When it comes to leveraging mobile text marketing and optimizing your strategy around consumer base expansion, the SMS contact database is a business's top resource. An effective SMS marketing contact database will allow a company to ensure its messages are deliverable and read, ensuring the 99 percent open rate that drives the value of text marketing. Furthermore, it will help drive response rates up, beyond the 15 to 30 percent rates most businesses average.
There are a few steps toward building a strong SMS contact database, including advertising on social media and print, including information on your company website and paid advertising, but the trick doesn't lie in filling the database but maintaining it. This is why companies need to focus on reducing their opt-out rate as well as increasing their opt-in rate.
Consumers will opt-out of a mass text messaging service for a variety of reasons, such as not seeing enough value or receiving messages too frequently. Make sure you offer incentives, manage integration with other marketing channels, optimize message frequency and focus on the right demographic for maximum results.
Consider these factors for streamlining your SMS customer database:
- What do your customers buy from you?
- How often do customers buy your products/services?
- Are there any common problems that your customers report to you?
- Do seasonal trends affect your products/services?
These questions will help you outline some of your mobile marketing strategy, as well as minimize opt-outs, which you can learn more about here. You also need to ensure you're asking consumers for the right data. Just getting their mobile phone number isn't enough, you need demographic data to help delineate product awareness and other influencing factors. Consider getting the customer's name as well to help personalize your campaign.
You should also consider incorporating SMS keywords. Putting a small keyword strategy in place, such as the name of a product or service or a single word or hashtag that is shareable and repeatable, you will be able to drive customer awareness and fill your database faster.
In order to streamline your SMS contact database you have to be sure to target the right demographic and seize ever opportunity for growth. Manage your marketing campaign with mobile as the primary channel and be sure to integrate social and other media and you'll see your customer base start to grow exponentially.
If you're considering mobile as a major marketing avenue for your business, you also need to ensure you have the appropriate SMS gateway in place to manage message load, delivery and the other technical aspects of mass text marketing.
