What Your Open Rates Say About Your SMS Marketing Campaign

Launching a new SMS marketing campaign is an exciting time. You’ve made the investment, you’ve produced the content, and you’ve got your subscriber list at the ready. The moment that the message sends, the excitement doesn’t dwindle as the countdown begins to see exactly how the campaign is received. Then it’s time to use the information gathered to design a bigger and better campaign the next time around.

There are a number of ways that you can look at the success of your campaign and see where you’re exceeding and where improvements can be made in the future. The first time you launch an SMS campaign, you may think that you have hit the jackpot with an enormous open rate. This will mean that your campaign has been a resounding success, right?

Surprisingly, an extraordinary open rate of up to 100% is not big news in the SMS marketing game. The open rate of text messages, as standard, is around 98%, give or take a 1% depending on which studies you look at.

The high open rate is one of the biggest benefits of text marketing, showing you that your audience is ready and waiting to hear your message. However, what this tells you about your SMS marketing campaign is actually very little, other than the fact that you message was seen and noted.

To get a better picture of your campaign success you need to take the open rate figure and weigh it up against the conversion rate – the number of people that did what you wanted them to do.

Open Rate vs Conversions Rate

If you send out 1000 messages as part of your campaign, then statistically, you can expect around 980 of them to be opened. That’s 980 potential customers who may or may not have read the content of your message. To judge the success of the campaign, you then need to see how many of those customers acted after viewing the text.

If 490 customers respond to your suggested option, such as taking advantage of a coupon offer, then your conversion rate for the people that opened your message would be 50%. This roughly correlates with the number of people that are expected to respond to a text offer, with research showing that 49% of people would be happy to respond to offers via text message.

So, what the near 100% open rate of SMS marketing is saying, is that you should be converting half of your subscriber list each time, according to the near 50% expected conversion rate.

While these are the averages, not all businesses are that lucky with their advertising campaigns. If your marketing is nowhere near a 50% conversion, despite the high open rate, then it’s time to reassess your strategy and hit back with new and improved content.

How Can You Improve Your Marketing Campaign?

SMS marketing lends itself well to creative marketing that can be tailored to fit the needs of your business as and when they change. From new ways to engage customers to better methods for sharing and gathering information, SMS techniques for marketing can offer up a solution.

If you find that your conversion rates are dipping, then utilizing the many features of leading SMS software is one of the best things you can do for your business. Luckily, there are an extensive number of features to explore.

A simple way to decide which features are right for your business, is to get a broader viewpoint and see what the features are able to achieve.

Here are five types of marketing feature that can be implemented into your SMS campaign:

The Urgency Creators

Creating a sense of urgency in your messages is a great tool for boosting conversion rates, giving your customers something to talk about and act upon. There are multiple ways you can create urgency, including the use of: coupons, contests, polls, and QR codes.

The Schedulers

Scheduling can speed up the process of sending your messages, help you plan future campaigns, and make sure that your texts are always sent at the right time. Top SMS software will offer you options for bulk SMS scheduling and contact grouping, so you can always keep track of your campaign dates and contact groups.

The Simplifiers

Streamlining your SMS campaign will take the pressure off your shoulders and make the whole process of keeping in touch with your subscribers a lot easier. Tools that you can utilize to simplify the process include: recurring messages, autoresponders, special occasion messages, and reminders for appointments.

The Managers

Management of your campaign is just as important as what you’re sending out to your subscribers. Poor management will impact your conversion rates which is why it’s essential to make use of the tools available, such as: email alerts, contact grouping, campaign analytics, call forwarding, and name capture.

The Integrators

Integration is key to reaching a wider audience and seamlessly managing your marketing across the board. An SMS marketing campaign can be integrated into social media and email, extending the reach of your advertising and addressing the needs of customers that prefer other forms of communication.

Improve Your Conversions with Creative Marketing

There’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple, but sometimes you need to get creative if you want to get the most back from the exceptional open rate of SMS marketing. Building brand loyalty, establishing brand awareness, and driving traffic to webpages or social media pages can all be achieved via SMS marketing software.

You can create punch loyalty cards, construct user-friendly digital kiosks, and bring the benefits of your marketing to your own app. A good open rate is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to marketing via text, everything you need for successful results every time is on hand, it just needs to be used to it’s full potential.

With SMS marketing, your open rate tells you that you have the potential of an outstanding reach, and the closer your conversion rate gets to the open rate, the better your campaign is performing.