10 Tips to Run Successful Text Campaigns

10 Tips to Run Successful Text Campaigns

Text marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business. However, it only works if you do it right. Several different aspects are easily lost or ignored. These little things can call off your campaign entirely. Moreover, they put your efforts and even money to waste. In this guide, we have compiled ten tips to ensure that you run successful text campaigns.

The following are the key ingredients to a successful text campaign.

1. Set Goals and KPIs
2. Create an incentive
3. Add a crisp CTA
4. Make groups manage your audience
5. Monitor your KPI
6. Make your website mobile-friendly
7. Enable two-way communication
8. Fuel on data
9. Appropriate content
10. Pick a reliable service

Set Goals and KPIs

One of the most common mistakes that businesses make is going aimless. Of course, when you begin a marketing campaign, the general aim is to have more revenue. However, this is very vague. Your goals need to be more precise and vivid. To set out a target, simply follow the SMART approach to your goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Let us talk about this approach in detail.

1. S – Specific
   
   Having vague goals are the top reason why campaigns do not run successfully. To set your goals, you need to ask the following questions. These will help you be more specific towards your goals.
   
   What is my end goal?
   
   Why is my end goal important?
   
   Who is my demographic?
   
   Where is my target audience?
   
   Which resource am I using for this campaign?
   
   Once you answer these questions, you can simply make the picture clearer in front of you.
   
   
2. M – Measurable
   
   Another very important aspect of setting up your goal is to ensure that it is easy to measurable. Marketing techniques like billboards and commercials may not be specific to this. However, text marketing allows you to measure your KPIs easily.
   
   We have a whole guide on how to measure your KPIs, you can click here to read it in detail.
   
3. A – achievable
   
   Another mistake that businesses tend to make is setting up unrealistic goals. If you are targeting 1000 leads, there is no guarantee that you will get all of them to convert. It is a good thing to aim for higher, but be more specific.
   
   The best way to go about it is to set small goals and achieve them. For example, if you target 1000 leads, expect 20% conversion.
   
   
4. R – Relevant
   
   Relevancy is the most ignored and the most important factor. Running a campaign for the sake of it may bring adverse results. Your business as a whole comes first, then comes the campaign. Hence, make sure that your campaign gives value to your business.
   
   Moreover, if you are running a special campaign at the time of a holiday, then make sure it is relevant. Running a campaign for men on women’s day may not work very well for you!
   
   
5. T – Time-Bound
   
   Your marketing campaign cannot and should not be aimless in terms of time as well. Do not begin running your campaign without a time limit. You can always extend the duration if you want to. However, during the inception, you should have a time limit set.

Create an incentive

After you set your goals, it’s time to decipher an incentive or your offer. Marketing and promoting your business are good ideas. However, if you are running a special campaign, then it is best to offer something in return. Ask yourself this question, why would a customer return to you? What are they getting if they invest their time and money in your business?

When it comes to text marketing, the best thing to offer is an exclusive incentive. Ensure that you don’t run the same campaign on other mediums. These reduce the exclusivity of the particular campaign. Moreover, after availing of the offer, your customer may unsubscribe from the list. Moreover, the same campaign across many platforms may mess with your analytics when you measure them.

Add a crisp CTA

One of the most common mistakes that go out in marketing campaigns is that customers do not know what to do after receiving a campaign.

The best way to go about it is to never miss a CTA. A call to action is one of the most important aspects of any marketing channel. A CTA is like a map to the action you want your customer to take. It can be a phone number, your email address, or even a link to the page of your choice. Moreover, with a service like ExpertTexting, you can enable two-way communication. Even requesting replies can become your CTA.

No matter how enticing your offer is, without a CTA your subscriber may not want to reach out to you at all. Similarly, they may not know what to do.

With text, marketing comes a big question. How do I manage characters with so much information? There are a couple of ways to go about it. Firstly, CTA’s do not need to be long and comprehensive. However, since texts are generally only 160 characters long, even something little can take up room. ExpertTexting allows you to send up to 800 characters in one message. These charge as multiple depending on the number of characters. However, smartphones tend to thread these messages as one.

If you wish to add a link as your call to action, then ExpertTexting can help you with that too. We have a link shortening feature. In this feature, you can pick the link of your choice and use our feature to compress it into as few characters as possible. Moreover, once you send out the messages, you can use the tool to further measure your KPIs. You can track the click-through rate and see where your campaign stands. Watch the video to know how you can use our link shortening feature.

