SMS text-based marketing campaigns can be highly successful in today’s world when done correctly. There are more smartphones in the world than there are people, and just about everyone out there has a phone in their pocket everywhere they go. Whatever other ramifications this has on society, it’s clear that this has provided endless potential for businesses that choose to go with SMS marketing campaigns in order to boost their brand and sales.
Once people become familiar with the general basics of SMS marketing and find some measure of success, they may want to move on to automated text marketing. Automation is the next logical step in that it’s basically like putting your SMS campaigns on autopilot. Here are four ways that you can get started with this automated method.
1: Find the Right Platform for Automation
The first way to get started here is to find an actual specific platform for text automation. You have to understand two things here.
One: Automated texts aren’t very beginner-friendly, which means you should have some experience with successful SMS marketing before going this route.
Two: You’re going to need a platform because you will need to set a series of automated parameters so that your SMS campaign actually runs on autopilot.
This isn’t something you’re going to be able to accomplish with some free Google tool or some social media platform tricks. You need a specific platform that allows you to set up your automation controls so that the campaigns will run successfully.
2: Curate Your Contacts
When you set up automated text features, you have to understand that these messages are going to be sent on their own after you’re finished setting everything up. So, your goal here should be to ensure that these messages are being sent out to your best contacts. In every single marketing campaign ever, you’re going to have a whole lot of numbers and contacts on your list that don’t pan out.
You’re going to start by having very slim conversions, and in time, after you build up list after list, you’re going to be able to save the contacts of those who are responsive. This is why it was mentioned earlier that automated text campaigns aren’t great for beginners. What you need here is a history of curating quality contacts so that you can build a solid list of contacts to send to automatically. Create segmented groups to target, and make sure they’re your best contacts.
3: Set Up Your Keywords and Additional Features
Keywords are still one of the most important aspects of any type of digital marketing campaign, especially an SMS campaign. The only difference here is that the keywords you’re using in your SMS marketing aren’t for ranking on search engines. Instead, they’re for appealing to your contacts.
The general principle here is that the right keywords stand out to your contacts because those are the keywords they would otherwise use to search. Simply put, the right keywords make your contacts think that you’re solving their problem, and thus they’re far more likely to click through and engage with your messages. Make sure you put some real time and effort into the keyword hunt here, and then you can program the SMS platform with all of these keywords so that things work on autopilot.
4: Choose the Right Scheduling
Another great thing about an automated platform is that you can set up an actual schedule here. You will still have to do the research and determine when it’s the best time to reach out to your contacts. Extracting data over time will help you to determine these factors. Though after you have determined such factors, you can set up the automated platform to send out messages on a defined schedule.
If you need to send it out every Saturday at noon, for instance, this is data that you can plug into the automated platform so that the texts go out automatically. This means that your marketing campaign can run on its own after you set it up.
In Conclusion
It’s not hard at all to set up an automated text campaign. The most important thing on which to focus here is finding the right platform to facilitate this sort of campaign. After that, it’s all about setting your parameters.
