How to Create a Winning SMS Marketing Strategy: Full Guide

Nowadays, a successful marketing strategy requires a combination of multiple communication channels and a high degree of audience personalization. If you haven’t added SMS, also known as text marketing, into the mix, now’s the time to start.

Not only are texts typically shorter by nature, making them faster to write than emails and easier to create than social media posts, but customers prefer SMS marketing. SMS allows you to meet customers where they are and match the pace of their daily lives—something you can’t do by only sending long-winded emails. To help you create an SMS marketing strategy that gets results, we’ll explore the following topics:

• What is SMS Marketing?
• Benefits of an Effective SMS Marketing Strategy
• How to Create an SMS Marketing Strategy
• Types of Strategic SMS Marketing Campaigns (with Examples)
• SMS Marketing Best Practices to Follow
• Using SMS Marketing Tools to Improve Results

With the right tips and tools, you can build stronger stakeholder relationships with your SMS marketing strategy in no time. Let’s get started by covering the basics.

What is SMS Marketing?

Short message service (SMS) marketing is the practice of sending text messages to promote a business or organization. 

SMS marketing encompasses all kinds of texts sent to customers and stakeholders for the purpose of promotion or relationship building. It’s used by businesses, nonprofits, universities, associations, and more. SMS marketing works on an opt-in basis, meaning that your recipients must explicitly sign up and consent to receive marketing texts.

The types of messages sent by SMS marketers can vary widely depending on goals, audience, and strategy. For example, a commercial business might use SMS marketing to promote a 20% off deal to text subscribers, while a university might text prospective students to make connections that boost admissions.

Benefits of an Effective SMS Marketing Strategy

SMS marketing can be highly effective, thanks to its speed and how easy it is for customers to engage with texts. The average American spends over five hours a day on their phone. That means no matter who your audience is, they likely check their text messages often, making SMS a naturally successful channel. 

Take a look at just a few of the reasons SMS marketing works so well:

98% Open Rate

The average text message open rate is 98%, which is much higher than any other traditional marketing channel. Plus, 90% of people will respond to text messages within 30 minutes of receiving them. This means that your customers or stakeholders are much more likely to see, read, and act on a text message than they are with an email.

19% Click-Through Rate

Your recipients aren’t just more likely to see your text messages than emails—they’re more likely to click on links in texts, as well. SMS promotions have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 19%, significantly higher than email’s 2.6% average.

Easy to Send

The short length of texts means your team spends less time creating content than they would for email or social media messages. With dedicated SMS marketing tools, it’s quick and easy to automatically send the right texts to the right customers, complete with personalization and compelling calls to action (CTAs).

Easy to Read

Your stakeholders likely skim your long emails or ignore them altogether, but SMS leaves no room for wordiness. Texts get straight to the point, making them much easier for recipients to read and engage with quickly. Your recipients won’t get bogged down by paragraphs of text—they’ll read your entire message right away.

Highly Flexible

You can further various business goals with your SMS marketing strategy, from increasing sales to improving customer loyalty to collecting feedback. Text messages’ flexibility allows you to integrate them into a multichannel strategy easily. With MMS (multimedia message service), you can even add images, gifs, audio, and PDFs to your messages.

How to Create an SMS Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the wide-reaching benefits of text marketing, let’s walk through the steps to create an SMS marketing strategy for your business or organization.

1. Outline your needs and goals

First, take stock of your existing resources and familiarity with SMS marketing. Discuss the current state of your strategy (or lack thereof), asking your team questions like:

• What business goals do we want to further with SMS marketing?
• Where is our current marketing strategy lacking?
• Do we have a list of stakeholders who have opted in to receive texts?
• If we’ve tried text marketing before, what challenges did we face?
• Which stakeholders do we want to text (i.e., customers, clients, donors)?
• Approximately how many people will we aim to reach?
• Do we have an SMS marketing app with automation capabilities?

Outline some initial goals based on the answers to these questions. For example, a car dealership might aim to acquire X new customers and increase its sales by X%, while a nonprofit may want to raise X amount of money through text-to-donate.

If you don’t already have software capable of sending, receiving, and managing text messages, investing in one should be one of your first priorities. It’s crucial that the platform you use has intuitive automation features and works natively (or integrates) with your CRM. For Salesforce users looking to launch a successful SMS marketing strategy, Mogli’s native SMS app is the best option.

2. Start building an opt-in list

Once you have a list of goals and an SMS app capable of managing the volume of messages and subscribers you expect to have, start building your contact list. You must receive an individual’s written consent, or “opt-in,” before you send them text messages (more on this later). This means that you can’t start texting every customer in your database—you’ll need to build an opt-in list from scratch.

