3 Simple Ways To Boost Your Bulk SMS Campaigns in 2024
2020 was a rough year for business and 2024 is shaping up to be more of the same with more lockdowns, restrictions around crowds which will affect brick and mortar type businesses.
One of the very best ways to protect your business is to have a large list of customers in your back pocket to call on when you need to generate sales.
Businesses who have responsive email lists know the power of having a customer base eager to buy and the having the ability to send out a single email and hours later generating new sales.
There’s nothing more calming then knowing that you have that ability to generate sales at the snap of a finger.
But even more exciting than email is using Bulk SMS or text message marketing because one of the major downsides to email is the open and response rates which are notoriously low.
Email campaigns will typically net you and open rate of around 20% which effectively means that 80% of people will never see your promotion.
In other words, you are running your business off a 20% open rate.
Compare that to Bulk SMS which has a staggering 97% open rate!
The best way to ensure the success of your campaign is to get as many eyeballs on your promotion as possible – Angus Barrett, SMSpapa.com.au.
I couldn’t agree more.
People say “conversions” is the most important factor but you need to understand that a conversion isn’t an event, it’s a process which many moving parts that precede it.
If no one opens your campaign you will get 0% conversions. With no open rate your campaign ends right there.
The open rate is king because you can flub the other parts of the conversion process and still make sales but if you can’t get people to take notice and open your campaign it doesn’t matter how good your offer is, it is over.
This is why we love bulk SMS so much, it guarantees that you marketing message is going to get read – that said even with nearly 100% of your messages getting opened and read there is still opportunities to optimize your bulk SMS marketing campaigns so that you squeeze even more performance from them.
In this article I’m going to share with you the best ways to maximize your bulk SMS campaigns so that you get the highest ROI from each and every marketing campaign.
Always Segment Your Customers
Even though bulk SMS services have been around for many years it’s still surprising to see that too many businesses still haven’t caught on to the critical importance of grouping your SMS subscribers into relevant segments.
Here’s why this is important:
- You can send more text message campaigns
- You can reduce unsubscribe rate
- You can target your offers better
Let’s break each of these down.
1. You can send more text message campaigns
Text messaging is incredibly low tolerance meaning that you can’t send text messages to people with as much frequency as email the reason being people don’t want to hear from businesses pushing offers on them every day on the personal mobile phones.
Once per week seems to be the highest frequency for bulk SMS campaigns.
If you have all of your subscribers bundled into one large group then that means you can only send out one SMS campaign per week.
This of course changes when you segment your SMS subscribers.
For example, if you own a health club and you have a list of subscribers made up of:
- Bodybuilders
- Yoga
- Weight loss
- Sport
- Rehabilitation
By segmenting your SMS subscribers into smaller groups you can send out one SMS campaign per week for each group which means multiple opportunities to drive sales revenue – in the above examples this means 5 SMS campaigns per week meaning you can drive sales Monday – Friday, not a bad strategy.
2. You can reduce your unsubscribe rate
It takes a lot to get a person to hand over their personal mobile number so the last thing you want to do is make it easy for them to leave.
When you have everyone bundled into one large group and you’re sending out one SMS campaign it means that your offer is going to be irrelevant to most of those people.
This irrelevancy will trigger people to unsubscribe.
By segmenting people together in smaller groups you’re able to craft your messaging and offers to each group making your SMS campaigns highly personalized.
3. You can target your SMS offers more precisely
Now that you have segmented everyone into relevant groups it makes it a lot easier to:
- Come up with promotions
- Increase ROI
Using the above health club example, it becomes a lot easier to come up with offers targeting our 5 groups.
- Bodybuilders
- Yoga
- Weight loss
- Sport
- Rehabilitation
No more generic weak offers.
And since each of our offers are going to speak directly to the goals of each of these subscribers then the conversions on those offers will likely be higher.
Use SMS to boost other marketing channels
Since bulk SMS has incredibly high open rates it can be used to prop up your other marketing channels that could definitely take advantage of higher open rates.
For example, if you have an upcoming webinar or trade show event then why not send out an SMS leading up to the event I guarantee your attendance rate is going to be much higher which will undoubtedly lead to higher conversions.
If you are sending out an important company newsletter, send out an SMS advising the recipient that you’ve just sent them an important email and if they had an chance to read it or not.
This would obviously be a good idea for ecommerce catalogues during high spending times during the year.
Use An Unsubscribe Option
In a lot of countries and states this is mandatory by law but even if this isn’t required by law where you are it’s still important to give your subscribers an option to opt-out.
This will actually reduce your unsubscribes and of course complaints because it lets the recipient know that you are professional enough to give them a way out.
