When should you say it with a text? The
suitability of Online SMS marketing
A text is a very quick, easy way to reach a large audience. However, something that’s limited to 160 characters clearly isn’t going to lend itself to everything. There’s no room for detail in an SMS so it has to be an instant hit – bang, here it is, go now, do this, do that. The tricky thing about online SMS marketing is that it’s hard to measure how successful you are. In many ways it’s a lot like trying to play football in the dark – you can have as many shots as you like but it’s difficult to know how many goals you score. Simply put, you can’t determine how customers behave after receiving your text.
If, for example, you encourage customers to buy a product with a text message campaign, and sales of that product then rise steadily, there’s no way of telling if that rise is due to the texts you've been sending or whether it’s because of something else. You can’t even say a percentage of that rise is due to the SMS campaign, all you can do is speculate. This is why SMS Marketing is better suited to reminding your customers about things – special offers that are only going to be available for a limited period of time, upcoming events or releases that they may be interested in.
Text messages have an open rate of 98% so you can pretty much guarantee that almost all of your customers will look at what you send them. But, with people wanting results quicker than ever nowadays it’s worth considering how many steps there are between that initial SMS and the customer making the decision to carry out the desired action. In the first place there is a drop-off rate of 2% (those who don’t even open the text message), there will then be another drop-off of people who read the text but do not act on it. Ideally you want this to be the last drop-off point so you lose as few customers as possible. If an extra step is required, like visiting a web page that they have to read before they can do anything, then you know you shouldn't be trying to say this with a text.
A text is a very quick, easy way to reach a large audience. However, something that’s limited to 160 characters clearly isn’t going to lend itself to everything. There’s no room for detail in an SMS so it has to be an instant hit – bang, here it is, go now, do this, do that. The tricky thing about online SMS marketing is that it’s hard to measure how successful you are. In many ways it’s a lot like trying to play football in the dark – you can have as many shots as you like but it’s difficult to know how many goals you score. Simply put, you can’t determine how customers behave after receiving your text.
If, for example, you encourage customers to buy a product with a text message campaign, and sales of that product then rise steadily, there’s no way of telling if that rise is due to the texts you've been sending or whether it’s because of something else. You can’t even say a percentage of that rise is due to the SMS campaign, all you can do is speculate. This is why SMS Marketing is better suited to reminding your customers about things – special offers that are only going to be available for a limited period of time, upcoming events or releases that they may be interested in.
Text messages have an open rate of 98% so you can pretty much guarantee that almost all of your customers will look at what you send them. But, with people wanting results quicker than ever nowadays it’s worth considering how many steps there are between that initial SMS and the customer making the decision to carry out the desired action. In the first place there is a drop-off rate of 2% (those who don’t even open the text message), there will then be another drop-off of people who read the text but do not act on it. Ideally you want this to be the last drop-off point so you lose as few customers as possible. If an extra step is required, like visiting a web page that they have to read before they can do anything, then you know you shouldn't be trying to say this with a text.
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