SMS Marketing Guide for 2023

SMS Marketing

We use SMS as part of our monthly marketing strategy but we don’t consider it a main marketing channel.

Below we will expand on the two campaign types that work well for us and the type of campaign that does not work well for us.

Custom Offers

What works for us is sending a specific offer. We use coupon codes to track the effectiveness of each SMS campaign. So if the offer is 20% off a specific product or category, we send it only to those that have shown interest in this category. The offer must be unique from any promotion going on the website.

Free Gifts

The second type of SMS campaign that works well for us is creating a free gift with purchase offer and sending it with an image that shows the free gift. This shows the product they will receive and it increases the click through rate on the text message leading to more recipients arriving on our landing page.

Equally important is to create a landing page experience that works well on mobile since they will be coming through from a mobile device.

Unsuccessful

What we see not work is sending the same offer you send via email and then also sending it in SMS format. We have not seen this be worthwhile. If you are running a site wide sale, and you’re sending an email then it doesn’t make sense to also send an SMS.

Your attribution will get muddled and you are not creating a perceived unique offer. You’re simply double messaging the current promotion.

These are our best practices for using an SMS campaign approach.