After what can only be explained as an unexpected and challenging year, we are into the final stretch, which means, believe it or not, it’s already that time again! In a matter of weeks, our screens will be plastered with Black Friday offers and Cyber Monday deals and the race to find the best bargains will begin. So whether you’re on the hunt to make some early Christmas present purchases, a new winter wardrobe or simply a treat for yourself it’s almost the perfect time to start looking!
Over the years Black Friday and Cyber Monday have extended themselves to run across the whole of November and for many of us, it kicks starts the countdown to Christmas and New Year too. As such, it marks the perfect time to start building out your database and planning your marketing campaigns, after all, one of the key elements to a successful campaign is ensuring you have an up to date and relevant database of contacts.
SMS is the most effective marketing tool to cut through the noise and start building excitement for the lead up to Black Friday. With the unbeatable open rate of 98%, you can almost be certain that once your message has been delivered it will be read, making it the perfect way to have instant and direct communication with your customers.
The next three months are one of the busiest spending seasons in the year with; Prime Day, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year. Meaning that it is the perfect opportunity to use SMS marketing to boost your sales and increase traffic.
Here at FireText, we want to help out as we understand that each and every SMS message that is sent out counts. As such, we not only have the knowledge you need, in order to create a successful SMS marketing campaign, we also want to share this with you so that you are getting the best value from your text campaign. You can take a look at a few of our top tips below in preparation for your campaign!
Personalise your campaigns
Personalisation is key to ensure you stand out from your competitors and engage with your audience, but what some people don’t consider is it’s also a great way to introduce trust into your SMS marketing campaign.
As such including personality from your brand itself is often more important than addressing the individual personally. As an example introducing yourself and the brand at the start of your text message is a great way to add a human element to maximise personality and build trust within your SMS message right from the start.
A clear offer
To stand out from the crowd and increase your engagement with your recipients it’s essential to make it really clear what you are offering, in a short and snappy message. If you send out a long confusing message you are likely to lose the attention of your audience. You want them to be excited about your message, which encourages them to act on your offer right away.
A clear call to action
A call to action needs to be clear within your marketing message so the recipient knows what to do next, it also gives you a great way to track the success of your SMS campaign and plan any potential follow up campaigns. Your call to action could simply be that they respond to your message, call a number or even show your text message in-store.
However, for Black Friday a great idea would be to include a link to your website in order to boost traffic. What’s super handy is we have our own built-in URL tracker that you can utilise, this could even be branded to your own business, using our SMS Vanity URL feature. This allows you to continue injecting personality and building trust within your message to help increase your click-through rate.
A sense of urgency
Within your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns you want to entice your recipients, while also building excitement so they act on it right away and don’t have the opportunity to think ‘I will come back to that later’ and potentially forget about it. Adding a sense of urgency within your message content is the perfect way to do this and this can easily be achieved by adding a time limit or highlighting limited stock.
An opt-out
Having an opt-out is completely optional on your side, however, we definitely encourage it for best practice when sending out your SMS marketing campaigns. This is simply because it gives your customers the freedom to unsubscribe from receiving any further messages from you which ensures you are complying with GDPR. We offer a range of different opt-out options that can be set up on your account at no additional cost, it’s simply a case of having chat with one of our friendly SMS experts.
Above are just a few pointers of how you can create the perfect Black Friday SMS campaign, if you wanted to discuss this further then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We are on standby to maximise the value of your campaign, bounce around message content ideas and help boost your engagement with customers!