SMS lead generation is an underutilised marketing channel that is slowly making its come back in the marketing sphere.
More than 1 in 2 people surveyed across 15 markets consider business messaging the “modern way to communicate.”
When you’re in the process of setting up your company’s SMS lead generation campaign, you’ll want to consider the options that are available to you.
Depending on the industry, business, and goals, a company should build intrinsic SMS workflows to connect with the target audience in a personalised format. It helps develop deeper bonds with the prospects and gain their trust.
If you’re not sure how to utilise SMS lead generation for your business, this article is for you.
Let’s start with the basics.
What is an SMS Lead Generation Campaign?
An SMS lead generation campaign is a marketing strategy that uses text messages to attract new customers. By sending automated text messages to your target market, you can generate leads and increase your chances of converting those leads into sales.
An SMS marketing campaign allows you to reach a large audience at a minimal cost. SMS has a 98% open rate compared to email marketing. Text messages are convenient, easy to send, easy to receive, and easy to read. You don’t need to pay an excessive amount of money to reach your target market. With a few keystrokes, you can start sending messages to any cell phone number.
There are many factors to consider when planning an SMS lead generation campaign, the prime one being your text messages should be exciting and relevant to the target market. SMS lead generation is a powerful tool for marketing in industries like real estate agencies, advertising companies, consultation agencies, event management companies, etc. These businesses generate leads via text through customised SMS workflows that focus on providing prompt but relevant information to the reader and showcase the value a brand brings to the table.
Best Practices to Utilise SMS Lead Generation
1. Identify your target audience
Identifying your target audience is the primary and most crucial part of SMS lead generation. You need to understand which customers you want to reach and why they would like to buy from you. Your first step should be to create a list of all the phone numbers you can reach with your campaign. Once you have your list of phone numbers, the next step would be to start researching which customers you want to target.
2. Take an in-depth look at your business model and build a business case
Once you have your target audience identified, you can start to build a business plan. It may involve doing comprehensive market research and creating buyers’ personas. A company can start by answering some common questions about its target industry and why prospects should invest in their services.
It’s important to note that this business plan doesn’t need to be extensive or complicated. The goal here is to lay out the steps you’ll take to convert your lead generation campaign into a successful business. It will help you avoid any mistakes that you might make along the way. Once you have your business plan, you can start drafting messages.
3. Create multiple offers
One of the best ways to create your offers is to use a combination of different methods. For example, you can have a text-only offer, an image-only offer, and a voice-only offer. You can also include a video offer if the customer has the necessary permissions.
The offers don’t have to be long and drawn out, but they need to include some value. Marketers can curate offers in many ways, including free samples, a free trial, or a money-back guarantee. After creating the offers, you need to send them to your customers. It will involve sending them one or more messages over several days.
After the customer receives your offer, they’ll have several options. They can ignore the offer or reply to it and complete the call to action. If they complete the call to action, the potential customers get taken to a thank-you page where they can enter their contact information. It will allow you to start building your database.
4. Get a marketing automation platform
Once you have your SMS lead conversion strategy down, you can move on to choosing the right platform. The first thing that you’ll want to look at is the features of each platform.
Does it allow you to send messages to multiple mobile numbers at once? Can you create an automated response? Do you have access to real-time analytics?
The more features that a platform has, the more likely it is to be worth the investment for your business. After that, you can choose the platform that best suits your needs. When choosing a platform, the main factors that you’ll want to keep in mind are ease of use, scalability, cost, and design. Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to start sending your draft messages.
Some of the popular SMS automation platforms are Twilio, MessageBird, etc.
5. Ask for feedback and make improvements
Once you have a working SMS lead generation strategy, it’s time to start asking for feedback. You can do this through surveys, focus groups, or even talking to your customers directly. It helps you get honest feedback and improve your product or services up to customer expectations.
User feedback is an integral part of generating effective texts, as it allows you to identify any problems or issues you need to address in your product or service. By understanding how customers interact and react to your texts, companies can revamp strategies and improve customer satisfaction.
6. Write a success message
Once you’ve gathered your feedback and implemented the necessary changes, it’s time to draft your success message.
Your success message is what you’ll be displaying in all of your marketing efforts. You’ll want to make sure that it’s catchy and concise, but you don’t need to go overboard. It is a short paragraph or sentence that shows your best offers, contact info, or a link to a landing page. When it comes to linking web pages like landing pages or websites with your SMS, make sure that they are optimised for mobile and other types of small screens. Website and landing page optimisation is extremely crucial as it makes it easier for people to access your brand from all types of devices.
Once you have your success message, it’s time to create your offers. You’ll want to make sure that you include a call to action that will invite your target audience to take the next step in your sales funnel.
Suggested Read– Mobile-Friendly Landing Pages: Why Every Online Business Needs Them
7. Create a challenge or survey
The final method that you can use to create an offer is to create a challenge or survey. It is a simple way to get customers to engage with your offer. It can collect information about the target prospects and their likings or test out a specific feature or update. Once the customer completes your challenge or survey, they’ll have the option of entering a contest or getting some exclusive offers.
Conclusion
Text messaging provides an easy way to reach your audience with targeted and relevant messages, but it requires a lot of caution to not infringe on consumer privacy. A business needs to understand the rules and regulations around mobile marketing, such as privacy policies, and get their audiences to opt-in before sending SMS messages.
SMS lead generation helps businesses reach out to all types of audiences and works even without the internet. By integrating the right links and offers with an SMS workflow, marketers must aim to share texts that motivate readers to click on the CTA and convert.
To learn more about the ABCs of marketing, check out these blogs:
Demand Generation vs Lead Generation: What You Need to Know
How To Use Psychology of Colours In Marketing Campaigns
Types Of Paid Advertising You Should Know About
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