9 SMS Marketing Best Practices to Boost Conversions

Published on
August 30, 2024

You’ve come to the right place if you want to learn SMS marketing best practices. But to begin with, why should you consider SMS marketing as a serious channel for business advertising?

This is because, on average, people spend 6 hours and 40 minutes daily scrolling through their phones. So this “natural habitat” is your perfect place to reach them.

SMS campaigns need to be optimized to maximize your customer’s attention, and we’re here to share some hacks based on our decade-long experience in SMS marketing.

SMS marketing best practices

To help you get the most out of your marketing SMS messages, here are some of the top text message rules you must follow:

  1. Get opt-in before you start texting
  2. Every marketing SMS must have a CTA
  3. Personalize based on interests and actions
  4. Use texts for cart-abandonment
  5. Use MMS to engage your customers
  6. Use promotional messages as part of your multichannel outreach
  7. Automate follow-ups based on actions
  8. Add text surveys to your marketing strategy
  9. Make opting out  easy

Let’s learn about these points in detail, so you make the most of it.

Get opt-in before you start texting.

As a marketer, I know trends keep changing, and we don’t want to hold onto an idea till it goes stale. In the era of reels and TikTok, a trend has a lifespan of only a few days

So, holding back and following due process can be frustrating when we have a new product launch or the latest marketing trend and want to send out messages. But, SMS opt-ins are number 1 on the SMS marketing best practices list. 

Why?

  1. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) mandates you get express written consent before sending a text message to a customer’s phone. Violation of this can lead to suspending your campaign or upto $1500 per violation.
  2. Beyond compliance, you also save precious marketing dollars by not wasting budgets on numbers that do not want to engage with your organization. 

How do I get opt-ins? 

A text-to-join message uses a keyword your audience can use to sign up for communications. By texting this keyword to your designated shortcode or longcode, they express consent to receive promotional messages. 

sms-marketing-best-practices-opt-in

Typically, businesses collect opt-ins by adding tacit consent as their T&C. They also use promotional and marketing activities to obtain new numbers (e.g., exclusive tempting offers for new opt-ins).

Want to learn how to create SMS opt-in campaigns? Here’s a blog you might like to read: How To Get Started with Opt-In Text Messaging 

Every marketing SMS must have a CTA

Imagine knowing there is a treasure buried somewhere but not having a map or instructions to find it! That’s what it feels like when your marketing SMS messages do not have a call-to-action (CTA).

33% of recipients react to a CTA in a text message, which is why this practice ranks #2 in our list of SMS marketing best practices. 

Depending on your marketing campaign goals, a call to action could be anything such as “Visit our website,” “Buy Now,” “Learn More,” etc. 

sms-marketing-best-practices-call-to-action
Pro-tip: Add a link tracker to your CTA to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Find out who engaged with it and who did not. Use this information to retarget your audience for future campaigns or follow-ups.

Personalize based on interests and actions.

Yes, as marketers, we’ve all watched our friends freak out when they discuss a product and end up seeing it on their feed. We know it is our doing with a little bit of algorithm magic. 

Personalization is also part of SMS marketing best practices. 76% of customers said they would be more likely to engage with a brand that personalizes their SMS message campaigns. 

Collect information from your audience, such as their name, location, gender, etc., and use this information to personalize how you greet them. On CallHub, you can use merge tags to personalize messages for each individual.

Merge tags allow you to insert the data from your custom fields into your text messages/text message templates to personalize your SMS marketing texts. Here’s an example:

sms-marketing-best-practices-merge-tags

Here’s what a perfect personalized SMS marketing message looks like:

sms-marketing-best-practices-personalization

Use texts for cart abandonment follow-up.

One of our favorite SMS marketing best practices is sending cart abandonment reminders to customers. This is a great follow-up and reminder to entice customers to return to your website and complete a purchase.

Mobile shopping has the highest cart abandonment rate at 78%, and a cart abandonment recovery text message has a high % conversion rate of 26%!

You could be an e-commerce platform or a software service provider, but when a customer almost completes a purchase and leaves your website, you have to follow up!

On CallHub, you can integrate third-party applications such as UserPilot, which can track user data, cart abandonment rates, and details and feed them into CallHub’s system. Once you finish this setup, your text messages will be automatically triggered to convert those dollars! You can use workflows on CallHub to target links even better. For instance, someone who clicked a link but did not buy could be retargeted with a follow-up message with an urgent tone.

