4 Online SMS Strategies to Grow Your Sales

There are countless marketing channels to grow your sales but few have the power of online SMS marketing.

Although text messaging was invented way back in 1992 before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others this was the original social networking tool. You could send out a group message to your friends to organize your night out, or plan a wedding or event and now, since the sharp upward spike in mobile use, online SMS has become even more popular with especially with businesses and in this article I’ll share 4 important strategies to use with your text messaging promotions.

1. Segment Your Lists

Google based its entire business model on relevancy. Google knew that people want a quick and simple way to find the exact information they were searching for – and it’s worked pretty well for them so far.

The best way to dramatically increase your relevancy with SMS messaging is to segment your customers into groups that share the same interests.

For example, if you own a diet supplement company you wouldn’t want to send weight gain products to the women on your list – this is an obvious example but hopefully, you get the point.

You can segment your lists by:

Outcomes (i.e. weight loss, better golf swing etc.)
Demographics
Geographic’s
Purchase behavior (e.g. big spenders vs low spenders)
Gender

Just by having different groups to market to will help you pick irresistible offers and increase your number of winning campaigns.

2. Build A Large SMS List

Generally speaking, the more people you have on your text messaging list the more sales you will generate.

Most businesses who have to use online SMS tend to have small lists of subscribers but if you want to generate more sales you need to grow a big list of hungry buyers.

While working for an online wine retailer we would routinely pull in $6,000 – $7,500 every time we sent out an SMS promotion. To give you a perspective our email campaigns would pull in roughly $2,500 – $3,000 per campaign to the same list with the same offer.

The best and fastest way to build up an SMS Marketing list is to use low front end offers.

These are essentially discounted or packaged offers designed purely to acquire mobile numbers not to generate profits.

Once we have the mobile numbers you can recoup that money over and over again with SMS offers which as I mentioned above tend to out pull email marketing offers sometimes by a lot.

Come up with an irresistible offer that your target market would find hard to refuse and start promoting that offer on your website, newsletters, shop front etc. and watch your list grow.

3. Keep Your List Lean

There’s little point in having a large list if you have a lot of people who aren’t engaging with your campaigns, that is clicking through to your offers or calling in and booking a dinner reservation etc.

The more subscribers you gain the higher the cost for sending out online text messaging campaigns so it’s a good idea to reduce unnecessary spend.

If you see that people haven’t clicked or engaged with your SMS after a 180 day period then it’s safe to say that they’re not likely to buy and remove them from your list but every business has different purchasing cycles.

That said, the good thing about SMS is that people tend to opt-out when they feel like they’re not getting value from your messages so be sure to include an opt-out keyword in every offer.