Explore strategies to maximize SMS marketing ROI by improve your reach and carrier compliance through Swift SMS Gateway. When thinking about marketing strategies, most businesses immediately dive into social media, or paid search ads. While that’s not necessarily wrong, it shows that business owners aren’t always aware of where their customers are already waiting and what they really want.
The public is on their phones and they are texting. It’s obvious.
66% of consumers would already like to receive service notifications via text. The fact that only 23% of businesses offer them demonstrates how many organizations still underestimate the power of SMS Marketing and Transactional SMS and their combined roles. Swift SMS Gateway will address this and how you can get a great ROI in your business text strategy.
Understanding & Boosting SMS Marketing ROI
Defining clear markers of success is crucial in recognizing the ROI of any investment.
Gain trust with your customers by Establishing an Organic Opt-In Audience on your text messaging. This will improve your ROI.
Transactional SMS – Improving Opt-In & ROI
Starting with Transactional SMS routines is the proven strategy to develop successful SMS text marketing broadcasts. To make it cost-effective, it’s important to first establish a credible Opt-In list. This cannot be bought, or simply assumed that you can transfer permission from another channel like email, and start texting your clients. Transactional SMS gains customer confidence through convenience and demonstrates service commitment to your customers. It supports business operations and does not imply an exchange of money, despite the inference.
Transactional SMS texts are automated on SMS API calls in three ways:
- Calendar Alerts – To send booking confirmations, and assist in appointment reminders
- Two-Factor Authentication Codes – To provide better security in user validation routines.
- Delivery Notifications – To inform customers at every stage of the delivery process.
SMS Text & Permission-Based Marketing
By first establishing SMS text messaging as a communications channel with your customers, you will then gain better acceptance in your permission based text marketing, as you ask them if they want to participate further in marketing and sales related communications with your business over your now established SMS text messaging channel. This will reduce your Opt-Out on text broadcasting. It’s literally that simple.
Remember this is permission-based marketing. No carrier allows blanket Opt-In across communication channels. It is implicit. Opt-Out is a direct cost to your business’s marketing budget and your reputation. Respect this and improve your customer relationship.
Carriers monitor Opt-Out requests. A rash of Opt-Out replies will flag your broadcasts as suspected SPAM, which will lead to blocking.
Before you decide how many messages you’ll send, take care to develop credibility and trust with your clients and customers. This will not only lead to success in your text message broadcasting, but it will ultimately improve your SMS marketing cost, because carriers charge you for every message they deliver and every message they block, if it fell into their SPAM filtering algorithms or not.
Text Broadcasting is Mass Messaging
For mass messaging, SMS API is the platform you need. Choosing SMS API integration may involve additional expenses for integrating with other platforms, because Swift provides a wide choice of integration options, programming languages, and organizes our code library by function, with full documentation. This makes integration fast and easy.
Under no circumstances should you consider using a private line to send marketing messages. While it may seem like a simple money-saving solution, those numbers aren’t registered for mass texting, and using them can at worst lead to mobile carrier fine fees. You need an established SMS aggregator like Swift SMS Gateway that has been doing this since 2007.
Understand Costs and SMS ROI
Finally, you should also consider the labor cost attached to delivered messages. That helps you achieve a more realistic estimate of your SMS ROI and compare different platforms. If a dedicated support package can help you provide a better customer experience while saving time, that could make it a valid investment.
For a full understanding of SMS cost, you also need to consider the average transaction or customer lifetime value and conversion rates. This helps you streamline your marketing strategy over time and allocate resources to the marketing campaign that promises the biggest bang for your buck.
Leveraging Other Marketing Channels
You should never look at any individual marketing channel in a vacuum, but rather consider each one’s strengths and observe how your competition uses them. SMS marketing is unique in the way a subscriber perceives your message. That’s because they’ll associate this medium with push notifications from friends and family. As a result, text message marketing has higher engagement rates and responses than any other marketing strategy. That’s not to say that you should ignore email marketing or paid ads in favour of text messaging. It’s best to leverage the trust in an SMS message to complement more shallow interactions.
