1. Do some fine-tuning of the content
It may be tempting to turn everything upside down when your SMS marketing is not performing as well as it used to. However, sudden changes can alienate your loyal subscribers. With this in mind, you need to change your content strategy while still fulfilling your initial promises to your customers about the nature and frequency of your text messages. This doesn’t mean that you won’t have room to tweak the content of your text messages creatively.
So, what kind of fine-tuning you can do:
- Remove repetitive offers from your text message campaign, as offering the same deal can’t keep up interest forever;
- Provide your mobile subscribers with varied information; for example, don’t just text offers but also tips and polls, or make your text marketing a two-way street by allowing your customers to send their questions to you via SMS, or organize text-to-win contests;
- Maintain the uniqueness of the text marketing channel – distribute content that doesn’t duplicate what you’re putting out on your other marketing media. Otherwise, your subscribers will opt out, as they won’t see the content of your text messages as exclusive. At the same time, it’s okay to sometimes embed links to your blog or web-site into text messages, if your text campaign requires it.
- Create urgency by texting time-sensitive offers that only last a few hours or for one day only; and add a strong call to action in every message – say precisely what you expect from the subscribers, whether they need to show the text message to get the discount or attend the event.
- Personalize your text messages;
- Reward your subscribers for their loyalty. Remember that rewards can be not only discounts, but also exclusive or early access to sales and other events.
2. Choose the right time of the day for your campaigns
If you can see from the stats that people are more likely to respond to your text messages at particular times of day, then go ahead and take advantage of this insight!
Besides your own inferences about time efficiency, there are also common rules of message timing. For example, it’s better to text customers a few hours before mealtimes for cafes and restaurants and before prime shopping hours for stores.
It’s absolutely not a good idea to text your customers early in the morning, late in the evening and during rush hours.
3. Use small holidays to organize your special SMS campaigns
If Christmas and the like didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent them. Marketers would invent them in any case, as holidays are always a great reason to run promotions. We recommend you create SMS campaigns not only for big holidays but for smaller ones as well. And the odder and more unique your holiday is, the more intriguing it will be for your customers to join you. This can help you to breathe new life into text marketing programs that have started to fade.
Over time, your text marketing needs to be improved, as customers and competitors don’t stand still. So, if you have noticed your SMS campaigns have started to flag, it’s time to bring some changes to them. First, analyze your data for the weaknesses of your text marketing. Then make adjustments that will help to reawaken customer interest in your message.
Your text message marketing campaign was a success at first, but then something went wrong and things have plateaued out. You don’t want it to fail completely, so it’s time to refresh your approach. Let us help you to find out where your problem might be and what you can do to overcome it:
Defining the problem: start from checking out your text marketing KPIs and your audience
You have a variety of text marketing stats to review, such as the opt out, opt in, conversion and open rates. On the base of these characteristics, you can identify the strong and weak points of your SMS marketing. It may be that text messages sending times should be tweaked; or you may be sending too many or too few text messages; or you could be sending out the same content over and over which irritates people and make them want to unsubscribe from your mobile program.
It is also possible that people’s preferences have changed, and as a result your target audience has changed a little bit too; or even if your customer’s demographic parameters have remained the same, the methods that you’re using may have become outmoded. That’s why you should check whether your vision for your target audience is relevant.
So, after you have reviewed your text marketing stats and customer profiles and identified your problem, get set to revitalizing your tired text marketing campaign.
How can you fix your SMS campaign?