How To Use Text Marketing

Most people own a mobile phone, and people spend a lot of time looking at those phones. You can use this for marketing. However, it can be tough to get right. While effective, if you get text marketing wrong, it can feel invasive and end up annoying customers more than it helps them. If you're going to do it, make sure you know how to get it right. Here's how you can make the most of text marketing and cause engagement, not irritation.

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Before you decide to try text marketing, make sure you do your homework first so you understand the risks and all the potential benefits. Put a solid plan in place so you can use text effectively.

Set up a specialist text marketing team to manage your campaigns

Large text marketing campaigns are a lot of work and effort. To do this successfully, you will need a team of professionals with the right skills to create the right strategy for using mass texting. You'll need different people to fill these roles or a few people who can manage a few different areas. You need someone who is an expert in SMS marketing programs, a retail expert, a digital designer, a social media expert, a promotions expert, and an ROI analyst. Ideally, look for people with skills in a few of these areas to keep the team at a reasonable size. These areas need to work smoothly together too. Text campaigns have a tight turnaround time so your team needs to work closely and effectively together and communicate effectively about their plans.

Know your customer well

Use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) app to track the success of the texts that you send to your customers. Do some analysis on their purchase history and look at location-based demographics so you can make sure the correct customers are getting messages that are highly relevant to them. For example, if you're a beauty company, there's no point in sending out a text with an offer for an anti-wrinkle cream that can only be spent in your New York store to a 19-year-old customer who lives in Boston. Divide all your customers into very well defined segments so you can properly target your promotions and other messaging by age, interest, and other demographics. Bulk messages can be sent for sales and promotions that are available to anyone, but other messages should be highly targeted.
 

Write clear messages

Marketing texts should be kept concise, or people won't read them. Keep them short to hold interest. Make sure your messages are clear, concise, and easy to understand. Avoid using things like abbreviations, emojis, and all caps. Don't use open-ended messages. An example of an open-ended message would be a message that advertises a sale without telling the person reading the message when the sale will end. Give a specific date of when the offer you're promoting ends to make your customers more likely to take action. They'll have enough information and incentive to be encouraged to take action.