To have the perfect SMS marketing campaign, you need to ensure you have your bulk SMS sorted down to the last detail. It’s likely to form a big part of your overall campaign, so it’s essential you get it right. What can you do to ensure you get the bulk SMS down to a tee and see the rest of your marketing campaign goes off without a hitch?
Planning
As always, the core to success is good planning. The more you can get written down on paper as a solid plan, the easier it will be to carry it all out in the long run. One of the key things behind this is figuring out how you are going to start your campaign and ensure it continues in the right direction.
All of your campaigns are going to use bulk SMS in some form, but you need to think about how many people will be receiving the messages, when you will send them and the reach that they have in the long term. It’s essential to work out the return on investment (ROI) and also how efficient bulk SMS will be for your business. A successful campaign could dramatically improve your brand reputation, but if it’s poorly done, you could see the business suffer as a result. Take the time to work out all of this and try to prioritise as well; it is likely to make everything run more smoothly further on down the line.
Know your market
When bulk SMS is used properly, it can have great results. Your customers will find out information about your company and get to read your marketing material, but you have to be careful that you target the right people. There is no point in sending out a blanket SMS message to every single subscriber, in the hope that it will be successful.
You need to research your market and ensure that you send the right messages to the right customers. There is little point in adopting a ‘one size fits all’ policy, because you’re likely to lose subscribers who receive messages they aren’t interested in. Instead, use segmentation. Send out smaller sets of messages to different lists of customers. This will give you the opportunity to tailor the content to fit their individual preferences, encouraging them to remain signed up.
Personalise
To an extent, bulk SMS is going to involve sending the same sort of message to lots of different people so you need to think carefully about the wording and make it seem as personal as possible. If you can make your customers feel unique and like they are important to you, they’re more likely to want to keep subscribing.
Get personal details from your customers so that you can incorporate these into your messages wherever possible. While your messages may all start off in the same way, you can then go on and make changes to them to ensure that they have a more individual feel. Split your customers into different categories dependent on their personal interests and you can then edit messages according to their preferences. This segmentation is going to give a better customer experience across the board, potentially bringing in more subscribers in the future.
Re-address your plan
While you might have worked out a very detailed plan at the start of your SMS campaign, it’s important that you go back regularly to look at it. Although you may have planned something, it might not have worked out like that in reality – so you should constantly double check.
Don’t be afraid to make changes to your original plan. Avoiding any problems or setbacks is likely to only make things worse in the long run. If something isn’t working, change it and try something different; adjusting your long-term plan accordingly.
Know your budget
You should work out how much of your marketing budget is going to be allocated to bulk SMS before you start detailing your campaign. You don’t want to start creating the campaign and then find out you don’t have the budget to work with.
Know what you can spend on what areas, but try to be flexible with it along the way. For example, if there is a big public holiday coming up that directly impacts on your business, think about having a push on your campaign. Sending out bulk SMS in the days leading up to the holiday may encourage more customers to spend money when they might not have considered it.
If you want to truly get to bulk SMS utopia, you need to think of all the little details and ensure you keep them in mind during the whole campaign. Everything starts with a good plan, but you also need to remain flexible and adaptable over time. Be sure to take a step back on a regular basis and check that you are still doing what you set out to do. Even if the original journey changes, as long as you keep the same goals in mind, you should be on your way to perfection.
