Online SMS has become more and more relevant sue to the large boom in mobile phone usage and while online SMS is not only super simple to use (if you’ve sent a group text message you are 99% trained up on online SMS marketing) and great for delivering high conversions, there are too many business owners and marketers who make some fundamental mistakes that if corrected would give a major boost to an already high conversion rate.
In this article, I’ll outline the 3 most common mistakes people make when using online SMS.
No lead generation campaign
A strategy that most business owners will use is to take their existing database of customers and migrate them over into their SMS list, nothing wrong with this, this is something you should absolutely the problem is that they fail to ask for permission to do so.
If you are going to migrate your customers over please make sure you ask them first otherwise you could end up in legal trouble.
Unfortunately, this is where it stops, in essence you are using the same old customer database to drive new sales over time you will get people unsubscribing which means reduced sales volume.
The solution is to set up an online SMS lead generation campaign – this ensures that your business will continue to drive fresh new leads day in and day out.
“Having an online SMS lead campaign is like having a sales person delivering new customers 24/7” – Angus B, SMSPapa.com.au.
If you have set up a great offer and have properly segmented them into specific groups you will notice an incredible inflow of new sales over time.
Let’s take a look at crafting a powerful offer.
Weak offer
For the business owners and marketers who are smart enough to set up an online SMS lead generation campaign the next problem is making an offer that is easy to refuse, this obviously reduces the number of subscribers that are added to your list and ultimately sales.
The solution here is to think about the different types of offers that would be highly attractive to specific segments of your market.
This part is worth repeating, one of my favorite foods is chocolate fudge, but when I go fishing if I were to load my hook with chocolate fudge I’m going to either:
- Catch the wrong fish, or;
- Catch no fish at all
The bait you use to catch the fish matters, the species of fish you catch is dependent on the bait you use.
I think you now know the importance if using the correct bait.
If you are a local health club, you will have many different types of “species” or types of customers and each will respond differently depending on what type of “bait” or offer you use.
Inside the health club you may have:
- Bodybuilders
- Power lifters
- Yoga
- Runners
- Sports specific
- Rehab
- SPIN classes, etc.
What do you think you would offer to a bodybuilder? You would likely offer them muscle gainer-type products, you would not offer this to a runner.
Think about the types of offers that would appeal to the different types of customers you have. With the help of companies like Emotive you can add this to your online SMS lead generation campaign and you will notice your SMS list growing with hungry new prospective customers.
No segmentation
In this section we are going to combine the previous section of offers and seeing how to best use them with segmentation.
Once you have an online SMS lead generation campaign set up and an offer you will need to funnel those people into specific contact groups within your online SMS platform.
Most businesses will unfortunately have one giant list of customers and will send out random offers the problem with this strategy is you will get a lower conversion rate and a higher unsubscribe rate.
Unsubscribes aren’t necessarily bad, you definitely do not want people on your list who will never buy but using the above strategy will push away actual customers.
If you are a supplement store and you send out a promotion for weight gain you will automatically become irrelevant to people who want to lose weight and when it comes to online SMS messaging people become quickly intolerant of receiving too many irrelevant messages and start to see you as spam, increased unsubscribe rates are sure to follow.
Let me just say that it is far better to plan your strategy and the moving parts out in advance as it is very difficult to change it down the track.
Here is a better idea. Let’s use the example from the health club owner from the previous section.
Inside the health club we have:
- Bodybuilders
- Power lifters
- Yoga
- Runners
- Sports specific
- Rehab
- SPIN classes, etc.
Create 14 groups for each customer segment for example “Bodybuilders Group A” and Bodybuilders Group B”.
Now create an A/B offer split test by creating 1 offer for each group, you should have 14 offers in total.
Now send each group one offer.
Look at the results.
Take the losing offer and replace it with another offer and try to beat the results from the previous winning offer.
Keep going until you have a collection of proven offers that consistently deliver you high conversions and add them to your next year’s promotional calendar.
Conclusion
To summarize we now have:
- Learned to importance of having an online SMS lead generation campaign to help you bring in a flow of new customers.
- Learned the importance of crafting a compelling offer that targets specific customer segments.
- Learned the key importance of building an online SMS lead generation system that segments those customers into highly relevant groups while developing a collection of proven offers to increase customer conversions.
