How can SMS marketing help you retain customers?

SMS is a channel. We communicate through channels, and each has positioning in our heads. Why did Microsoft need to build and launch Teams when it owned Skype? Insta has a chat function, but why do we defer to other chat apps? We categorize these tools in our simple brains. Similarly, we need to treat SMS as the channel it is positioned to be, then think about the recipient humans in terms of the message that will go into their brains. This means we must understand their cognitive traits to create *resonant* messaging. Personality is who they are, motivation is what causes them to act, and mindset is how they process information. Know these three, and you're on your way to both getting into their brains and trigger a response.

When it comes to SMS marketing, the name of the game is personalization. SMS is both too expensive and too high risk for breaking consumer trust to send out either 1. huge missives to a massive audience or 2. sending out things that aren't relevant. It's a quick way to get unsubscribed straight to blacklist status. So how do you avoid this? Know your audience and have the data that tells you where these people fall. Do you own a cupcake shop? Make sure you tell your return customers about a flash cupcake sale. New customers? make sure to thank them for coming in with a coupon for a free cookie! Did they order a wedding cake? Send them an offer for bachelor/bachelorette cupcakes. Make it short, sweet, and as relevant as you can.

SMS marketing can significantly boost customer retention. Firstly, it's incredibly direct—texts have a 98% open rate, ensuring your message is seen. Personalization is key here; customized messages based on purchase history or preferences can make customers feel valued and understood. This strategy, when combined with exclusive offers or early access to sales, fosters a sense of VIP treatment. Moreover, SMS can facilitate feedback collection, allowing you to swiftly address concerns or suggestions, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction. Regular, but non-intrusive, SMS communications keep your brand top-of-mind, gently nurturing a long-lasting customer relationship.

Tailoring messages to specific customer groups based on their behavior and preferences is a game-changer. Use analytics to refine your segments continually. Adjust your criteria based on campaign performance, and you'll fine-tune your strategy for optimal results. It boosts engagement, CTR, and customer retention. But compliance is critical, and a robust understanding of data protection laws is vital to ensure you are not spamming the customers & ending up being on their blacklist.

Segmenting your customers in advertising is key. Categorize them based on behavior, demographics, or preferences to deliver more targeted and personalized marketing messages.

It is crucial to prioritize privacy and respect user preferences while engaging in SMS marketing. Obtaining customers' permission and giving them an easy option to opt-out is always a good practice. Feedback is most important! Regularly seeking insights through surveys and rewarding customer input enhances loyalty and service quality.

Regular feedback helps you know the individual needs of your customers, more problems to solve thorugh products or services, creating better experience and ultimately, retain them for long. SMS marketing can be a great tool to collect feedback through short surveys and polls.

In advertising, seek permission for data usage and ask for feedback to respect privacy and improve customer experiences, enhancing trust and relevance.

Best way to ask for customers' permission is to add a check box on the details submission page. Let customers decide if they want your product updates or not. Just a small tip if you want people to select your SMS marketing check box ticked then provide them some kind of welcome discount. It will increase your customer's acquisition rate.

This is a huge deal in today's business environment, with all the privacy laws and customer awareness. In all campaigns I've worked on, our team has included a clearly visible opt-out button for the customers who aren't inclined to receive promotional content and tailored deals. It's our job to make the customer want to keep receiving these promotional deals and messages- with killer copy and irresistible offers.

Ask 10 marketers to define "personalization" and see what you get across responses. Personalization often contradicts with the bro science of "consistent message across channels, touchpoint, and devices." Pick any person on the street, how likely is that person to have the same musical/food/movie/book/romantic partner taste as you? Exactly, then why do we insist on showing the same messages to everyone? Personalization is not merely using their first name (this helps), it is tailoring messaging to their cognitive traits, because research (mine) shows that this greatly improves the probability they will both see the message and act on it. Is this not the purpose of marketing in the first place? Know their PsyCom profiles, people.

Utilizing automation and personalization in advertising streamlines processes and tailors content to individual preferences, enhancing engagement and campaign effectiveness.

You must've seen those "Send me a Hi! in my DMs" or "comment Hi below" posts all over social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. Those posts are made possible with the help of messenger automation. Based on the user input, a canned reply can be auto-sent on behalf of your brand, 24x7! Once a user's details are filled in, creating personalised outreach messages becomes simple to do. (You may train an in-house team or use a 3rd party specialised agency.)

It is important to keep the SMS short to increase engagement. A short catchy sentence followed by a link in most cases is what marketers use to get attention and engagement.

In advertising, brevity is powerful. Clear, concise messages are more memorable and effective in conveying your brand's value.

SMS marketing/WhatsApp Marketing is all about customer reengagement. You want to make the customer remember your brand and it's offerings. Share funny, relatable short form messages and get straight to the point after. In the case of WhatsApp, you can also utilise visual media to show your point better.

This is the "what" vs. "why" conversation. The campaign manager of a US presidential candidate said, "we have identified 162 variables in every ad. We multivariate test, and have hundreds of thousands of variations. We know what works, but not why." Humans make decisions based on emotion, which happens in the non-conscious part of the brain. In order to know what to say, you need to know their psychological profiles (the why). When you build messaging based on who they are and what moves them emotionally (not guessing), then you can accurate test and measure the resonance of your messaging. Anything else is just testing guess against guess. Welcome to the physics of human behavior.

Testing and optimizing campaigns is essential in advertising. Analyze data, make adjustments, and refine strategies to improve performance and ROI.

This is where the trained in-house team/ specialised agency's major work comes in. You need to perform pre-market A/B testing, deploy the planned marketing content, monitor performance, optimise it, and re-launch it (at times) to use your customer base to the full extent. Sometimes, even a small change in the copy used, or the visuals used, can make a large change in user retention and ad performance.

We helped an agency with a pitch for a shoe brand you may have heard of. We identified two distinct groups for a particular running shoe: those concerned with reaching their goals, and the other primarily concerned with preventing failure. The brand was saying "these shoes will get you to the finish line." This was speaking only to the former group, the obvious message. We added two words to the end of the copy, triggering the latter group, and sales went up 30%. "...this time."

One thing I would like to add is that you should always run email and SMS marketing at the same time to get best results from your campaign. Although email open rate is low but still it's very effective and all big brands still use email channel to promote their products.

An anecdotal insight but I think still relevant and applies to other businesses is Athletic Brewing’s SMS strategy. As soon as I submitted my order I received a text asking if I’d like to join for deals and early notifications of special releases. I immediately signed up and have order 3 times in the span of a couple months because of a message via text. Most were about new beers they were releasing and the fact that I was first to know and be able to order. Another was about a sale going on. They’re informative, but short and sweet. Great strategy!