SMS marketing campaigns can be extremely cheap and effective. As we’ve seen in our recent series, they are not hard to set up and run, either.

Probably the greatest challenge you will face is a relatively simple one: how do you pack an effective sales message into just 160 characters – the length of a standard SMS text message? In this post we’ll look at some techniques you can use to be as concise as possible without losing any marketing punch.

The first thing to say, of course, is that you don’t have to be concise at all. TextMagic allows you to send concatenated text messages, and you can use up to 459 characters to get your message across.

That’s great if you’re sending a small number of messages, or you need to send detailed instructions or greetings to customers, colleagues or friends. But the long approach isn’t usually the best when it comes to bulk SMS marketing. The whole point of using text messages to pitch to your customer base is to present your target audience with a short, pithy text that gets your message across quickly and efficiently, and as far as possible recreates the experience of receiving an SMS from a family member or friend. If you make your customers scroll through a concatenated message of 300 or 400 characters, you’re going to lose many of them even before the halfway point.

All the same, you have a lot to say. How do you get the best possible results from just 160 characters?

The key is to focus on your core message, and nothing more. If you’re thinking of running an SMS marketing campaign it might be worth designing your offer with the medium of SMS in mind, rather than trying to make SMS fit an existing campaign. Try to focus on creating a simple offer, such as a limited-time discount on your most popular product.

Anything too complicated risks getting lost in 160 characters. On the other hand, a good, clear, simple offer with an obvious benefit and call to action is perfect for SMS. Here are a couple of SMS marketing messages that would probably work really well:

“Jones’ Jewellers SALE: 10% off all items until 5pm Tuesday!”

“Car need a service? Come to Davies’ Motors, Moston and get a FREE wash ‘n’ wax!”

Each one is a combination of brevity and classic copywriting techniques. Let’s have a look at what’s going on.

First, each message would be targeted at a specific, tightly defined audience. The first one would probably go out to existing customers of Jones the Jeweller, while the second might go either to former customers of Davies’ Motors, or at least to residents of the town where the business is based. This customer pre-knowledge is key to a successful SMS campaign: if the list you’re sending to has never heard of your business, you need to use part of your message to explain what and where it is. (Top tip: the easiest way to do that can be to include a web address).

Second, each message is delivering a clear, simple, easy-to-understand offer. Key offer words like FREE and SALE are capitalised (a very effective technique, but restrict it to one word per message, or you’ll lose the effect) and – in the first message – there is a clear time limit on the offer.

The second message starts with a question which is designed to provoke a clear response in the reader’s mind (either “yes, my car does need a service!” or “no, but it will do soon…” – after all, every car needs a service sooner or later).

So there we go: a short, clear message aimed at a defined audience who either know about your business already or which is able to discover and understand it quickly and easily. That approach combined with robust, proven copywriting methodology should help to ensure that you get the best possible results from your SMS marketing campaign.

Photo: Maggie Smith

In this new video I will show you how to collect mobile phone numbers from your website’s visitors using our mobile marketing sign-up forms.

You can use these forms to collect contacts to you mobile marketing database. All contacts will be inserted to groups. Once your database has some contacts you can send a group SMS in a few clicks to all your contacts.

In the previous four posts (see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) in this series we looked at how to set up and deliver an SMS marketing campaign with TextMagic, and how to interact with your customers when they responded. In this final post we’re going to look at some ideas for maximising your return on investment (ROI) from any SMS campaign.

The first thing we need to say is that the investment doesn’t really need to be very much, at least in cash terms. There are no fees for joining TextMagic or starting a campaign – you just pay for the text messages you send. So, if your campaign involves sending a single text to a thousand people on your marketing list, you’ll pay for a thousand texts.

How much you pay will vary depending on the country or countries your recipients are in. We price messages in TextMagic credits (for example, a single text sent to a phone in the UK costs 0.8 credits right now). You can find out how much credits cost on our SMS pricing page – as you’ll see, the first thing you can do to maximise your ROI is to buy credits in bulk, as we offer discounts of more than 30% on large purchases.

