When launching a new SMS text message marketing campaign, there are a few ways to gauge its success: engagement, donations received, and optimization metrics collected and easily accessible on the Tatango platform. You don’t have to do anything to see open rates, click-through rates, and other campaign data. Tatango does it all for you.
In this blog post, you’ll learn three ways Tatango helps optimize your campaign and why it’s a mistake not to take advantage of them. Keep reading to learn about some optimization mistakes we commonly see and how to avoid or fix them.
How Campaigns and Nonprofits Benefit from SMS Fundraising
A whopping 83.72% of the world’s population uses a smartphone, which has helped interaction and engagement of SMS fundraising greatly surpass that of other forms of outreach, such as email newsletters and direct mail. SMS text message fundraising has a 99% open rate, 90% of text messages are opened within just three minutes of receipt, and 78% of consumers say SMS is the fastest way to reach them.
Technology and innovation provide more flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness. With text messaging, it’s possible to raise more money and do more in less time without sacrificing message quality. Text message fundraising can effectively reach thousands or even millions of people at once and is the perfect channel for campaigns that share time-sensitive promotions and information. The evidence overwhelmingly favors SMS text messaging as the most efficient way to raise funds.
With Tatango’s platform on your side, your campaign can trust your data, subscriber lists, and donor payment information are safe and secure. Advanced software integrations make donating easier than ever. Supporters can sign up for recurring donations with just a few taps on their phone screen, so they’ll no longer need to remember to do it manually.
However, there are a few common optimization mistakes that are easy to make…
Common Optimization Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Fortunately, the Tatango team is on your side. Here are the most common SMS optimization mistakes that we see and how to fix them.
Link Shortening and Real-Time Tracking
A long URL can really eat into the 160-character limit of SMS text messages when every character counts. A Tatango link shortener will shorten a long URL to something like bit.ly/188IICE to help maximize your use of the allowed character count. That shorter URL uses only 14 characters. Running your URL through a link shortener offers another great benefit, real-time tracking, which lets you see how many people have interacted with your link, up to the minute.
Not taking advantage of this tool can leave you in the dark, not knowing how well your messaging performs. Supporters click on links based on the call to action you’ve used to encourage their engagement. It’s a quick and easy way to determine if your messaging is successful or needs a little workshopping.
A/B Testing for Effective Messaging
In A/B testing, you’ll send one message to a subset of your subscribers and a slightly different message to the remaining subscribers. Then you’ll monitor which message, call to action, or visual element results in the most engagement. You may find that your audience prefers and engages more with images than with text—this is valuable insight you can use to guide your future messaging.
The Tatango software makes A/B testing easy by sending the determined higher-performing text message to your remaining subscribers who weren’t included in the original test. Without A/B testing, it’s far more difficult to determine whether one message performs better than another since there’s less direct comparison between the two. Take advantage of A/B testing so you can implement the most effective messaging to drive donations.
Compare Dollar Spent With ROI
In general, Tatango clients see returns of $5 in donations for every $1 invested in text message fundraising, which is fantastic for those fundraising campaigns that need support to hit their goals. The Tatango platform helps you monitor how much you’ve invested in your fundraising campaign against how much you’ve raised. Eliminate the guesswork by generating a clear picture of your campaign’s success. If you’re not monitoring how these two numbers relate, it will be harder to determine if your fundraising campaign hit its goals.
Add Tatango for SMS Marketing
Now that you’re aware of some common optimization mistakes and how to avoid them, let Tatango help you apply this knowledge and leverage your nonprofit SMS marketing for broader reach and better results. Partner with us to learn from the pros and avoid missteps. Our SMS marketing experts will be with you every step of the way.
Optimization is a key tool to utilize when raising donations via SMS. Contact the text message marketing experts at Tatango today to learn more about other ways Tatango can help elevate you and your SMS marketing.
