Measuring the effectiveness of your SMS broadcast is almost as important as sending it. Measurements provide a plethora of insights regarding your promotional SMS.
One of the most straightforward ways is to not just announce that there is a sale on in your premises on a certain date, but to be more direct and proactive with a call to action that can be quantified. This can usually be in the form of SMS based vouchers/coupons/tickets that can be redeemed at your cash/payment desk. Thus, the number of redeemed vouchers compared to the volume of the list that you sent out can give you a direct percentage of success. There are other ways, but that is definitely one of the most crude and direct methods as it can be quantified and compared with other data such as sales revenue from a day prior to sale, or a day after sale etc.
If the campaign is not as successful as you hoped, then what can be tweaked to improve the next outcome?
- Perhaps investigate the content of the message (is it too ambiguous, avoid text abbreviation that can be misunderstood or not understood in its entirety, text symbols that can be mistranslated on a person’s phone etc.).
- Was the time you sent it too inopportune that people simply were distracted and ignored/deleted it (for example commuting times/meal times of 5pm to 6pm, 8am -9am)?
- Was the offer not enticing enough or the product relevant to your subscriber base (can you refine by age/gender from your CRM systems to qualify the mobiles)?
- Were the subscribers based in a reasonable proximity to your store (again can your CRM allow you to extract this location parameter?).
Just remember the key points:
- Keep the SMS content direct, unambiguous and relevant to your subscribers. Ensure the basics are covered, such as a sale information; ensure date, time, location/store branch are directly mentioned.
- Personalize the message to grab and hold a person’s attention- be it by a firstname or loyalty points stored or some other relevant tag.
- Have clear brand awareness so your customers can immediately identify and associate with your business (a sender identifier can do this or have your business name mentioned at the beginning of the SMS).
- Ensure you send at an optimal time that does not irritate your customer base. Think of your subscriber base, and do not send before late morning/early afternoon to avoid waking those who are on night shifts and do not text after the “watershed” hours late evening such as 9pm. Also do not send multiple messages during a short period of time as this barrage loses people’s interest and usually causes them to opt-out.
- Create a dialogue without spamming. Perhaps instead of one message, send 2 distanced apart. Say for example 1 week to your sale you send out promotional message containing a promotional redeemable voucher, then a day before the sale you send a quick reminder, encouraging the recipient to cash their voucher.
- Always, always only send to opt-in subscribers. Never send to a general list. Keep it legal, and do not tarnish your brand or attitude from your total potential customer pool. And always include an opt-out mechanism within your broadcasts; make it simple for people to stop receiving your broadcasts.
- Ensure cost control also; just remember to watch your message length. This is a key factor in your bottom line margins when assessing sales from a text campaign. For example, if you are sending to 2000 customers, a message that is even 165 characters long, then that is the equivalent cost of sending to 4000 customers (i.e. equivalent 2 messages each).
Using Text Messages/SMS/Mobile Marketing in Business 