Bulk SMS Marketing Best Practices || USMS-GH
Bulk SMS Marketing Best Practices
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Bulk SMS marketing is an extremely powerful tool for communicating to your audience and reaching large amounts of people. It's important, however, that you follow specific guidelines when using a mass texting service as the laws are quite different from other forms of marketing and communication. Here are some few guidelines to help you in your SMS marketing journey.
1. Get Permission
You must have permission from people before sending them text messages. If you don't have their explicit consent, not only will you be breaking laws and possibly be subject to legal penalties, it will also cause you to look spammy, create a bad name for your organization, and annoy your audience. So what is permission? How do you get it? If your subscribers are opting in by texting to join, then you already have it. If you are manually uploading a list or adding your contacts one by one, you'll need written consent. This may be the most important best practice for any SMS marketing program.
2. Be Clear About Your Program
People should know exactly what they're signing up for when subscribing to your text marketing list. The intent of your program should be clear to everyone and set their expectations about what they will be receiving in the future. This doesn't mean you need to provide a long, drawn out explanation of what your program is all about. You just need to ensure people know what to expect. This can easily be done in your opt-in language both where you're advertising your text program and in the auto-response subscribers receives after they first join.
3. Pay Attention to Frequency of your SMS
Don't send too often. Nobody wants to receive an excessive amount of text messages from your business or organization. We recommend no more than 2 – 6 SMS per month in most cases. Any more may annoy your subscribers. You also must make sure they know how often you'll be texting them. This is important! Be crystal clear about how many text messages they can expect to receive on a monthly basis. An example would be adding this to the initial auto reply of your text marketing program: "Receive up to 4 msgs/ month".
4. Include Disclaimers
The CTIA is an international nonprofit trade association that represents the wireless communications industry. They provide us with many of the best practices used in text marketing and also govern all short code SMS messaging. They require you to include things like "Message and data rates may apply" in your initial opt-in language. Because these disclaimers are so important, our SMS marketing service adds them automatically in the required places so you don't have to worry about it. Note that your subscribers will only see this once! Only when they first join your list—not every time you send a mass text message.
5. Provide an Exit from your bulk sms campaign
Your subscribers need to know that they can opt out of your text messaging program at any time. This is another thing that our SMS marketing service does for you by default in your auto replies. When someone signs up for your text messaging list, in addition to "Msg & Data rates may apply", we also add "txt STOP to cancel" to the end of your auto reply. Again, this is included ONLY in your auto reply. They will not see this in every text you send out. It is good practice however, to occasionally include those instructions in your text blasts to remind people of how to opt out if they'd like.
6. Text During Normal Hours
You should only send text messages during normal / expected hours. Be courteous to your subscribers. They won't enjoy waking up to your text messages in the middle of the night. Also, as a business, think about how counterproductive it is to message them outside of your optimal hours. One of the many benefits of text marketing is to inspire immediate action from your subscribers. It's unlikely that anyone will take action in the middle of the night.
7. Use Common Language
Use SMS shorthand sparingly, if at all. While many text abbreviations are widely understood by people today, not everyone will get what you're trying to say. Additionally, it can look quite unprofessional depending on your target audience. If you absolutely need to save characters by shortening some of your words, start with the most common text abbreviations and try to keep them to a minimum.
8. Bulk SMS content should Provide Value
Make sure that every text message you send is one of value! If people are willing to give you explicit permission to text them, you should be giving them something worthwhile in return. Also, if your text program is used for marketing, make sure to keep your messages fresh and exciting. They should feel like a VIP. If you're not giving your subscribers something of value each time you send a group text, chances are, it's not worth it for them and they'll unsubscribe.
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Bulk SMS: Tips for successful bulk SMS marketing || USMS-GH
Bulk SMS
Bulk SMS campaigns should be targeted as much as possible. It’s likely the audience has already interacted with your business in some way or other – they may be a current user, have opted in for SMS alerts or previously purchased from your business. So this makes them ideal targets for marketers and research teams.
To help you engage with this more-than-warm audience, here are 5 tips for creating effective and successful campaign messages:
1. Keep it short:
Keep your message below 160 characters. Going above this limit could lead to your messages appearing fragmented on older phones. You’ll also be charged more. Shorter, succinct messages will make more of an impact on recipients anyway so there’s no reason not to keep things simple.
