You’ll hear it time and time again: send the right message at the right time on the right channel. With a bleaker Black Friday expected, the right message is in fact crucial. Many consumers will be making more conscious choices about how they spend their money. They’ll need clear, targeted and meaningful messages. Here’s how, as a retailer, you can do it with SMS.
Create clear & relevant campaigns
Microcontent is a go-to for the overarching Black Friday demographic (18-44 year-olds), which is why SMS works. Today’s consumer is swarmed with endless retail social media ads and promises of being the trendiest person in the room, so to be seen, you need to drill into what truly appeals to your target market and do it all with concise, data-driven content.
What time of day is best? What is the most important aspect of your product to them? The quality of the clothing, the delivery time, or the best deals? Get to the point in your text messages – and steer away from the predictable sales talk. There are SMS tools that support you with this:
Keyword on 82228
A keyword is unique to your campaign and allows your target audience to opt in to receive SMS from your business. In the context of Black Friday, this is adds a level of exclusivity to your products and allows you to target actively-engaged leads who choose to opt in. Here’s a good example of how a retail brand might promote a keyword on social media:
Personalisation & dynamic URLs
Using FireText’s personalisation tool, you can upload custom information with the number of each recipient. From first names to three custom fields of your choice, your bulk Black Friday SMS campaigns can include all of the targeted info that will help you stand out in busy times.
Hey Suzie, we know you were keen for our Pink Strike the Cord Dungarees. It’s your lucky Black Friday – here’s an extra 15% off. Bag ’em here before they’re gone: http://fts.ms/ABC123
Custom fields also give you scope to easily upload dynamic URLs per recipient. That way, when you’re sending targeted messages from FireText, the link can be specific to the recipient. You could make the purchase process as easy as possible for them by taking them straight to the basket.
Click reports
The trackable URL tool allows you to segment your recipients further. Using a drip-feed strategy, you can continue to target your audiences depending on whether or not they’ve clicked on the link. The messages tab in your FireText account will produce reports, so you can see exactly who has and hasn’t clicked.
You can take your links a step further by branding them – what we call a ‘vanity URL‘. For example, if we were sending a message to you from us, our vanity URL may look like: sms.firetext.co.uk/ABC123. This adds a further level of trust to the link, as it’s branded to your business.
Character counter
The FireText platform acts as your personal character counter, telling you exactly how many characters ,and therefore credits, you’ll use per recipient. It’s not only great for keeping track of credits, but it reminds you to keep your message snappy.
Enabling emojis
When used effectively, emojis can be an ✨ aesthetic ✨ addition to your messages. To support your message in standing out even more, we can enable ‘Unicode’ characters. This allows you to use an emoji in your messages, but as with all SMS, it reduces your character to credit limit.
Offer an opt-out option
Including an opt-out in your message gives your audience the chance to back out of communications with you if it’s not the right time. It’s a positive thing, as it means going forwards, you’re only engaging with those who want to be engaged with.
The most common opt-out retailers use is an opt-out landing page. We can create a personalised URL for you to include in your messages. For example, at the end of your message, you can say something like:
Opt-Out? www.sto.pm/firetext
Target abandoned carts
Targeted messages are effective for retail-specific scenarios like abandoned carts. For example, if a customer has abandoned the cart mid deal in the lead up to Black Friday, why not follow up with a Black Friday deal for the very same item they left behind?
Opt for the omnichannel strategy
The most successful marketing campaigns revolve around an omnichannel strategy: a mixture of SMS, email, social media and even print. This allows you to send the right messages to your target audience per channel.
As time goes on, you can even individualise your communications per recipient depending on what they’re most responsive to. SMS link tracking and delivery reports make this super simple to analyse and make decisions.
Integrations can really help with pulling your channels together for Black Friday. Zapier is an efficient tool that allows you to connect platforms together. For example, you may decide to mix your email platform (Mailchimp, for example) with FireText. Once your initial SMS campaign has been sent out, send a follow-up email to those who haven’t yet acted on the desired call to action. From there, narrow down the times, messages and channel that recipients are most responsive to.
Black Friday prep? Let’s chat!
Get in touch with us to get ready for all things Black Friday – from content ideas to FireText platform features.