You can gather opt-ins in several different ways, such as by:

• Adding an online form to your website
• Using website pop-ups to ask for opt-ins
• Offering a deal for customers who opt-in, such as 15% off a purchase
• Promoting opt-in keywords (like texting “SIGN UP”) on social media
• Adding opt-in QR codes to physical marketing materials

3. Segment your audience

Like any other kind of marketing, SMS works best when you personalize your communications. The more personally relevant your text messages are, the more likely customers are to engage with them and remain on your opt-in list. 

Beyond simple steps like using recipients’ names, one way to make personalization more efficient and effective is to use audience segmentation. Once you’ve gathered enough opt-ins, create segments of customers based on shared characteristics like:

• Age
• Location
• Purchase history
• Interests
• Engagement history
• Communication frequency preferences

With these segments, you can easily tailor texts to the interests of each group and increase the chances they’ll engage with the message.

4. Draft and send SMS messages

Use your goals, software, and audience segments to start writing messages for your strategic SMS campaigns. These messages should be short (standard best practice is 160 characters or less), relevant to each recipient, and compliant with all SMS laws. Each message should also fit naturally into your wider marketing strategy for that particular segment.

For example, say that you’re drafting messages for a series of welcome texts to send to first-time customers. Your messages might look something like this:

• Welcome to the Ailey & Co family! As a thank-you for making your first purchase, take an extra 20% off your next one! Use coupon code FIRSTTIME20 by 11/29
• Pssst… you’ve still got that 20% coupon to use 👀 Check out our website to see the newest styles we’ve got in stock: [link to your website]
• Kasey, did you know we also have events at Ailey & Co? We’ve got a fashion show coming up 💃 RSVP here to join! [link to RSVP form]

5. Analyze your results

Reporting on your text messages’ success helps you determine which strategies are working well for your audience and which ones need adjustment. To track your SMS marketing strategies’ effectiveness, pay attention to metrics like:

• Click-through rate: This is the number of recipients who click a link in a text message out of everyone who received that message.
• Conversion rate: Monitor the number of customers who make a purchase, use a coupon, or sign up for an event because of your text promotions.
• Opt-out rate: If you see a high number of customers opting out, this could indicate that your texts aren’t relevant enough to your audience. 

With the right resources, you won’t have to track these metrics on your own. Quality SMS marketing tools include reporting features designed to help you tailor your strategy based on what works best for your audience.

Types of Strategic SMS Campaigns (with Examples)

There are many different kinds of SMS messages you might send as part of your strategy, but they typically fall into five core categories. Let’s go through each one.

Promotional Texts

When you think of SMS marketing strategies, promotional texts likely come to mind. These messages promote specific products, deals, discounts, and offers to customers, typically sent in bulk rather than one-to-one. As you draft promotional text messages to send, make sure they include clear calls to action and links to access relevant offers.

Transactional Messages

Transactional messages are just what they sound like—texts sent to complete a transaction or thank someone for completing one. Typically, the customer takes an action first, such as making a purchase or sending in a keyword. Then, your business responds by providing what they need, such as a receipt, a link to complete a transaction, or a resource they can explore.

In the example above, a customer texts a financial institution asking for help, and the bank responds by collecting their email address and sharing a link with more information.

Conversational Messages

Texts intended to start conversations can take many forms. For example, quick messages of appreciation boost engagement and help you build relationships through SMS. You can create personalized, one-on-one thank-you messages like the example above or use automation tools to trigger thank-you texts each time a customer makes a purchase or a donor makes a gift. Any time the recipient messages you back, you’re using a conversational SMS marketing strategy.

Automated reminders

Using an SMS marketing platform, you can set up automated texts that remind customers about expiring deals, appointments, opportunities to give feedback, and more. Use scheduled automations to send reminders 24 hours before a deal expires, or create custom workflows that automatically send multiple reminders based on set triggers.

Feedback Requests

SMS messages are often great for collecting feedback. By setting up a series of automated responses, your customers can take surveys directly via text rather than having to open another app or browser to give feedback. SMS surveys are highly interactive and engaging for customers, and they provide an opportunity to gather immediate feedback from your audience while showing them you value their opinions. 

5 SMS Marketing Best Practices to Follow

No matter what kind of messages you send, follow these essential SMS marketing best practices.

1. Only text people who have opted in

Since SMS marketing operates on an opt-in basis, it’s vital that you follow national text opt-in laws by only sending messages to those who have given their written consent to receive texts. To legally text customers in the US, you must:

1. Obtain explicit, written permission to text each recipient.
2. Have an existing relationship with each recipient.
3. Allow customers to easily opt out of text messages at any time.
4. Clearly identify commercial texts as advertisements.

