SMS is a great tool to communicate with your customers in a fast and direct way. Short, concise messages with easy to follow ‘call to action’ make for successful SMS campaigns. The immediate nature of SMS often means they have higher open and click rates than emails.
Here are our top tips to make the most out of SMS campaigns.
- Reward or benefit: Include the promotion as the opening line to engage your customer. This could be a voucher with a limited-time offer, a chance to win a prize or a special discount.
- Personalisation: Successful communications target specific contacts who might be interested in them, rather than an entire database. Contacts can be segmented using demographic data (age and/or gender), location data (state or postcode) or behavioural data (spend or other in-venue activity). Successful communications often use a ‘first name’ merge field, too.
- Friendly tone: Text messages featuring natural language with a friendly tone usually have better engagement. Messages that shout at the customer (e.g. DON’T MISS OUT) tend to perform poorly and come off as spammy.
- Time frame: Communications with a sense of urgency tend to perform well. Increase your chances of success by specifying a valid timeframe or expiration date (e.g. ‘today only’ or ‘tomorrow only’)
- Call to action: Use terms like ‘book now’, and include your venue name and phone number/contact info. If your SMS includes a link to a flyer, a call to action can be an effective way to entice customers to click on the link.