Establish your brand’s goals with SMS marketing
It's important that you communicate with your customers in a way that compels them to engage and convert, helping you foster deeper relationships and cultivate brand loyalty. Before you begin crafting your text message copy, focus on your audience and how they engage with your brand to help you identify your SMS marketing goals.
First, consider the following questions:
- What do you want to say to people?
- How do you want them to perceive your brand?
- What is your brand’s style, personality, and values?
- How do you best serve your customers?
- What makes your brand unique?
Copywriting for text messaging best practices
Text messaging is an incredibly personal channel, and with only 160 characters per SMS (1,600 per MMS) you have to make every word count. Before drafting a message, take the time to answer these three questions:
- What is the goal of this message?
- Who is interested in this message?
- Will an offer be included?
By answering these questions, you can define a solid foundation for the content and tone of your text messages. In the following video we will share 5 tips to make the most of your texts and drive your recipients to take action.
Note: Prior to texting any subscribers, you must first collect consent and understand compliance. Head to our Help Center for more information on collecting consent and abiding by local SMS regulations.
Create and iterate on your SMS marketing strategy
Once you have a good idea of how you want your brand to be perceived, get to know your audience through personas, research, and A/B testing.
Personas, research, and testing help you determine what tone works best for your customers. For instance, if the vast majority of your client base is younger, they may like a more informal tone with a few emojis and text-speak sprinkled into the content. Otherwise, if you target a wide range of age groups, text-speak might not always be appreciated and a more formal tone may resonate best.
Build personas
A persona is a type of person or group of like-minded individuals within your brand community. Their differences may pertain to age, gender, interest, motivation, income, familiarity with your product, etc. You likely have a variety of personas to account for, and it is best practice to understand these audience members and target your communication to best suit their interests. Use this template to build out the personas within your brand community!
Conduct research
Do your due diligence to investigate and get to know your subscribers. Take a look at trends in your industry, collect customer feedback using forms or email buttons, or even launch a focus group of users to gain insight on what they are looking for via SMS. Ask your customers what works best for them, and use any resources you have at your disposal to research your audience as much as possible.
Continually test
Never underestimate the power of experimentation! By A/B testing your text messages, you can see what factors drive subscribers to most likely complete the call-to-action (CTA). You can A/B test your SMS campaigns and A/B test your SMS messages in flows to gain better insight into the content and timing of SMS that resonates best with your audience.
Send with intention
After drafting your text message, complete the following:
Proofread
Go back through your text message to fix any typos, ensure your CTA is clear, and send yourself a preview text, ensuring that your message looks as expected and your link directs recipients to the right place. Make sure your recipients know who this message is from by toggling on your organization prefix.
Include opt-out instructions
Opt-out language is the phrase added to the end of a message that provides instructions for customers to opt out of further text message communications. Including opt-out language limits negative customer experiences and makes sure that your deliverability is not negatively impacted by carrier filtering.
Your opt-out language must include STOP in the message and is required in some jurisdictions. STOP is a keyword message that is automatically toggled on. When a customer responds to one of your messages with this keyword, their consent to receive text messages from your brand will be revoked.
Note: If you send messages to customers in the UK, you must include an unsubscribe link for subscribers to opt out. When using Klaviyo text messaging, you can automatically add this to your messages via the option in the Compliance tab.
Send or Schedule Your Message
Once your text message is ready, remember that it’s best practice to send messages between 9 am and 8 pm in your recipient’s local time. When sending text messages in flows, keep the SMS quiet hours feature enabled for all of your texts to make sure your message is sent at an appropriate time.
You should also employ Smart Sending for your text messages so you don’t disturb customers and bombard them with too many messages in a short timeframe. Similarly, planning out an omnichannel sending strategy helps you avoid over-messaging recipients, while also giving you the chance to send important message content to non-openers across channels and to analyze, understand, and improve your performance.