Here’s what a card abandonment recovery SMS looks like:

sms-marketing-best-practices-cart-abandonment

Use MMS to engage your customers

sms-marketing-best-practices-mms

A picture is worth a thousand words – so is a GIF or a video.

If you want to boost your engagement and conversions, using MMS is number 5 on our SMS marketing best practices. Here’s why MMS improves your marketing sms messages:

Message type:SMSMMS
Character length:160 characters. Anything above that goes out as two (or more) messages.1600 characters
Multimedia support:Only text and linksText, Image, GIF, HD video and links
Conversion rates:10-16% 30%
Cost (CallHub pricing in the US):$0.034 / text (long code)
$0.05/ text (short code)
$0.06/ MMS

Read Also: What’s The Difference Between MMS and SMS? Let’s Find Out 

Here is how easily you can set up an MMS campaign on CallHub and also preview it:

sms-marketing-best-practices-mms-media

Use promotional messages as part of your multichannel outreach.

Some campaigns need us to go the extra mile to ensure their audience is engaged. 

As part of this, marketers opt for multichannel communications, where they mix social media ads, calls, text messages, and more as different touchpoints for a campaign. For example, you might call a customer and tell them about your city’s latest real estate constructions. This message will be even more effective when you immediately follow up the call with a text message and links to the property. 

SMS marketing best practices for multichannel outreach include sending follow-up text messages after calls and using other outreach methods to reinforce your message. This best practice has led CallHub to create the ‘Text from Call Center’ feature, which allows you to immediately send a text message from within your calling campaign. 

Here’s an example of a follow-up text after outreach:

sms-marketing-best-practices-multichannel-outreach

Automate follow-ups based on actions: SMS marketing best practices

82% of customers want an immediate response to product and marketing-related questions. 

While no business can have a human respond immediately 24/7, they can set up text message autoresponders to engage customers. As the name suggests, text autoresponders are messages that are sent after a trigger. The trigger could be a missed call to a number, a keyword texted to a shortcode, etc. 

You can educate your audience about trigger words, and your texts will be ready to go out!

For example, if a customer wants to locate your office, you can ask them to send the keyword “LOCATION” to your shortcode number, and an automatic message with the location link will be sent to them.

sms-marketing-best-practices-automatic-follow-up

Here’s an example of how you can set up autoresponders on CallHub:

sms-marketing-best-practices-automated-replies

 Add text surveys to your marketing strategy: SMS marketing best practices

Sending text surveys to your audience is one of the top SMS marketing best practices. Text messages have a 209% higher response rate than calls, emails, or social media platforms. 

It is the best platform for conducting market research, learning what your customers like, and engaging with them to improve their consideration of your brand.

Text surveys can be conducted in two ways:

  • Using SMS Opt-in for inbound text surveys. With this method, you can use automated follow-ups when they text in a unique keyword to a shortcode.
sms-marketing-best-practices-opt-in-survey
  • Using peer-to-peer texts for outbound text surveys. Your texting agents can ask questions, and a customer can reply with answers. Agents can manually fill in the survey forms on the back end.

Pro-tip: On CallHub, agents can send saved replies and save time when texting hundreds of contacts.

Make opting out easy: SMS marketing best practices

One of the last SMS marketing best practices that I will leave you with is to make opting out of your text campaigns easy. 

Not only does this comply with regulations, but also:

  • It saves money that you would otherwise spend on outreach to uninterested contacts.
  • It saves your campaign from being marked as spam.
  • It saves your brand image from being associated with unwanted communications.

Always give your customers an option to stop receiving communications from you. Generally, SMS messages have a line at the end that says, “Reply STOP to unsubscribe.” It is a great way to maintain clean lists and make your campaign conversions more effective.

sms-marketing-best-practices-opt-out

SMS marketing best practices: What’s next?

You can begin your texting campaign now that you know the top 9 SMS marketing best practices. While these best practices will get great results, you can boost your campaign with the right texting tools.

Check out CallHub’s text messaging software. From SMS, MMS, peer-to-peer texting, and text opt-ins to advanced features like link shorteners and trackers – we have it all on a single platform. Sign up to CallHub today!

Featured Image Source: Fauxels

Shiksha Sharma Linkedin
Shiksha Sharma is a Content Marketer with over 5 years of experience in the B2B SaaS industry. She has extensively written about software that helps organizations work easily. Her areas of research include politics, nonprofits, advocacy, and business.