Make groups manage your audience

As a marketer, you should be on the toes of knowing your audience at all times. When you devise your campaign, gathering details of your target audience is the top priority. With the right target audience, you can gather much more revenue than targeting everybody in general.

The best thing about text marketing is that you can segment your audience for each campaign. If you use a service like ExpertTexting, you can make groups for each campaign and send out messages to them only. These help you in many ways. The top two reasons are that you save money and you get the message out to the people that are the highest intent in your leads list.

Imagine being a father and receiving promotions for mothers only on Mothers’ Day. Some people may simply ignore your message. However, others may unsubscribe thinking that your business is not serious enough. However, the biggest problem will be that it will affect your KPI measurably. You may not know precisely how your campaign worked out or how your target audience reacted to it.

Hence, you make a group at the beginning of your campaign. Add your target audience only and send out messages to them.

Monitor your KPI

Key performance indicators are perhaps the biggest tool that marketers have. These are measurable values to see where your business and your campaign stand. If you are beginning a campaign, then you need to know about your KPIs and how you can measure them. We have a very comprehensive guide on it that you can read by clicking on the image below.

Once you send out your messages, start tracking the analytics. Check how many people opted out against the message, your click-through rates, and all other aspects. Analytics help you get a tangible image of your campaign and its results.

Once you have your results, make sure to make changes to your campaign accordingly. Rolling over your campaign occasionally brings a vast difference in the ROI.

Make your website mobile-friendly

While your campaign might be perfect, there are other aspects that you may be missing out on. One of those aspects is the website that you link in your text message. In text marketing, the impact of a good webpage increases. Hence, ensure that the web link that you add is mobile-friendly.

The reason why you need to ensure that the webpage is mobile-friendly is so that it is easy to access. A webpage that is not optimized may bring issues like size, display, and overall slow pages. Even if a customer wants to take any action, they might get irritated with the website.

If you send out a campaign with a website link, make sure that the webpage runs perfectly on mobile phones and tablets.

Enable two-way communication

One of the biggest advantages of text marketing is that it is a channel that allows replies. You cannot put up a billboard and expect replies. Moreover, a service like ExpertTexting makes this easier to manage and enhances your campaign. Additionally, ExpertTexting also offers free incoming messages in some numbers and cases.

Increase customer satisfaction and marketing by asking questions and requesting replies. Moreover, give your audience the option of sending their queries about a campaign when they please. However, do not make the mistake of leaving these on ‘read’. Make sure to have a proper system so that your customers can receive a reply promptly. Moreover, they should be able to track the feedback and queries and use them to enhance your marketing strategy.

Fuel on data

Data is the fuel of any marketing strategy or campaign. A marketing approach without data is like a car without fuel. Although you may be able to push it, it still has its limits! Similarly, your text campaign should have enough data information to run.

There are plenty of aspects to collecting data. For marketing, the biggest chunk of data is your research. Your research about your brand, its competitors, and its take on the market is an important angle to present your brand. Moreover, you should have data on your customer as well. By data, we do not mean breaching privacy. The general demographics and how they respond to similar businesses. Click on the image below for a detailed guide on how to know your customer.

Never make the mistake of beginning your marketing plan without unbiased data. If you are new to the business, then take your time in collecting data. You can conduct surveys, do field and off field researches, and much more. Just make sure you are not empty of information when you begin your campaign.

Appropriate Content

Now that you have everything in order, don’t forget the main thing – the content! Sending texts becomes much more effective if you have the right tone and the right content in that message.

Your business and its branding decipher the tone and nature of your content. It can be formal, informal, or any other type that works for your audience. However, since texting is generally conversational, make sure to find a balance.

Avoid using slang and offensive terms that may hurt the sentiments of your audience. Not only is it unethical, but you may also lose a big chunk of your potential leads.  

If you are using a service like ExpertTexting, then you will also have the option of sending MMS. Visual content seems to work best for promotional marketing. Hence, use it!

Pick a reliable service

Now that you are doing everything right, you just need one thing! The perfect service to send out your text messages. The service you pick should have enough reliability to send out your messages on time and not charge you a fortune for it.

ExpertTexting is one of the best ones out there. We allow you to pay-as-you-go with a clear invoice. Instead of buying plans with limitations, you can just pay for the messages that you send. This helps your marketing become more efficient in terms of finances. You do not have to worry about the remaining messages or finished messages.

Moreover, we have features like analytics and a dashboard. These help in ensuring that you can measure all your performance and know where you stand.