We are constantly touting the benefits of Text Message Marketing: immediacy, open rates, response rates, customer engagement, lead generation, etc. However, as with any marketing tool, there are a few ‘best practices’ to ensure that you are making the most out of text message marketing for your business.
One big consideration is the timeliness of your messages. In other words, how do you know exactly when to send texts to maximize results? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this challenge. The optimal time to send text message marketing will depend largely on your business’ audience.
But don’t worry- we won’t leave you hanging! Read on for some tips to use as a jumping off point to nail the timing of your text message marketing.
Timing Is Everything: 4 Timeliness Tips for Text Message Marketing
- Stick to normal business hours.
As a general rule, we recommend staying within normal business hours for your text message marketing efforts. Unlike other channels, such as email, text messages are immediate. In fact, 90% of text messages are opened within just three minutes of being received. In comparison, the overall open rate for emails is just 20%.
Therefore, if you’re sending texts to customers late at night, for example, they probably won’t even see them right away. Or worse, the notification will wake them up! The bottom line is that sending text message marketing outside of normal business hours will probably be ineffective at best or worse, intrusive.
- Consider the content of your message.
The proper time to send any given text message marketing also depends on its contents. For instance, if you are aiming to encourage a sale with a text, consider when your audience is most likely to be making a buying decision.
One obvious example of this tactic is predicting mealtimes or meal planning for restaurants. If your restaurant wants to offer a promotion for dinner specials to SMS marketing subscribers, then you might want to send that message around late afternoon- when many people are considering their dinner plans for the night.
Other types of messages will go out at different times. Remember how we said earlier to stick to normal business hours? Well, like many rules, that one has some exceptions. For instance, if your business sends texts triggered by a specific action, like payment confirmations or package shipment information, the text can be sent whenever that action occurs.
Another common reason for sending texts to customers is appointment or payment reminders. In this case, you will want to send your first reminder within a couple of days of the appointment or payment due date, and then once more 24 hours ahead of time if no action occurred after the first reminder.
Whatever your reason for sending texts to customers, consider the content as your first clue for what time and day will render the desired result.
- Know your audience.
This is key to any content marketing, but in the context of this article, we mean knowing (or rather, predicting) the schedule of your audience. Knowing what your audience is likely to be doing at any given point will help you to decide when they are most likely to be available to perform the desired action in your text.
For instance, if your target audience consists of young moms or moms with young children, then you know that mornings are probably pretty busy for them. Between getting everyone fed, washed and off to school and work, many families are on the run from 7 AM to 10 AM. Therefore, they might not have the time to give any attention to your text message marketing during those hours.
If you run an ecommerce site or any business that caters to customers from all over, you will also want to consider the location of your audience. This is where splitting your subscriber list into organized segments will really come in handy. Perhaps you have subscribers in New York, California and everywhere in between. In this case, you might want to segment your subscribers based on location. Otherwise your timing will be spot on for some subscribers, but miss the mark for others.
Accurately predicting the daily schedule of your text message marketing subscribers would be pretty impossible, but if you know your audience you can make an educated guess, as in the above examples. You can then use that information to inform the timeliness of your text message marketing efforts.
5. Don’t be afraid to test.
A/B testing is your business’ best bet to determine the timeliness of your text message marketing. As we stated earlier, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, so when you are first starting out, there may be some trial and error.
First, you need to determine what your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will be when testing different times and days. In other words, what do you want customers to do and what insights will indicate success or failure? If you are sending messages with a link to a landing page, for instance, you might want to consider click-through rate as a KPI. Or if you offer mobile coupons, then the redemption rate would be a reliable KPI.
Then, try formulating the exact same message and sending it at two different times or at the same time on different days. Examine the results, and run another test. You should do this a few times to make sure that your findings are reliable.
Running A/B tests and carefully examining KPIs will be the final step in finding out exactly what works for your audience! Don’t be afraid to “fail” when running these tests. Low response or engagement with one version of your message will still give your business valuable information that will help you get it right the next time!
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The immediacy of text message marketing is one of the things that makes it so effective, but it also enforces the idea that timing is everything! Use these tips to get it right and start seeing big results from your next campaign! If you are ready to start taking advantage of all that text message marketing has to offer, start your 14-day free trial with us today!
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