Three Powerful Bulk SMS Marketing Tips

Using bulk SMS to help you boost campaigns and communication through 2010 can be made a little more effective with careful planning. Ensure that you get the most out of it with the following helpful tips.

Bulk SMS is the wholesale sending of SMS messages. This means that during a a certain period, for instance one calendar month, you send off a fair amount of text messages – be it to customers, clients, a target audience or even employees. This is not only limited to local texting, but also applies to messages sent throughout the world.

And even though texting is cheaper than a telephone call, it will still help to save where you can to keep within budgeting limits. After all, as soon as you hit the ‘Send’ button, the cost of each message is deducted from your credit amount, whether it is successful or not. So what can you do to ensure that every message counts?

1. Check Your Numbers

Here’s the scenario: You’ve got a subscriber list of about 10,000 individuals who you want to bulk SMS message to once a month. Of those, about 500 messages return an ‘undelivered’ status message. On a month-to-month basis that might not seem like a lot, but once you add up the numbers, it could add up to 6,000 a year – more than half your entire contact list. How do you ensure that your contact list is current, and that most or all of your contacts are reachable?

When contacts subscribe via a web page, ask them to confirm their mobile numbers – in other words, let them enter it twice. If the numbers match, then you know that there is an increased chance that the number exists.

Additionally, it will help to have an FAQ section on your website where you can identify reasons why your contacts won’t be able to receive your messages. This can include anything from a lack of space on their handset to a faulty handset or even messages moved to a different folder with certain handset models.

Minimising the amount of invalid numbers on your contact lists will help you save on your bulk SMS costs.

2. Play with the Words

Browsed through some of our other posts? If not, now’s a good time to do so – you’ll find plenty of evidence that bulk SMS marketing is downright effective. But then again, it’s only as successful as the content of the message you send.

There are a few ways to compose the right type of bulk SMS message to ensure maximum response, but all of them have somethings in common. Effective messages are:

• To the point
• Memorable for a specific reason
• Contain all the legal requirements (sender identification, opt-out info, etc.)

You might think that it’s a matter of minutes to compose a 160-character bulk SMS message that’ll sell, but it can take quite a while to get the job done.

Tip: Finding it difficult to choose between different messages? Why not test them by segmenting your contact list and sending each message variation to a small group of recipients? The group with the best response will most probably be more successful than the others when sent to the rest of your contact database.

3. Analyse your Campaign Progress

To optimise your bulk SMS campaign, it’ll help to keep a vigilant eye on the results. Check the performances of your messages and look for areas that can be improved upon – if a certain message works for one market segment, it might require a little tweaking to be as effective on a different segment that’s lagging behind. Remember, it is in situations like these where split-testing can be your best friend.

And lest we forget, always ensure that you’re using the right bulk SMS product – businesses with a small contact database might perform better using the online SMS interface, while those with a contact list might just receive better performance and flexibility by using any of the available application programming interfaces (API’s).

If you’re unsure about which bulk SMS product is right for you, visit our bulk SMS page for more information.

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Tags: bulk sms, destination numbers, SMS campaign, SMS copy