This means you can’t send a bulk text message to all the contacts in your CRM. Sending promotional texts to people who haven’t explicitly opted in can result in hefty fines for your business. 

2. Use a double opt-in strategy

For extra verification, implement a double opt-in strategy that asks customers to confirm they want to receive your texts. Double opt-ins help you ensure legal compliance and are easy to set up with the right SMS marketing software.

Whenever someone signs up to receive your texts for the first time, whether by texting you a keyword or filling out a form on your website, your software should automatically text them to confirm. Here’s what a double opt-in message might look like:

• Your Company: Thanks for signing up for texts from The Company! Reply YES to confirm or NO to cancel. Msg & data rates may apply.
• Customer: YES
• Your Company: You’re all set! Frequency of recurring messages varies. Msg & data rates may apply. Text STOP at any time to opt out.

Once the customer replies “YES,” follow up with one more message letting them know exactly what they’ve signed up for. Mention the frequency of messages, any message and data rates that may apply, and how they can opt out later.

3. Write concise messages

Try to keep each text message you send within 160 characters or less. Staying concise will ensure recipients can see the entirety of your messages (without text carriers potentially splitting them into multiple messages) and read them quickly. Plus, shorter texts help you hold recipients’ attention.

To shorten your messages, use URL optimization tools and limit your calls to action (CTAs) to a few words. For example, you might say, “Donate here: [link to your donation page]” instead of “Visit our site to make your donation!”

4. Don’t overwhelm your recipients with texts

Even with all the benefits of SMS marketing, it can backfire if you send too many text messages in a short time. You’ve likely heard about the overwhelming number of political texts sent in recent years that exhausted many voters. To avoid doing the same thing to your customers, limit the number of texts you send and follow a reasonable messaging cadence. 

If customers feel like they hear from you too often, they’re likely to opt out—or worse, mark your messages as spam. 

5. Comply with all relevant SMS laws

Finally, double-check that your business knows and follows all the SMS marketing laws that apply to it. While the crux of most SMS laws is that it’s illegal for businesses to text individuals promotional messages without their permission, there are additional restrictions outlined in the:

• TPCA: The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is the main law that requires you to obtain written opt-in consent from everyone you text.
• CAN-SPAM Act: The CAN-SPAN Act requires companies to identify themselves in messages, identify texts as advertisements, and honor individuals’ decisions to opt out.
• CTIA: While more a set of guidelines than laws, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) promotes SMS marketing best practices every business should follow.
• CCPA: If your business operates in California, you must comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which outlines additional data protection regulations.

Not maintaining compliance with these laws can not only damage customer relationships; it can also lead to hefty fines—up to $1500 for each unsolicited text message. To stay compliant, set up clear opt-in and opt-out procedures for your customers.

Using SMS Marketing Tools to Improve Results

SMS marketing involves many moving parts, from tracking thousands of phone numbers and individual preferences to ensuring every message maintains legal compliance. This can be tough to handle on your own, so many marketers choose to invest in dedicated SMS marketing tools to simplify the process. 

SMS marketing tools like Mogli don’t just help you keep track of your data. They also enable you to:

• Pull data straight from your CRM to populate text messages
• Schedule send one-to-one and bulk messages
• Create complex, interactive SMS surveys
• Automate messages, reminders, and notifications

These comprehensive features make it easy to create, personalize, and send messages that impact your customers or constituents.

Mogli, our Salesforce native SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp solution, works seamlessly with your CRM to give you all the tools you need to let data guide your SMS marketing strategy. Plus, built-in reporting features and an expert customer support team take the technical tasks off your plate, allowing you to focus on finding success with SMS. Watch our video below to learn more:

Launch Your SMS Marketing Strategy Today

Adding SMS to your marketing strategy can significantly improve your ability to reach and connect with customers. With high open and engagement rates, SMS helps you grab your audience’s attention without taking up too much of their time. To get started, explore SMS marketing tools and successful campaign examples, then talk with your team about creating your own SMS marketing strategy.

Want to learn more before bringing SMS to your team? Check out these additional resources to go deeper into the influential world of SMS marketing:

• SMS Opt-In and Out Guide: Navigating U.S. Texting Laws. Dive deeper into the weeds of SMS marketing regulations and explore several strategies for gathering opt-ins in this guide.
• 7 Best SMS Marketing Platforms for Salesforce This Year. The right platform will make a major difference to your text marketing strategy. Discover our top recommendations here.
• Salesforce SMS: How to Text from Salesforce & Why You Should. Does your business use Salesforce CRM? Learn how to text directly from your database and explore your options for doing so.