SMS messaging is considered ancient tech by marketers who typically fall into the trap of chasing the shiniest new marketing channel.
Veteran marketers don’t care about the specific marketing channel, they are only concerned with the results.
Unfortunately, I’ve sat in on so many meetings with marketers who are 100% sold on mobile marketing, and creating mobile friendly websites, landing pages, and user experience but have completely overlooked one of the most powerful one-to-one marketing opportunities available today.
That is of course online SMS marketing.
For those of you who are already using online SMS to engage your customers, you already know the conversion power that it holds but you may not be aware of ways to optimize it even further.
In this article, I’ll share with you my favourite ways to optimize online SMS campaigns for maximum conversions.
Always use a magnetic offer
The next issue for company owners and marketers that are savvy enough to set up an online SMS lead generation campaign is producing an offer that is simple to decline, which clearly limits the amount of subscribers added to your list and eventually sales.
The approach is to consider the many sorts of offers that would be very appealing to distinct groups of your market.
This bit is worth repeating: for example, one of my favorite meals is chocolate fudge, but if I load my hook with chocolate fudge when I go fishing, there are several outcomes:
- You can catch an incorrect fish
- Catch no fish
The bait you use to catch fish is important; the kind of fish you catch is determined by the bait you use.
I believe you now understand the significance of utilising the proper bait.
If you own a local fitness club, you may encounter many various “species” or sorts of consumers, each of whom will react differently based on the type of “bait” or offer you utilise.
You may find the following segments inside a retail pet store:
- Dog owners
- Puppy owners
- Cat owners
- Kitten owners
- Fish owners
- Bearded dragon owners
- Hamster owners
Each of these are very different groups who have very different needs, and even inside these groups you have sub-groups for example, dog owners > puppy owners so sending SMS messages uniquely specific to those groups is vital for the success of any online SMS campaign.
Always use the keyword opt-in lead capture feature
Most company owners will adopt a method in which they transfer their current customer database into your SMS list. There is nothing wrong with this, and it is something you should certainly do. The issue is that they neglect to seek for permission to do so.
If you are intending to move your clients, please be sure to consult with them first, otherwise you may wind yourself in legal problems.
Unfortunately, this is where it ends; essentially, you are utilising the same old customer information to generate new sales; over time, customers will unsubscribe, resulting in lower sales volume.
The answer is to launch an online SMS lead generation campaign, which will guarantee that your company continues to generate new leads on a daily basis.
“Having an online SMS lead campaign is like having a salesperson bringing new clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” SMSPapa.com.au, Angus B.
You will see an extraordinary flood of new sales over time if you have created a terrific offer and correctly classified them into relevant groups.
Always segment your subscribers
In this part, we’ll combine the offers from the previous section and look at how to effectively utilise them with segmentation.
Once you’ve established an online SMS lead generation campaign and an offer, you’ll need to direct those individuals to certain contact groups inside your online SMS platform.
Unfortunately, most firms will have one large list of clients and will send out random offers. The issue with this technique is that you will have a lower conversion rate and a greater unsubscribe rate.
Unsubscribes aren’t always negative; you don’t want folks on your list who will never purchase, but the aforementioned technique will drive away real consumers.
If you are a pet store owner and send out a promotion for puppy food, you will automatically become irrelevant to anyone who doesn’t own a puppy.
While you may get away with this a handful of times using email marketing, this will blow up in your face quick when using online SMS.
Consumers tend to be a lot less tolerant of irrelevant messaging (i.e. spam) on their personal mobiles than their email addresses so you need to ensure that you are sending highly relevant promotions that target very specific groups of people to guarantee the highest conversions.
It’s best to map out your strategy before hand and so you can see how the parts are going to move before launching your online SMS campaigns but in most cases, you will likely already be using online SMS and so you will need to rework it.
Let us return to the previous section’s example of the retail pet store owner.
Let’s remind ourselves. We’ve had:
- Dog owners
- Puppy owners
- Cat owners
- Kitten owners
- Fish owners
- Bearded dragon owners
- Hamster owners
For each consumer category, create 14 groups, such as “Dogg owner Group A” and “Dog owner Group B.”
Here you would create 2 offers for each group.
Send one offer to each category.
Take a look at the outcomes.
Replace the lost offer with another offer and aim to outperform the prior successful offer’s performance.
Continue until you have a collection of proven offers that regularly yield high conversions, and then add them to your promotional calendar for the next year.
Conclusion
To summarise what we’ve learned:
- The value of having an online SMS lead generation campaign to assist you to bring in a steady stream of new consumers.
- Creating a compelling offer that is tailored to certain consumer groups.
Built an online SMS lead generating system that classifies clients into highly relevant groups while producing a library of proven offers to enhance customer conversions.
