SMS is a much more personal communication channel, so by extension, it needs to be managed more carefully than most other channels. While metrics and monitoring for obvious dips in performance is something everyone needs to do, because of the strictness of enforcement on the SMS channel as a whole, preventative measures, and planning ahead of time in terms of strategy is a significantly safer bet if you want to keep things moving smoothly.
First things first, Treat your SMS subscribers like they are a VIP Customers, and by that we mean in favor of their time and attention. In short, you want to aim for a significantly higher read/click rate on SMS than typical marketing messages, as cell carriers are much quicker to engage spam filters on messages marked as junk repeatedly or even when a large number of “STOP” requests come in as Requests to “STOP” are counted as complaints.
This typically means you want to stick to very specific and very personal messaging, so things like transactional updates for shipping, specific back-in-stock notifications, or fulfilment messages such as event ticket delivery, etc.
This is, by no means, the only type of message you can send, but broad marketing messages are typically the ones that drive unsubscription rates, or go unread due to inopportune timing. These can come down the road once you’ve gotten things a bit more established, but especially at the start, aim for extremely high value messaging in order to ensure your subscribers stay subscribed.
Can you give me a quick example?
One of the most successful SMS campaigns we’ve seen was a back-in-stock notification, that was shoe size specific. In short, customers would be stuck waiting to buy a pair of cowboy boots in a relatively high demand shoe size, and this vendor offered to sign up for text alerts for when that shoe was back in stock in that specific size. When customers signed up for these alerts, even behind a disclaimer that it may be 60-90 days before they get a text, they still saw an influx of sign-ups trickle in. While a few hundred sign-ups across an entire website may seem not much, the kicker here is that the click through and sales rate on their SMS campaign was just below 60%.
Given that this was a relatively high-cost item, a 60% success rate on any campaign is incredible.
This may not apply to every product, but this kind of messaging ensures extremely limited reach while delivering very high value to the customer!