How To Calculate Your SMS Marketing ROI
Calculating SMS marketing ROI can take many forms depending on your business model and marketing strategy.
Here are some metrics to track the ROI of your SMS marketing efforts:
- Study Your Opt-In/Out Rates: Try to stay below 10% Opt-Out. Go above it and you will start to be seen as SPAM by carriers, which will reduce your audience reach and increase your costs.
- Increased sales: Whether you’re tracking a seasonal SMS campaign, upsells or yearly revenue attributable to SMS, you can use special codes to document the customer journey.
- Website traffic: Thanks to unique tracking URLs, custom landing pages and QR codes, it’s easy to segment website visitors by SMS marketing campaign.
- Time savings: For automated messages like appointment reminders or customer service, you could determine time savings for your staff.
There’s no one way to measure your SMS marketing ROI. Once you get into the routine, you’ll develop an approach to analytics that reflects your target audience. An SMS coupon in retail comes with different objectives than an appointment reminder in healthcare. Start with metrics that make sense to you and take it from there.
What Are SMS Success Rates & Campaign Reporting Roles
Besides sales and productivity metrics, you’ll encounter others that can give you an idea of your marketing efforts.
Your text message delivery rate can give you insights into issues with certain carriers and invalid phone numbers. It can also tell you if you’re following best practices. If you keep spamming recipients with hourly messages, they’ll likely block your number, thus hurting customer engagement and delivery rates.
For a more comprehensive understanding of SMS messaging delivery, you can analyze your open and click-through rates. While you’ll quickly notice that those are higher on average for SMS marketing than paid search or social media, the stats become truly valuable once you dig into industry-specific averages.
That’s why it’s important to define clear objectives first to avoid getting hung up on arbitrary numbers. Try to associate a business goal with each metric if possible. Make sure to benchmark your results against industry averages to recognize what’s considered normal. That way, you can reiterate strategies that worked specifically for your audience and improve ROI month over month.
Maximize SMS Marketing ROI & Customer Engagement
Measuring your SMS Marketing ROI often comes down to continuous research and self-awareness. Pulling together both technical and marketing oriented metrics.
Proven SMS Text Broadcasting Strategies
- Segmentation: Categorizing audience demographics allows you to tailor texting. This increases relevance, engagement and conversion rates.
- A/B testing: Experimenting with personalized messages can identify effective elements in your texting. This can improve your click-through rates.
- Text Optimization: Crafting compelling messages will capture audience attention. Consider hiring a professional copywriter.
- List Filtering: Refine your contact list with automated Opt-Outs to improve deliverability and campaign efficiency.
- Message Timing: Do not do broadcast messaging at night. In most jurisdictions it violates telecom regulations.
- Mobile-Responsive Website Links: Visitors expect a mobile-first experience. Make it a priority. It also helps you stay compliant with requirements for visitors with limited eyesight.
- Government Compliance: Regulations such as TCPA and the Canada-UK TCA as it relates to Europe’s GDPR demand adherence. Ensure it to safeguard your brand and build trust.
- Integrating SMS with Other Channels: Aligning SMS campaigns with email, social media and other marketing channels will maintain a unified brand identity through reinforcement and effectiveness.
- Encourage Feedback: Listen to text recipients and make informed adjustments to your marketing strategy to improve communications.
Conclusion
Maximizing your SMS ROI starts with developing an organic Opt-In. This reinforces customer service and support. Then regularly measure your SMS broadcasting to manage your Opt-In and reduce your client Opt-Out requests. This puts you into an SMS flow and creates strategies that become routine. Then, the additional reporting and campaign vetting of Swift SMS Gateway provides assistance and value to achieve it.
If you’d like to maximize your SMS ROI, Swift SMS Gateway is here to help. Sign up for a free demo now!
