There are dozens of ways to reach your customers, and you should be using all of them. But if your business is strapped for employee hours and juggling a high number of different marketing campaigns is out of reach, make sure texting is on the shortlist. 98% of texts are opened; so long as you have consent to text your customers, your message will be (well-)received. So get the most use out of this direct line of communication and always follow these three rules: be short, be trustworthy, and be the first step.
Be short.
Text messages still have a limit on size. Even if there isn’t a fixed character cap, your customers won’t like a wall of text. Having a message be broken up into multiple texts is even worse because your customers are more likely to be annoyed. Marketing messages should always be brief, but it’s absolutely crucial with texting. Use one sentence, one link, and, only if it’s absolutely necessary, one emoji.
Be trustworthy.
There’s a leap of faith that goes into tapping on a shortened or temporary link. But most businesses have to do this to fit a URL within reasonable character limits, even if it means customers can’t deduce precisely where they’re going. Your customers have probably also seen spammy, suspicious texts with nonsense links before. So identify your company, give a good and grammatically correct action step that outlines a benefit, and don’t misspell anything. Look up a picture of a spammy text, and make sure your texts never look like that.
Be the first step.
If you’re following the first two steps, then you’re leaving out a lot of information your customers can use. That’s okay because it’s essential to make your text effective. But you still want to provide that information and reel customers in, so make sure wherever the link goes has all the context and additional information they need.
For examples of effective texts and texting campaigns, contact us today.