How To Write A Good Marketing SMS?

Winback Team on Jul 22, 2021 12:01:50 PM

If carried out correctly, SMS marketing is one the most effective means of mass communication. However, it is important to make sure that the SMS you’re sending is relevant and useful to the recipients.

Your brand is being presented, so make sure that you are only interrupting people’s time with an apt reason to help them in some way or another. And naturally, the next question is how to convert these reads into purchases to propel your business.

To make sure your SMS marketing hits the target, we have summarized some of the most effective tips to write persuasive SMS copies. Follow this quick guide to know more about them.

Best Practices For SMS Marketing

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Before you move ahead with writing your SMS copies and sending them, it’s worth readdressing three main SMS marketing best practices:

• Choose a correct time
  Your expertly written SMS is of no match if you wake someone up at four in the morning.
• Bring value to the table
  Your clients give you access to the most personal way to reach them, so your campaigns should offer value to your subscribers in return.
• Shun irregular SMS campaigns
  You really don’t want to annoy your subscribers, but on the other hand, you also don’t want to forget your existence. So try to balance this out and maintain a reasonable regular SMS campaign schedule.

All of the tips discussed below rely on the condition that the above aspects are kept in mind and enacted upon properly. If you fail to recognize their value, none of the tips or hacks can provide you with reliable improvement since the recipients are likely to perceive your messages in a different context.

Let us now have a look at the list of top six tips curated especially for our audience to aid in improving their experience of engaging with your brand:

6 Tips To Help You Write SMS For Marketing

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In this section, we will have a look at some of the most effective yet low-effort tips that you can implement right away. While all of them are incredibly useful, you shouldn’t go for implementing each of them at once. Every SMS has a unique sender intent, and the proportion of using different tactics should vary accordingly.

Let’s have a look at the six tips that will help you write better SMS copies:

#1 Grab Attention

If you were writing a blog post, the suggestion to “grab attention” would be ‘go for a strong headline.’ An SMS has no such headlines, but the very first phrase should still grab attention to entice the recipient to read out the entire communication.

Due to the nature of the SMS, you should be aware that you are limited to only 160 characters per message. Also, you have to sync with the short attention spans of your subscribers. Tip number one is to get to the point right in the beginning and get the point across well.

Using grabbing opening words like “SALE” or “FREE” along with other power words is a timeless way of doing so.

Address the recipient and leverage the “what’s in it for me?” factor straight away to influence them to read not only the rest of the message but also grab the offer.

#2 Drop A Question

Your SMS messages need a call to action. This leads to conversations. You may send a great message to your subscriber about a promotion you know in which they are interested. But if you don’t try to make it easy for them to take advantage of it, the chances are that the messages will sit there, and opportunity will pass.

People look for clues as to what they are supposed to do next.

A strong directive can be the key to get a sale instead of your message simply narrating something. The best place for putting the CTA is at the end of the SMS. Here is an example of a good questionnaire which you can put at the end to attract your subscribers – “Thank you for choosing us, would you recommend us to a friend? Reply with ‘Yes’ or ‘No'”.

#3 Keep It Uncomplicated

The thumb rule to this is to ‘always’ keep your SMS copy uncomplicated. Drop all your linguistic garnishing and just focus on clarity. It is as simple as that; just because you can squeeze in a few more characters doesn’t mean you should. The key to making your SMS messages more precise is by trimming the excess of what you can get rid of without losing the essence of the SMS.

You can also use an URL shortener to save precious characters and an SMS length calculator from planning your text. The best way to describe it is to have a mindset of a boxer looking for KO instead of the one running a marathon. The ability to use as few characters and ideas is the key to driving conversions in SMS marketing.

#4 Add Urgency

While doing anything in life, people are prone to put things off until it is absolutely necessary. Making a deal or an SMS that seems urgent is an amazing way to get subscribers to act fast. Saying a deal ends in two days gives your recipients a real need to plan how they can take advantage of the sale as they read the message.

By doing such things, what you are doing is, you are changing their thought process, something like they can think, ‘I can’t make it today, so I will have to go tomorrow,’ and this finally gets planted in your subscriber’s mind. And they might as well decide to visit your store once!

#5 Personalize And Target

To become a good SMS marketer, you should be able to personalize SMS messages. This will directly help you to engage your readers. If you are not going to use demographics, psychographics, buyer persona, and analytics available at your fingertips, you are simply wasting your time and money. You should know your subscribers, what they like, what are their shopping habits, and other behavioral patterns that will help you to perfectly craft the targeted SMS.

By using a person’s name when addressing them, you are psychologically breaking down the impression of an impersonal barrier between you and your subscribers, making them subconsciously trust you. Even if the trust is only fractional, it can help you to distinguish from your competitors.

These personalized and targeted SMS lets the recipient believe that you value their needs. By sending such relevant SMS, you maximize your marketing potential and increase customer satisfaction.

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#6 Optimize Heavily

As you are very well aware of the fact that you don’t have a whole lot of space to get your SMS across. If you look at any texts from any established company, you will notice that they are short, precise, and to the point. Unlike email marketing, where you can write longer messages, here you cannot exceed more than 160 characters, which is all you get with SMS campaigns.

So now what you have to do is you have to use them wisely. And for this, you can always consider the following questions in your mind:

• Do you take full advantage of all the SMS marketing features?
  While writing a marketing SMS, you don’t have space to tell your subscribers all the details of the program, like how long it lasts. But what you can do is you can include a link to your website where all the details are laid out.
• What all relevant points do you need to include?
  You have to specifically cater to your subscribers’ needs.
• Are you sure that you are targeting the right people?
  You don’t have to send SMS to all the mobile devices on your list. You have to use segmentation to target users based on their interests and contact them at the correct time. It’s more cost-effective to connect with subscribers this way.

You might have noticed that the focus of all these tips lies in polishing your texts instead of the ideation. To be specific, coming up with ideas is comparatively easier than writing an SMS copy. A perfect copy would require you to establish relevance, value, spark curiosity, motivate action, and extend a personalized experience- all within 160 characters! These tips are focused on keeping you grounded and minimizing the chances of making any mistakes in the process of creating crisp SMS copies.

Wrap Up

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Now by the end, you know how to write a good marketing SMS. The more professional, personalized, to the point, and specific you are, the more effective your SMS messages will be and more involvement of subscribers, which will probably help you to enhance your business.

Here, the “Less is more” maxim fits perfectly, and you need to interweave it in all aspects of your SMS copywriting. Have you finalized an SMS marketing service provider yet? Check out Winback, the leading name in the world of SMS marketing.

Winback offers you four pricing options to choose from: Starter Tier, Ramp Tier, Growth Tier, and Executive Tier. You can select one of these plans depending upon your needs. The great thing about Winback is that once you signup for Winback’s plans, you can start recovering up to 34% of your store’s abandoned carts.

Also, you will see ROI up to 35X on every dollar that you spend on Winback’s SMS marketing plans. What more could one ask from an SMS marketing service provider? Go ahead and check out our website to know more about us. If you would like to discuss more, send us a message through the live chat option on our website. If you prefer communication via email, you can also drop us an email.

We hope this quick guide helps you make the most out of your SMS marketing campaigns in 2021 and beyond.

Topics: SMS Marketing