The Basics of Effective Lead Segmenting for SMS Campaigns

More and more people are choosing to opt-in to SMS marketing every day, but their reasons are very varied. In a recent report, 29.9% of customers opted-in to receive coupons, 7.3% to get information, and 6.7% to get event notifications.

If your business has been growing its subscriber count for a while now, then you’ll very likely have a varied mixture of leads; from those that just signed up for a new coupon to those that wanted information, there are countless reasons why your lead signed up, which is both good and bad.

The good side is that you have a healthy mix of leads that have the potential to be converted into customers, the bad side is that a lot of the leads want different things. This poses a problem when trying to create marketing campaigns, as what will be effective for one set of leads may just cause another set of leads to opt-out.

This is where the solution of lead segmentation comes into the picture to offer businesses a much more effective way of running their SMS campaigns. You can’t please everyone, but you can up your chances of pleasing the majority of people.

How Can You Segment Your Leads?

The basic principles of lead segmentation are very simple, it involves splitting your leads into groups to better optimize your marketing campaign. Luckily, the method for segmenting them is just as easy to get to grips with as the concept.

The best SMS marketing software will come readily equipped with options for lead segmentation. Through your software, you’ll be able to split your contacts into different custom groups. This gives you great control over your campaign, but of course, just splitting a group is not going to suddenly increase your conservation rates, it needs to be done right.

What is the Best Way to Segment Your Leads?

The first step towards an effective SMS marketing campaign with lead segmentation is to decide how you’re going to split your groups up for the best results. There are a number of factors that you can consider when segmenting your groups, including:

• The products or services that they’re interested in
• When they last made a purchase
• The topics that they’re interested in
• What products they normally purchase
• How engaged they are with your business

There’s no 100% correct way to split your leads, it all depends on the exact service that your business is providing, and what you believe should be selected as the areas of most interest. You can segment your leads in one way, or multiple ways, again, depending on your business needs.

Just simple segmentation, like creating two groups for the leads who have purchased recently and those that haven’t, can help you to better tailor your marketing to the individual, not just the entire subscriber lists as a whole.

What Are the Benefits of Effective Lead Segmentation?

On average, 18-24 year olds receive 1,831 texts a month and 25-34 year olds receive 1,130 texts a month, so a handful of marketing texts are only going to make up a small part of an inbox, which means that they need to stand out.

Lead segmentation helps to make every text you send more personal to your leads, which in turn, increases the chances of that lead turning into a customer. While there are many benefits to lead segmentation, here are three of the main ones:

1. Narrows Your Target Audience
Addressing every service that your business offers in a text and then attaching a coupon, contest, or poll doesn’t make for a snappy text that is going to intrigue the reader. By segmenting your leads, you can cover what matters to that particular audience, and increase your chance of engaging them.

2. Focuses Your Marketing Efforts

Designing a perfect market strategy only for the results to be lower than expected because half your leads aren’t interested in what you’re offering is frustrating and very avoidable. SMS lead segmenting focuses your marketing efforts more directly, improving the chances of a marketing campaign being successful.

3. Enhances the Value Given

When a message is personalized, it provides much more value. If the texts you’re sending offer something that your leads want, then not only do they get more value, but so does your business.

Ways to Make Lead Segmentation Effective in Your SMS Campaigns

To get the full benefits of lead segmenting, the process starts with creating the right groups, but once those groups have been created, you can go one step further and personalize your content for a much better response.

Here are three of the easiest ways that you can get better results from your SMS campaign with different groups:

1. Localize the Content

Grouping your leads by location is a great way to enhance the personalization of each text that you send and get your leads to relate to the message. Localizing the content with colloquialisms and locations will make the message seem more familiar.

With location segmenting, you can also promote services or products in local areas, which leads will be more likely to visit/interact with. Through top SMS marketing software, you can even use local numbers in your campaigns.

2. Re-phrase Your Message

By optimizing your campaign towards what your leads enjoy or the products that they’re more likely to purchase, you can tailor the message to them and use keywords that are more likely to get a reaction.

3. Introduce Group-Specific Deals

Using group-specific deals targets what your customers want and gives them something of value, which is great for improving customer satisfaction. Tailoring your offers, promotions, and deals to each group, or even offering coupons to leads that haven’t purchased products in a while, is a more efficient way of focusing your marketing efforts.

Lead segmentation is an easy way to get more out of your marketing campaign and improve your return on investment. By locating which leads need specific attention and which leads are more likely to make a purchase or get involved with a contest, you can up your SMS marketing game, and give more back to your customers.