The modern world is more connected than ever, meaning it’s never been easier for businesses to connect with their customers. Still, with so many communication channels available, it can be difficult to pick the right one for you. Despite all of those channels, SMS texting continues to reign supreme as one of the most popular customer service touchpoints out there. As such, it plays an integral role in many marketing campaigns to this day. Call on these SMS marketing tips to make the most of your text campaigns—they’re certainly not going anywhere any time soon.

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Better yet, properly implementing these SMS marketing tips will pay off tenfold in your overall marketing strategies. You also need to keep in mind that it is easy for your budget to get wasted if your contact list is full of numbers that shouldn’t be there. That’s why a top-of-the-line contact list scrubber like Landline Remover is mission-critical for SMS marketing success.

How Important Is Your Call-To-Action (CTA) for SMS Marketing?

Marketing’s main aim is to motivate potential customers to take action, whether that be making a purchase or just getting into contact with your business to learn more about it. A lot of marketing does a good job of catching the public’s attention but very few manage to nail the call-to-action, also known as the CTA. Your CTA instructs your potential customer on what they should do next. After they’ve engaged with your marketing, should they head to your store, visit your website, or schedule a call?

Boiled down, your CTA is what converts prospective customers into paying ones. Without it, your customers have been entertained by some good marketing, but they don’t know what to do next. CTAs can be implemented in various ways. For example, links on a webpage can serve as CTAs directing readers to important information or a sign-up form. Still, it’s worth noting that SMS marketing poses unique challenges to marketing teams because it relies on relaying lots of information very concisely. You’re generally restricted to 160 characters, after all. Fortunately, there are some simple yet highly effective SMS marketing tips to make the most of your character count.

KISS: Keep it Short and Simple

It’s best to keep your CTA as short as possible, as it starts to lose its punch the longer it trails on. A simple instruction informing your audience on what to do next—like a ‘Contact us’ or ‘Schedule a meeting here’—will suffice. Including a succinct CTA at the end of the text will keep your messaging within character limits without drowning out the information you’re actually trying to market.

Enforce a Sense of Urgency

A compelling CTA elicits a sense of urgency to push the reader to act now. Urgency can be stressed by highlighting time constraints. You can do this, for example, by offering a free trial to the first thousand customers who sign up. This motivates your audience to act immediately instead of putting it off for later and losing out on the deal altogether.

Other incentives that help create a sense of urgency include time-sensitive discounts and sign-up bonuses. These incentives work because they instill a fear of missing out. When customers know an offer is only available for a limited time, they are more inclined to act sooner. That’s why your CTA should stress a deadline to claim what you’re offering.

A sense of urgency can also be conveyed through your use of language. Writing in the third person makes things feel a little removed, which ultimately kills whatever urgency you’ve managed to foster otherwise. So, give your CTA the extra zing it needs by writing it in the first person. This makes readers feel like they’re being directly spoken to, which makes them more likely to act on the instructions given to them.

First-person is also useful for sowing the seeds for a relationship of trust between your business and your customers. When customers read first-person writing, it feels less like communicating with a faceless corporation and more like talking to a human. This can make customers more receptive to your overall marketing tactics.

Make Your CTA Personal

The effects of writing in the first person can be amplified by further personalizing your SMS marketing. There are tools available that allow you to do this even when sending bulk texts to hundreds or thousands of customers.

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Personalization can be as simple as addressing the customer by name. This makes customers feel like they are being valued as individuals, which makes them more likely to engage with your business. If your business serves multiple regions, personalization can also be implemented by grouping your contacts according to their different regions and sending them text marketing materials specific to their respective locations.

You can also use personalization to laser-focus your text marketing on whatever stage of the customer journey a particular client is in. For example, a car dealership may send different marketing to customers who are still looking for a new car versus customers who have purchased vehicles and might need upgrades in the future. With personalized texting, you can cater your marketing message to different groups.

Use Power Keywords

Using power keywords is one of the most important SMS marketing tips, as every word counts due to the character limit. You can make your CTAs more powerful by including command verbs. These add an extra punch to your instructions, making readers more likely to act. It also ensures that your potential customer knows exactly what they need to do next. Command verbs include words like ‘buy’, ‘order’, ‘click’, ‘visit’, or ‘call’.

In addition, use words that will entice potential customers. Words like ‘free’ are good because who doesn’t like free stuff? If you’re offering a free trial or anything of that nature, be loud about it. Conversely, avoid words like ‘submit’ because they make people feel like they’re working for something rather than just being gifted it out of goodwill.

Get Creative With Your CTA Approach

Today’s consumers are inundated with marketing at every turn. This is even true in the realm of SMS marketing. Although SMS texts benefit from high open rates, it’s still possible for your marketing to get lost in the sea of texts that people send and receive each day. One way this can be avoided is by having a creative approach to make your texts stand out.

This can be done in simple ways like including emojis. This can help your business feel more relatable and approachable. With that being said, you should keep in mind who your audience is and what you’re selling to determine if/what emojis are appropriate to use. For a financial institution, for instance, it is probably best to avoid emojis for the sake of maintaining the professionalism that bank customers expect.

Instead of going for the generic “Click here!”, try something new and test its effectiveness as you go. To start, maybe try employing a bit of clever wordplay or a funny pun. On the flip side, don’t get discouraged if your initial ideas don't land as well as you’d hoped. Just try, try again—from a new angle until you find the unique approach that works for you.

No SMS Marketing Campaign Is Complete Without a Contact List Scrubber

These SMS marketing tips can elevate your text marketing campaigns and ultimately boost customer engagement and sales. The best part? They’re all super simple tools that can pay off big time, such as remembering to include an urgent CTA, using powerful keywords, and keeping things short.

Furthermore, one of the greatest advantages of SMS marketing is that it’s very cost-effective compared to other marketing mediums. Not if you blow your marketing budget sending texts sent to numbers that aren’t even active mobile numbers, though. Unfortunately, this is all too common. That’s because contact lists naturally accumulate disconnected numbers and landline numbers over time.

You also have the Do-Not-Call (DNC) Registry to consider. Members of the public have their numbers added to the registry to indicate that they don’t wish to receive any telemarketing. Violating the DNC Registry can land you in costly legal trouble, as the Federal Trade Commission has been known to serve significant fines to those that do.

To give yourself peace of mind, you need to arm yourself with a good contact list scrubber. There are many on the market, but Landline Remover offers unique benefits that make it too hard to ignore.

Landline Remover Is the Contact List Scrubber You Need

With Landline Remover, all you need to do is submit a CSV file containing your contacts, and within seconds, your list is returned with all of the invalid numbers scrubbed. Better yet, unlike many of our competitors, we use both state and federal data no older than 72 hours. That means we’ve got the most up-to-date phone number book on the market! Most importantly, Landline Remover is cost-effective. You only pay for what you use, and at $0.002 per number checked or $2 for 1000 numbers, you stand to save big in the long run.

Get started with Landline Remover today and receive 1000 free credits to get scrubbing in no time.