So what else can you do to maximise our ROI when you run a campaign? We’ve looked at quite a few tips in the previous posts, but here’s a summary and some useful bits of extra information:

1. Use a high-quality list. This is probably the number one piece of advice we’d offer. A good list won’t guarantee the success of an SMS campaign (or any sort of direct marketing campaign), but it’s the essential foundation you need. Probably the most valuable list you can use is also the cheapest – your database of existing customers. However, if you don’t have a customer list, or you want to expand your customer base with new leads, you can buy a list that includes mobile numbers and demographic information from many list brokers.

2. Base your campaign on a specific, interesting offer. SMS marketing works best when you have something concrete to offer – a competition with a decent prize, a sale on your most popular products, a new product you want to pitch to your customers, and so on. The best way of thinking about this is that you should want to run an SMS campaign because you have a great story to tell your customers. If you decide to run a campaign and then cast around for something to say, things might be harder. You might still have some success, but probably not on the same scale as if you’re offering something brilliant to an interested, targeted audience.

3. Write the message carefully. There’s not much point in having a great offer and a great audience if the message you send is weak or ineffective. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to spend some time carefully putting together the message you are going to use as part of your SMS marketing campaign. Standard SMS messages are 160 characters in length. You can fit an awful lot of information into those 160 characters if you think carefully about it. The main thing is to make your offer clear, focus on a key benefit, and ensure that your customer knows what he or she has to do to take advantage of the offer. Because SMS messages are sent as plain text, you can’t use any fancy fonts or decoration to drive your message home. The only thing you can do is use capital letters to emphasise certain words. This can work very well, but make sure you only do it sparingly or the effect will be lost and you will send your customers a message that looks like spam and is difficult to read. One final tip: before you send your message to your customer list, send it to your own phone so you can see what it looks like. Is it easy to read? Is the offer obvious?

4. Build loyalty with fast responses. If you’re offering your customers a chance to reply to your SMS marketing messages, make sure that you are polite, efficient and professional when you deal with their responses. Ideally, you should have a workflow in place that is designed to deal with common responses and questions. That way you can ensure consistency even if you are dealing with hundreds of customers and using multiple customer service representatives at your end. TextMagic offers you a robust, flexible and fast system for working with your customers via the medium of SMS. However, it will only ever be as good as the quality of customer care you put into it.

5. Think seriously about testing. A very popular way of increasing ROI in any kind of marketing campaign is to perform a split test. Let’s say for example that you have a list of 20,000 potential customers. You can start off by sending your message to just 200 of them. At the same time you can send a similar message with a slightly different offer to another 200. Which message and offer holds the best response? By using a small portion of your list to test the best approach you can be sure that when it comes to contacting everyone, you have a message and an offer that work. Testing does not have to be time-consuming or expensive, but in the long run it can deliver very substantial returns.

6. Make it part of a larger campaign. One of the beauties of using TextMagic to run an SMS marketing campaign is that you can design and run the project very quickly, sometimes in less than a couple of hours. However, you might find that you get more long-term value from TextMagic if you use it as one part of a larger marketing campaign. Basically, the secret of success is planning. Running a single isolated SMS campaign might deliver rewards, but in the long run you will probably achieve greater things if you embed it in a carefully strategised marketing campaign that encompasses several media over a considerable period of time. At the end of the day, it’s about deciding what is right for your business – an off-the-cuff, quick campaign that is very responsive to market demands, or something more long-term and considered.

So that’s it for our series on SMS marketing with TextMagic. We really hope you found it useful. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, or examples from your own experience, we’d love to hear them. We think SMS marketing is going to be an essential tool for millions of businesses over the next decade – and we want to help yours make the most of it.

In our previous posts in this series (part 1, part 2 and part 3) we’ve looked at how to plan, design and deliver an SMS marketing campaign targeted at a a defined group of customers.

