I’ll be the first to admit that text message marketing isn’t cheap, especially with specific wireless carriers charging additional fees to SMS providers for sending text messages to their wireless subscribers. It’s because of the high costs to send text messages to customers, that brands want to see value from their text message marketing, and a lot of it! What does “value” mean for most brands? Yep, you guessed right… More Sales!
How does a brand increase sales by using text messaging marketing? Yep, you guessed right again… By giving customers something valuable in each and every text message! As a brand, if you’re not giving anything of value to your SMS subscribers, you’re never going to get anything of value in return, which means no new sales! Without new sales being generated by text message marketing, you’re not even going to be able to cover the cost of sending the text messages, so essentially you’re losing money every time you text message customers. Remember that the goal of most text message marketing campaigns is to see a return on investment (ROI), which means that if a brand spends $1,000, they want to see $10,000 in new sales generated (hypothetical). Looking for a good case study on text messaging marketing ROI, check out how this company generated $200,000 in new sales during the first month of their campaign.
So how does a brand know if they’re giving enough value in each text message? It’s pretty simple, check out this video on what I like to call the “Quarter Test”, which can be done before each and every message is sent to your SMS subscribers. While our blog is full of good examples, we sometimes have to show you the bad examples, as merely a warning of what not to do.
We’ve been following the text message marketing campaign for Things Remembered for a few months now, and have yet to see any messages that would pass the “Quarter Test”, as you can see below.
Not only is there little to no value in each of these text messages sent by Things Remembered, but there’s no mechanism to measure the return on investment. What do we mean by that? While SMS providers like Tatango can tell you how many wireless subscribers received a text message, the brand needs to be responsible for putting something in the text message that they can track on their end to measure engagement, new sales, clicks, etc. Examples can include a coupon code, a web link, a phone number to call, or even a call-to-action like “Show this text message”. Something that will allow the brand to calculate the return on investment of their text message marketing campaign. Unfortunately Things Remembered has none of these present in their text message marketing campaign.
