Top 9 SMS Marketing Best Practices

Learn the essential 9 SMS marketing best practices and get started with great text marketing campaigns.

SMS marketing outmaneuvered waves of sophisticated marketing tools in the past decades and arrives in the 2020s as a major promotional strategy.

While social media, texting apps, and other tools were finding their place inside a marketing strategy, SMS consolidated more and more as a powerful way to get a direct and specific message with precision.

However, the evolution of marketing in the past twenty years creates the need to adapt to an evolving market. Tactics that were useful a while back don’t have space in business anymore. Compliances, engagement, value, timing are but a few of the keywords.

To best understand how to move through with your text message strategy in a fast-changing environment, we will tackle today the top 10 SMS marketing best practices for 2022 and beyond.

Use an SMS marketing tool

Our first SMS marketing best practice is also the most important one. You will want to use a specific SMS marketing tool as you develop your text message strategy.

Running full-fledged text message campaigns with your own phone is insanely time-consuming and can rapidly transform your inbox into an abyss of disorganization.

A proper SMS marketing tool will make sending, answering, and organizing your messages a much smoother process. It provides you with the ability to send messages in bulk, create automation, manage your contacts, get reports, and much more.

There isn’t anything more unpleasant than receiving messages we didn’t sign up for. And this is what our second SMS marketing is about: getting consent from your audience.

You might be collecting users to your SMS list with a free resource, a list of clients that you serve or served at one point in your business, or with a sweepstake campaign – it doesn’t matter. Everyone that receives your text messages must grant you consent to send SMS.

And consent doesn’t end there. Just as important as asking people if they would like to join your list is to give clear instructions on how people can opt out from it. Long are the days in which opt-out possibilities would be tricky or difficult to access. Nowadays people are more inclined to continue receiving promotional material through SMS or Email as long as they can identify an easy way to stop receiving them from the start.

In SMS it is a must that every message carries the following ending.

And this is where our next point comes into view:

Run SMS automation

Automations are a great way to communicate with your audience while managing to have personalized interactions.

SMS automation can be used to grow your list by running sweepstakes. People need to opt in to participate and, by doing so, consent to receiving more promotional material that you might have in store.

Besides SMS list growth, another SMS best practice in automation is to remind clients of an upcoming appointment. Professional business text marketing tools, like Appointible, are vital to keeping your client appointment calendar synced with SMS sending.

SMS automation is a vast and deep topic. We covered this idea in depth in our SMS automation article. Be sure to check it out as it will contain tactics that can have an immediate effect on your marketing efforts.

Interact with your audience

Your audience will frequently reply to your SMS upon receiving your text campaigns. Professional SMS marketing platforms, such as Appointible, grant you the possibility to engage with your customers or potential clients through two-way messaging.

Your recipient might follow up on your SMS with a query that might even be unrelated to the topic at hand. Be sure to interact with them.

Another crucial SMS marketing best practice is to reply to messages as soon as they arrive in your inbox (given you are on your working hours) since 90% of the people will check a text message within the first 3 minutes. Needless to say that they expect the same level of readiness on your part.

And for those non-working hours that you might receive a text message, you can always set automated responses indicating when you will get back to them, as we saw earlier.

Be catchy from the start

It is estimated that 85% of readers decide if they will read a message, email, or blog post already in the title.

Another jaw-dropping statistic is that 70% of Americans will share articles and read just the title but not the copy inside.

These numbers are as impressive as are important. For us running SMS marketing campaigns, it is even more imperative to be catchy from the start, as text messages don’t even have a title associated with them.

With an SMS best practice, in this case, is to be engaging from the beginning. Use tools such as personalization, allowing you to send messages in bulk while still naming all your audience.

With promotional messages that offer coupons, for example, be as straightforward as possible, giving the code and the link right at the beginning of the message.

Generate value

As much as your audience should be receiving SMS with deals, promo codes and important reminders of upcoming appointments, not all marketing communication should be based solely on sales or post-sales.

Another SMS marketing best practice is to generate value with your text messages.

Think of a therapy practice business. You could send your users tips on how to have a stress-free mourning routine by leading them to a blog post or YouTube video you recently launched.

By sending text messages over time that generate value to your audience, they are more likely to engage with your future SMS campaigns and become your customers.

Timing is essential

We are all bombarded and barraged with information on the internet every single day, with 45% of the people admitting to checking social media being the first thing they do every day after waking up.

That being said, timing your SMS to send right is directly associated with the success of your text message campaign.

It is always important to keep testing different moments until you get a better understanding of when your audience prefers to receive your campaigns. We talk more about this topic in our earlier SMS marketing for beginners guide. Be sure to check it out.

Avoid abbreviations

Abbreviations are frequent in texting. We want to save space and create more succinct messages. However, in business texting, abbreviations should be avoided at all costs.

Words like TXT for text tend to be confusing and make your recipients simply move on to another app on their phones.

Write professionally at all times with no abbreviations.

Create a tone of voice

The tone of voice is what gives soul to all written communication. And it goes along with so much that we discussed throughout today’s SMS marketing best practices

A predefined tone of voice captivates your audience and makes it easier for it to connect the message to you.

If you operate in the medical space, sounding positive whilst being professional is the way to go. If you run a fast fashion e-commerce, being expressive and catchy might be the better approach.

We hope this article helped you hone your SMS marketing strategy and implement best practices that will take your text messaging to the next level.

Let us know in the comments below what your thoughts are.

About the author

Professional writer and storyteller, with a deep passion for Traveling, Mental Health and Marketing.

Fernando Cintra

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