dramatically reduce your unsubscribe rate, the goal is to keep as many people on your SMS list so that you can drive more sales revenue so making sure that your list is happy is a good way to preserve the maximum number of subscribers.
The second major benefit to segmentation is that you can send more SMS campaigns.
You see when you send a mass bulk SMS campaign to everyone you can’t run another campaign for at least another week otherwise you’ll see unsubscribe rates and complaints increase.
Bulk SMS shouldn’t be used like email, they are similar but the one main difference is the frequency, people are ok with daily emails but a daily SMS is frowned upon.
If you separate everyone up into multiple groups this means that you can send a campaign to each of these groups once per week, so using the above example, instead of sending 1 massive SMS per week you can send seven highly targeted text messaging campaigns.
The third major benefit to segmented groups is that coming up with highly targeted offers and promotions is a lot easier.
Boost other marketing campaigns
One of the best reasons to use bulk SMS is because of its incredibly high open and read rates. Regardless of what industry you are in you can expect to get any from 82-97% of people to open and read your message – for anyone in marketing who understands the typical metrics today’s marketing channels deliver you will instantly see the benefit especially in terms of sales and lead generation.
Most companies that use SMS will separate it from all other marketing channels, this is pretty dumb.
The best marketers will try to integrate their marketing and combine it to increase overall performance.
Take email marketing for example which has a typical open rate of 20%, regardless of what industry you operate in you can expect anywhere from 16-22% open rates.
Well what if you created a bulk SMS campaign to specifically promote your email campaign, I guarantee you’d see a noticeable increase in open rates for your email campaign.
The same is true for other things like confirming appointments, product launches, trade show events, webinars, etc. think of a mission-critical area of your business and try sending a bulk SMS campaign to promote that area and see if your results improve – I bet they will!
Provide SMS Only Content
It takes a lot more effort to get people to subscribe to an SMS list than an email list because people typically only have one mobile number that they’ll need to hand over.
It takes a lot of trusts for someone to hand over their mobile number to a business so it is good practice to do everything you can to keep those subscribers around for as long as possible.
One of those ways is to give them stuff they would never have received anywhere else. If you offer things like special closed-door events, parties, special pricing, priority access, etc. that cannot be got anywhere else people will be reluctant to leave especially if you cap the number of people you have o your SMS subscriber list.
Treat your subscribers like they are part of a secret insider’s club and they’ll stick around for longer.
Always Have An Opt-Out / Unsubscribe Option
In a lot of countries and states, this is mandatory by law but even if this isn’t required by law where you are it’s still important to give your subscribers an option to unsubscribe from further communications.
There’s nothing worse than receiving unwanted information from a company that doesn’t give you a way to stop receiving communications – I was once in this scenario, I eventually changed my mobile number.
Having an opt-out option on your text message will do at least two things:
- Let them know you are a professional and;
- Let them know that they can leave at any time, this peace of mind is very powerful.
