Are you wondering how to get more out of your texting campaigns? Wonder no more with these seven effective SMS strategies.
To paraphrase Pablo Picasso, “good marketers copy, great marketers steal.”
To be clear, we’re not talking about copying ads or articles word for word and stealing images without giving credit. That’s shady, illegal, and not a great way to make friends.
What we’re talking about is taking a great idea and making it your own.
We’d argue that half of marketing is knowing what’s possible: once you know what you can achieve, it’s much easier to build an optimal strategy.
While there are tons of articles highlighting real-world examples of effective email marketing and social media advertising campaigns, there’s not as much out there on effective SMS.
So, instead of reinventing the text messaging wheel and wasting money on guesswork, here’s what some of the top companies we work with are doing with their text marketing strategies.
(You can see more real-world examples by browsing our full library of success stories.)
Listed by NBC as one of the best sunglasses to shop in 2020, Toroe Eyewear is a direct-to-consumer brand that’s gone from strength to strength.
Part of its success comes from its marketing team’s ability to turn small investments like $45 into $7,000 in sales in 30 days. (Yes, you read that right.)
Using our Mobile Sign-Up Widget to advertise a 10% discount, Toroe Eyewear generated $7,028 in revenue in a month. That’s a 156x return on its text message marketing channel.
When people visit Toroe’s website, they see the following popup.
When they tap on the “Click here to text” call to action, it opens their native text messaging app with Toroe Eyewear’s phone number and keyword prefilled. (A keyword is a phrase or word people text to a number to sign up to receive future messages.)
Not only did this simple popup increase the conversion rate by 200%, but it also grew its text marketing subscriber list by 22%.
Jurassic Quest (JQ) is the largest exhibition of life-size, moving, museum-quality dinosaurs in North America. Due to COVID, it transitioned to a drive-thru format.
Typically a hands-on experience, JQ needed a way to offer visitors an element of interaction. That’s where texting came into play. Visitors can text park ranger Marty—a dinosaur expert—their dinosaur questions.
What’s the takeaway here for businesses that don’t travel around the country with animatronic dinosaurs? Response rates to texts are 7.5x higher than email.
Whether you’re an e-commerce store looking to add an element of conversational commerce or a professional services firm that wants to offer text-based customer service, people want to text you.
It’s why in 90 days, JQ received close to 4,000 questions.
Email and SMS marketing is a winning combination: with multiple mediums to choose from, customers can engage with your business on their preferred channels.
Blue Baker, a multi-location restaurant in Texas, is an excellent example of this in practice. Instead of making an unnecessary either-or decision, it combines the broad reach of email and text messages 98% open rate.
The restaurant first sends out an email promotion and then, about two days later, follows up with a text.
This strategy increased the number of coupon redemptions by over 162%.
The Warehouse Sale is a pop-up store that travels across the US, offering brand-name shoes at steep discounts.
One of the most important features the team needed was an easy way for visitors to its website to provide their phone numbers.
With SimpleTexting, it built a web form and embedded it on the store’s homepage. The results speak for themselves with subscriber list growth of 100%.
The lesson from the Warehouse Sale is that to have an effective SMS channel, you need to focus on capturing as many cellphone numbers as you can.
It’s essential to create a sense of exclusivity and anticipation when sending effective SMS marketing campaigns.
Matt Davis from Whisker Seeker knows this, and it’s why he created a MegaDeals program that offers first-access to SMS subscribers to deals and promotions. It centers around a monthly MegaDeal promotion.
According to Matt, the result is people actively waiting to receive the text from Whisker Seeker each month. This approach equals:
Baby Tula is one of the leaders in the baby carrying industry. It’s earned rave reviews, including features in Wired to People. There are even Facebook groups dedicated to it, with hundreds of thousands of members.
It uses our text messaging service to send messages about new product drops. It now has thousands of customers signed up for text alerts.
It’s a strategy that works incredibly well: with just one SMS campaign, Baby Tula made enough sales to drive a 1,668% ROI.
Last, but certainly not least, Year Round Brown (YRB) increased revenue by 20% with text promotions.
YRB is the largest locally owned tanning brand in South Dakota, with 10 locations and plans to open more. It was another one of the countless businesses impacted by COVID.
Stay-at-home orders pushed out its biggest sale of the year several weeks. Anxious to make up for lost time, the YBR team turned to text message promotions.
We’ve shown before that using images in your texts can improve CTRs. It’s particularly crucial if you’re in a highly visual space like tanning.
YRB uses MMS messages–text messages with engaging multimedia content like photos, videos, and animations–to send a graphic highlighting its 50% off tanning offer. Here’s an example of one of its MMS messages.
It’s well-documented that people spend more time on their mobile devices than ever before and that SMS messages are an excellent way to reach them.
But, because of the 160-character limit of SMS, people often think there’s nothing more to it than “sending a text.” As you can tell from the seven examples above, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you’re feeling inspired–and eager to learn more–we recommend browsing the rest of our Navigating SMS blog, which is chock-full of helpful resources.
Drew Wilkinson is the Head of Marketing at SimpleTexting. Drew has more than a decade of experience managing successful integrated marketing programs to build brands, raise awareness, and generate demand.
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