9 Tips to Write Effective SMS for Marketing

SMS marketing has become one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses. But even if SMS is a great source for businesses to market, they still have to design text messages for marketing.

Once you've figured out how to write the marketing text message, building a campaign around it is easy. As more and more industries understand the potential of SMS, it becomes harder to make your message stand out from the crowd.

Tips for an effective text marketing campaign:

1. Know Your Audience: Personalize and Target

The first step towards writing effective text messages is to understand whom you are writing them for. Know your target and then frame your text messages. You may also have to divide your targets into different groups depending on their characteristics and create different texts for each group.

2. Send Short and Engaging Messages

Text messages generally have a limit of 160 characters. An ideal text should have a short sentence and an urgency to call to action.

The space limitation in SMS leads to the quick attention of the audience. Also, remember to add value through your texts because the first few words of the texts act as previews, so make sure to count them.

3. Create Value

Value creation is one of the most important aspects of any text marketing campaign as it encourages people to sign up and remain loyal and subscribed.

Create your text marketing plan with service offerings and value creation first and then promotion. Keep in mind that text messaging shouldn’t be just about marketing, but it should be a helpful customer service tool.

It can be used for multiple communications, including but not limited to sending out appointment reminders, and transactional messages, and as a way to interact with customers who have questions. Customers tend to be more open to any promotional messages if they see meeting their needs.

4. Keep the timing right

People today tend to have their phones with them all the time, but that doesn’t mean you can text them at any time. Studies have shown that mid to late afternoon is the most suitable time to send a message. If your business serves multiple geographies, keep track of the time you send your messages depending on their geography.

It would be best to prefer texting during typical business hours and choose to be transparent about what customers should expect from your campaigns. That way, no one feels resentful toward your SMS advertising, and fewer people will feel the need to reply "STOP."

5. Consistency is the key

Prepare a text marketing plan and stick to it. Consistency will lead to greater engagement and increase the favorability of your brand.

To keep track, you can create a calendar with a pre-planned text. This will help you to prepare ahead of your time and respond to your customer well. Regular communication also keeps customers engaged, informed, and expectant.

6. Use Urgency to Your Advantage

Urgency and text messages are parallel.

That’s because 90% of text messages are opened within 3 minutes. To create a sense of urgency, you could put a time constraint on a sale or let your customers know how much stock is available.

7. Use Call-to-Action

Call-to-action buttons lead to greater conversions. Even if you send a text to your customers but don’t make it easy for them to take any action, your efforts will go in vain.

The best place for the call to action is at the end of the message, as a final instruction to the recipient. Some examples of a good call to action are Act Fast, Sign Up Now, You Don’t Want To Miss Out, Buy Now, Don’t Miss Out, Incredible Offer, Last Chance, and Limited Time Offer.

8. Test your text

Testing should be an integral part of your text messaging campaign. To do so, divide your target audience into sub-sets and send different texts to each group to check the response of the recipient.

To keep experimenting, you can make minor changes to your texts and see which texts work out well.

9. Include an opt-out option

While this is something you never want to happen, but you should consider it. The texts you send to the recipients shouldn’t be forced. To make sure you don’t intrude on the privacy of your customers, only send texts to sign up users.

Even for the signed users, keep an easy way to opt out. You can consider including “Reply STOP to opt-out” at the end of your texts for the ease of your receipts.

So Finally…

Now you are aware of how to write SMS for marketing campaigns. The more personalized, professional, to the point, and specific you are, the more effective your SMS messages will be.

SMS marketing is gaining popularity, and it’s essential not to miss out on a very profitable means of communication with your audience.

And what’s more, it doesn’t have to be an additional platform to manage; using Falkon SMS you can easily combine it into your existing package. It’s almost too easy!

If you’re looking to channel all of your communications into one area, then Falkon SMS is the way to do it. To start your journey, then why not have a meeting with us today?

Get started for Business texting by scheduling a demo with our Falkon SMS team.