It’s simple. If you add effective text messaging to your marketing campaigns, you’ll see better results and stop pulling out your hair. More hair equals better hair.

The trick is adding text messaging effectively. For that, you might need to know what we know. Here are eight of our favorite tips for building effective text messaging marketing campaigns:

Secret #1 – Get permission first.

You can’t just start texting your customers, even if they’ve given you their phone numbers. Government regulations say that you must have their permission first. So you’ll probably want to ask for permission in every way possible – on your website, in emails, with printed ads, on receipts, and many other ways. Find tons of great ideas for promoting your texting program in one of our recent blogs and examples of those first few texts in this one.

Once you have permission to text, here’s how to design your campaign:

Secret #2 – Decide what you want to accomplish.

What are your goals for the campaign? Do you want to increase opt-ins to your text messaging lists? Do you want to increase sales, applications, or appointments? If you can, put some numbers in the goal. How much of an increase in sales? How many new appointments or applications? Knowing what you want to accomplish will help you know when you’ve done well.

Secret #3 – Research your market.

If you haven’t already done so, you should conduct research to define your market. You need to know who they are, where they hang out, and what makes them tick. What are their challenges and how can you help? In a business-to-business environment, you need to be sure you understand their business. How do they want to be served? Do you know what they think value is? The more you know about your market, the easier it is to design campaigns that help them solve problems.

Secret #4 – State the call to action clearly.

What do you want them to do? Remember KISS – Keep it short and simple.

Secret #5 – Personalize the text messages.

As your opt-in list grows, take the time to segment your list into personas. You can send tailored messages to segments of the list. Using a CRM will help define and track your audiences.

Secret #6 – Don’t overwhelm your audience.

Think about your own experience. Nothing makes us angrier than texts we haven’t opted into or too many texts from anyone. Treat your customers like friends and be respectful of their time. Keep in mind that we read texts within two minutes of receiving them. Time your texts for your customers’ convenience.

Secret #7 – Choose an SMS provider who can help on the back end.

Your provider should make respecting opt-outs easy and should be able to provide the reports to prove compliance with local and national laws. Even better is a service that works easily with your CRM. You may not ever need to show you comply with regulations, but knowing you could, will keep you from pulling your hair out.

Secret #8 – Test, Evaluate and Tweak

When you decide what your campaign goals are, you should determine how you’re going to measure it. Whatever your method is, remember to test appropriately. You need to know if your campaign is working. If it isn’t, figure out why and adjust it. Then test again. Nothing is perfect, and you’ll get better results with flexible design.

Those eight secrets should help you get started. Text messaging is a powerful tool, and it’s available to organizations of all sizes.

Let SMS-Magic Help You

The SMS-Magic team works every day to make building effective campaigns easy. We are Salesforce and Zoho experts and can make those integrations seamless. We would be excited to share our experience and help you decide what is best for you.

Does the SMS-Magic team sound like the partner you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how SMS-Magic can help you build and automate your text messaging campaigns!