The festive season should be renamed the busy season, especially for marketers and business owners. You don’t need to become a huge ball of stress this year. Play it smart, and set up a gift that keeps on giving instead.
Clever companies use text during the festive season. SMS is easy to implement, delivers fast results and can be automated or scheduled. No more working through the Christmas party.
To get you one step closer to the egg nog, we’ll show you our favourite tricks of the text trade. This will make selling in and setting up SMS before the Christmas break a breeze.
In this blog post, we’ll cover
- SMS benefits to impress your boss,
- 9 messages to add to your holiday marketing strategy,
- Your text messaging cheat sheet.
Ready, set, let’s go.
SMS benefits to impress your boss
Do you still need to get your boss to sign off on SMS marketing? Please, shamelessly steal these statistics and put them in your SMS strategy slide deck. Merry Christmas.
- Text messages get read. SMS has a 98% open rate, and 90% of messages are read within 3 minutes. Straight to the top of your wishlist.
- SMS is global (just like Santa). It connects you to the 143 billion people who own mobile phones. No internet access is required.
- The SMS 20-30% clickthrough rate (CTR) is more intriguing than a bacon-wrapped turducken. It kicks email’s measly 3% CTR into next year.
- You can set up SMS to send automatically from your website, software, calendars, CRM (basically anywhere) via integrations.
- Here’s a fun one; marketers save 25 hours/week using automation. And 46% of this time-saving comes from automating team communication, which includes SMS. The admin time you’ll save can be an early present for your boss.
9 messages to add to your holiday text strategy
This year, we want to give you a headstart on your text strategy. Because let’s face it, you’ve got stockings to fill.
Here are nine types of text messages you can add to your SMS strategy.
The give and get
People are in a giving mood this time of year. So, why not give them a free gift in exchange for an SMS opt-in. It’s a great way to build your contact list and get people to click through to your website. If this is your first time using an SMS gateway, check the opt-in rules.The perfect pair
No, we’re not talking about the partridge and a pear tree. Promote cross-selling and offer services or products as gift bundles. Make these only available for SMS subscribers, so they feel special.You can also retarget customers based on past purchases. It’s one way to ensure your gift bundle is something they’ll actually think about buying.It’s back (in stock)
On-trend and popular items sell out fast. Leaving people upset and likely to go shopping elsewhere. If a product is out of stock, allow shoppers to opt-in for SMS alerts once it is restocked.You can even add a sprinkle of FOMO by offering a discount for prompt purchase.Send secret Santa-style discount codes
SMS coupons are redeemed far more than any other type of coupon — fact. Offer your SMS subscribers secret and limited-time discount codes for shopping or booking.Shipping cut-off dates update
It’s never nice to say, “I ordered your present, but it didn’t arrive in time”.Help your customers avoid gift awkwardness by sharing a ‘last day to order before Christmas’ SMS. This gives your customers the confidence to shop with you. Plus, it reminds them to revisit any carts they abandoned weeks ago.Pro tip: when determining the last day to buy before Christmas, allow an extra few business days buffer in case of any unforeseen delays with your logistics company.Exclusive events
It’s party season, so make sure yours is well attended. Send invites to exclusive festive season events via text. It makes the recipient feel special and boosts brand loyalty. Nudge abandoned carts Make more sales, hit your targets and score that end-of-year bonus. You can automatically set up abandoned cart nudges via SMS. They’re incredibly effective.Spark your sales
The post-Christmas sales period is a goldmine. Promote your brand’s sales via SMS to grow excitement and engagement.Pro tip: always include a trackable hyperlink so people can shop straight from their phones. And you can pull the data in the new year.Show gratitude
Give thanks to your customers with a message blast. You might even offer a discount on a future purchase. Your customers will feel appreciated, and you’ll grow the relationship between them and your brand.
A holiday cheat sheet for text messaging best practices
Before you set up your first campaign or automated texts, tick off this cheat sheet. It will be just as enjoyable as crossing items off your festive season shopping list.
SMS campaign checklist
Set an objective. What do you want to achieve from your SMS? Your objective might be data capture, coupon redemption, an increase in sales or reservations. Set it, track it, and learn from it. Opt-in users. Make sure all the people to who you send marketing messages have opted-in. And make sure you always provide an opt-out. It’s the law. Schedule campaigns. This allows you to leverage the best times for the best results. Be sure to set-up texts that work for the different time zones of your customers. Keep messages clear and concise. Try to stick to the 160 character limit. You can write more but it will be sent as two separate messages and will cost double. Personalise your SMS notifications. Using someone’s first name is a no-brainer, and it’s simple to set up placeholders [first name], also known as merge tags or merge fields. Write your message. Keep it to 160 characters for SMS. You can write more for MMS. Segment your contact list. Make sure you’re only sending relevant messages to each segment.
Ready to get sending SMS?
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