2. Showcase your business name:
You don’t want your texts to appear with an anonymous number shown up top. A text coming from your business name builds trust in your message and lets people know a text isn’t spammy or malicious. It also boosts brand visibility and looks professional. USMS-GH services enable you to edit the sender ID.
3. Personalize your messages:
Although bulk SMS campaigns are sent out in large numbers, this doesn’t mean you can’t personalize your messages. Most bulk SMS service providers will allow you to alter messages to suit a specific recipient based on the information in your database. Address people by their names, refer to an account number or mention the date and time of an event. Consider how you’d like to personalize your messages when creating fields for your sign up pages and database.
4. Include a branded link:
With just 160 characters to convey your message, it makes sense to shorten the link you plan to include in your SMS message. But don’t use a generic link shortener, use a branded link and customize it to drive clicks.
Branded links look neater and can boost your click-through rate by up to 39%. They receive more clicks because they are trusted and indicate where the link leads to.
Another big benefit of using a link shortener is that you can update your short link at any time. Once an SMS is sent, you can’t make any changes to the text. But you can edit the destination of your link in the dashboard.
5. Track and monitor your results:
Add UTM parameters to your branded links and you’ll be able to track precisely how effective your bulk SMS messages are. This will let you see which text, topics, and CTAs drive customer engagement. You’ll even see what leads to conversions. This will inform future decisions and let you improve each bulk SMS campaign you run.
Check out this piece on SMS marketing for more tips on ways to improve your SMS messages.
Beyond Bulk SMS
With increased targeting and personalization becoming more sought after in marketing and customer service messages, SMS messaging services have evolved to meet the needs of modern businesses. Alongside bulk SMS messages, many services provide other features like the sending of single texts for passwords, delivery status alerts, and verification codes. With the growing popularity of chatbots, some services also provide interactive messaging features. These bots can now interact with inbound messages that come about as a result of your outbound bulk SMS campaigns.
Though it has been around for a long time, bulk SMS messaging isn’t going anywhere soon. The high levels of engagement it receives combined with new features in SMS communications means it will continue to be a go-to tool for businesses of all kinds. If you haven’t started implementing bulk SMS campaigns as part of your marketing or customer service strategy, now is the time.
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What is text message marketing?
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ext message marketing is the ongoing process of communicating business news, sales, promotions or other relevant information to your customers via SMS (short message service) text messages on their mobile devices. It is a type of digital marketing strategy that helps build brand awareness on a more personal level. Consumers must opt in to your messaging before you begin sending texts to them.
You can send bulk messages to groups of customers or audience segments, or customize the experience even more by sending individualized messages. This tactic allows you to bypass other marketing noise – social media ads, email marketing campaigns, etc., – and go directly to consumers’ phones.
How does text message marketing work?
Text message marketing relies on a database consisting of your customers’ names, cell phone numbers and other information (geographic region, customer categories, customer interests) that helps you track the sales process.
Text message marketing targets a specific audience.
As with any marketing endeavor, the more information you have on hand and the more specific your customer segments are, the better. Similar to how Facebook ads target people within a certain area, by age, and by interests, the best text message marketing is highly customized and geared toward a specific target audience.
Through SMS marketing, you’re getting as specific as possible and meeting your customers where they are – on their smartphones. By communicating your marketing messages to a targeted audience, you’re able to cultivate more meaningful connections with users and interactions with qualified leads.
Text message marketing acts as part of an overall marketing campaign.
As a marketer, the most important thing to remember about all mobile marketing (i.e., marketing that relies on technical and digital methods to reach mobile users, as opposed to printed materials) is that it should be part of an overall marketing campaign. No company should start text messaging marketing without a game plan on how it all fits together to reach new customers.
Text messaging isn’t appropriate for every marketing scenario. Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of business development at Material Good, advises marketers to use it for things like a delivery status, a secondary message after you download a certain mobile app or program, a receipt of purchase, or an exclusive discount. Text message marketing is only effective for brands with an audience that prefer this form of communication.
“When the brand recognition is present with the user and they’re familiar with your company or products, offering them content via text can be efficient.”
Mobile marketing channels, which include SMS, social media, email, and other forms of marketing, should all complement and benefit each other, thus contributing to your company’s overall mobile marketing campaign.