If you haven’t heard of a drip campaign yet, let us be the first to inform you that you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to provide value to your audience and increase sales for your business.
A drip campaign “is a communication strategy that sends, or ‘drips,’ a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time.” Ordinarily, drip campaigns are associated with email, but done right, they can be quite effective in SMS marketing, as well.
Before getting started, let’s cover the basics. In order to implement your first SMS marketing drip campaign, you will need a couple of things. First of all, you will need a subscription to a business texting service- but not just any business texting service. You will want to make sure that your chosen service has the right features!
Here are a few features, offered by Text My Main Number, that are must-haves for any SMS marketing drip campaign:
- Auto-reply- This feature will enable you to send automated, pre-written replies to customer texts based on the identification of certain keywords.
- Scheduled Texting- Write and schedule messages to be sent out on a specific day and time in the future. Timeliness is a huge consideration to make when planning any SMS marketing campaign, and this feature will help your business stay on track and send messages when they have the best chance of converting.
- API Access- Integrate your current CRM (customer relationship management) tool with your texting platform to keep your process streamlined and organized.
No matter which business texting service you choose, you will definitely want to be sure that you have these features, or their equivalent, before planning an SMS marketing drip campaign!
Once you have your business texting service in place, it’s time to get started!
How To Plan An Effective Drip Campaign With SMS Marketing
- State your objective/goal.
As with any marketing campaign, it’s crucial to determine beforehand exactly what your goals are going to be. In other words, what do you hope to achieve with your drip campaign?
One common goal for this type of campaign is to ‘increase sales.’ However, you will want to make any stated goal as specific as possible. If increasing sales is the goal, you also should determine two additional things: what is your target percentage of increase and how much time do you plan to take?
An example of this goal might look something like this:
“With this SMS marketing drip campaign, we hope to increase sales by 10% over the next 3 months.”
The above stated goal is specific and time-sensitive which will serve as an ideal jumping off point. Everyone on your team should be made aware of this goal in order to plan an effective campaign.
- Determine which segment(s) of your
audience you plan to target.
If your business caters to multiple different personas, you will want to plan separate drip campaigns for each. A customer persona is a fictional character that represents a segment of your business’ target audience; some details that should be included in your customer persona include demographic, behavior and their potential motivation(s) for buying your business’ goods and/or services.
This is where the API access feature of your business texting service comes into play. By integrating your texting capabilities with your current CRM, your business will be able to accurately identify exactly which customers to target with specific messaging. Hence the need for multiple drip campaigns.
For instance, if you run an ecommerce business that sells clothes, you wouldn’t try to sell a man’s shirt to a woman. Chances are high that she is looking for women’s clothes and therefore, a drip campaign that targets women with men’s items is very unlikely to convert at your desired rate.
However, don’t get discouraged! You can put together a uniform drip campaign and then make the necessary tweaks for each of your business’ customer personas. Then, using your API access feature, you can plan to have the right drip campaign sent to the exact right customers.
- Continue to provide value.
When writing your drip campaign messages, keep in mind that you should still continue to provide additional value aside from promoting items or offering deals. By additional value, we mean providing content in your SMS marketing that is educational, entertaining, and/or inspiring.
The logic of this is that customers are more likely to spend money with businesses that they know, like and trust. By avoiding never-ending sales attempts and instead, providing useful content to your audience, you will strengthen your relationship with the customer and increase your chances of making a sale. The more your customer trusts you, the better chance you have of creating solid brand loyalty.
An SMS marketing drip campaign is all about the long game. Sending out multiple messages that are in some way connected to one another and serve a common goal will keep your business top-of-mind with customers. Don’t feel the need to make every message a hard sales pitch.
- Don’t forget your CTA!
Within each message in your SMS marketing drip campaign, there should be a CTA (call to action). In other words, what do you want the customer to do after reading your text? Your CTA should be directly related to the goal that you set at the beginning, either specifically articulating your goal or an action that will move the customer further down your sales funnel.
Example:
- “Click here to grab a pair of our newly restocked styles before it’s too late!”
Or…
- “For more information on our available services, check out our website! [link]”
Both of these examples are asking the customer to perform a specific action. The first one works directly towards your business’ hypothetical goal of “increasing sales by 10% in the next 3 months.”
On the other hand, while the second example doesn’t explicitly encourage a sale, it will prompt the customer to visit your website where they may decide to make a purchase after browsing a bit.
Both CTA’s will get you closer to achieving the ultimate goal of your SMS marketing drip campaign… just with two slightly different approaches!
Pro tip: if you decide to go with the second example in your texts, be sure that your website is optimized to continue moving customers down the sales funnel. This will ensure that you’re making the most out of each SMS marketing campaign.
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Now that you have an idea of what you need to plan an effective drip campaign with SMS marketing, you’re ready to get started! If you still haven’t taken the first step, there’s good news. You can try out Text My Main Number’s platform for free for two weeks! Get started today!
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