A successful SMS marketing campaign requires continuous work. It is important to check regularly and make adjustments to ensure that your efforts continue to bring strong returns. There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of your texting campaign, and your text message marketing platform probably offers several key analytical tools to get you started. Knowing the right ones to use for your campaign ensures that you are tracking the right things and making the right adjustments to keep your campaign going strong and bringing in more business.
Are People Signing Up--And Staying Active?
A basic way to measure the success of your SMS marketing campaign is how many people sign up to receive messages from you. This is measured through your opt-in rate. It is just as important to look at the opt-out rate and delivery rate to see how many people remain active subscribers. You will always find that a few people choose to opt out for reasons beyond your control, and you will find you have some texts that bounce. However, an effective campaign keeps these numbers low while the opt-in rates remain high.
Are Customers Engaged?
In addition to continually recruiting new subscribers and retaining them, you want to keep them actively engaged. This can be measured in a few different ways, including redemption rates, conversion rates, click-through rates and open rates. In general, text message marketing has eight times the response rate as email marketing. You want to take advantage of this and maintain a high engagement rate across the board. This not only means that you have a successful campaign, but it correlates to increased business.
These numbers also tell you what messages work, and which do not. A coupon that sees a high redemption rate met some need with your customers. Although you want to vary your coupons and deals to maintain value, you also want to be sure to send coupons that work. Using the data you receive can help you to tailor messages to those your customers like, keeping your campaign more successful over time.
Are People Sharing With Their Friends?
Another way to measure the success of your campaign is to see whether your customers are telling their friends and family members to sign up as well. You can track this by using a unique keyword that your SMS subscribers can send to their friends to sign up. You might also send out surveys asking how people heard about the program.
Unique keywords tell you, in general, from whence your subscribers come. This allows you to see which of your campaigns work the best and which are the least effective. For example, you might run a promotion on your social media page and a TV ad simultaneously, both of which use a texting call to action, but with unique keywords. You can track the opt-in numbers using the different keywords and see which one had the most people sign up.
Is It Cost-Effective?
In general, SMS marketing is a cost-effective marketing channel. It costs just a few cents to send and receive texts and you do not have to pay for expensive graphics, which are reasons why texting typically has a high return on investment. However, you might find that you are not getting the return on investment you expected. By comparing the cost of your campaign with any increase in business, you can determine whether texting has been effective for your company. You might find that making a few adjustments could help you to increase the impact and, thereby, generate a better ROI.
People like to receive texts from businesses. Texting is quickly becoming one of the top business marketing channels.
By reviewing these four different components of your SMS marketing campaign, you learn about its effectiveness. A quick review of your analytics should provide most of the information you need, although you might also want to talk with your customers and learn more about their perspective to learn how you might improve in the future.
Contact us to learn more about how to monitor your campaign.