But one of the great things about an SMS campaign is that it can be a two-way conversation. Instead of simply broadcasting messages to your list of customers, you can also get replies. That means you can deal with queries, run instant contests and handle customer feedback.

(Importantly, it also means you can also receive ‘stop’ messages from customers who no longer want to be on your list. It’s better to identify and delete those customers rather than continue to send them messages they don’t want, which is potentially illegal in some jurisdictions, and could in any case damage your brand.)

You manage replies by visiting the Reply Options page in your TextMagic control panel. Like all the other major pages in your control panel, it’s linked from the left hand nav. When you get there, it looks like this:

If you look carefully, you’ll see you have three broad options. First, you can direct SMS replies to the TextMagic server. This means you’ll be able to access them through either your control panel, TextMagic Messenger, your email account or (if you’ve set it up with your own web application) the TextMagic SMS API.

Second, you can choose to have replies sent to one of the mobile phones you have registered with TextMagic. This can be very useful, but beware: if you’re sending out hundreds or thousands of messages, dealing with a similar volume of replies on your mobile could be a difficult task! On the other hand, it does mean that your recipients get the message “from” your mobile number – so it’s ideal if you’re using TextMagic to send text messages to a relatively small number of friends, colleagues or important customers.

Third, you can use a Sender ID. When you do this, the “sender” field in the message your customers receive will contain a name, not a number. You might have had messages with Sender IDs yourself – for example, your phone company might have seny you a message that simply appeared to be from “Vodafone” or “O2″ or whatever. Sender IDs are great for branding – they look very professional. However, you can’t accept replies to Sender ID messages through TextMagic, and you have to apply for your chosen Sender ID in advance, in case someone else is already using it. (We automate the application process for you – just click the “apply for Sender ID link” on the Reply Options page.)

Replies in detail

Let’s have a closer look at how some of the reply systems work. If you choose to receive replies via the server, you’ll see from the screenshot above that you have three sub-options. You can choose just one option, or two or three if you wish.

First option: messages are sent to your online TextMagic inbox, which you access from the left hand nav of your control panel. It looks like this:

Messages are stored in your inbox until you delete them. As you can see, there’s a quick reply option that allows you to respond to your customers fast. In fact, all three options let you do this. The beauty of the TextMagic inbox is that it allows you to keep all your replies in one place, alongside all the other data you use for TextMagic. As such, we recommend that even if you have replies sent to your email address or to TextMagic Messenger, you also have a copy sent to your TextMagic Inbox.

Second option: have messages sent to TextMagic Messenger. If you don’t already use Messenger, you can download it (for Windows or Mac OS X) from the Downloads section of your control panel. It’s a handy desktop tool that lets you send and receive texts via TextMagic, but doesn’t require you to have the TextMagic control panel open in a browser. Here’s what the message inbox looks like:

Third option: have messages forwarded to your email inbox. This is useful because it helps you keep track of your campaign and on top of replies via your email application, which most people have open all the time – in other words, you don’t have to remember to log into the TextMagic control panel or TextMagic Messenger to check for replies. When messages arrive they look like this:

Replying to an SMS you’ve received via email is as quick and simple as if you were using the TextMagic control panel or Messenger. You just need to make sure that the email address you’re replying from is registered to send text messages via TextMagic (which you can do in your control panel, under the Email to SMS settings). Just hit reply, and you email application will set up an email to 07123456789@textmagic.com, where the number is the number from which the reply has been received.

The only thing you need to be a little careful with if you’re receiving replies via email is that you will only get them as fast as your webhost or mail provider can deliver them. If their mailserver is a little slow, you might get a delay. That shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s worth bearing in mind if you’re running SMS marketing campaigns that depend on being able to deal with customer responses quickly.

OK, we’re nearly done! In the next – and final – post in this series, we’re going to look at ways of maximising ROI from the SMS campaigns you run through TextMagic.