SMS Marketing Dos and Don'ts

Hey it’s Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

Working on a helpful sms guide and wanted to share some dos and don’ts with sms marketing.

These can help you with savings costs today.

SMS MARKETING IS THE FUTURE

SMS has an average open rate of 98%. That’s insane.

When you click send you almost guarantee your audience will see your message.

That’s very powerful.

Building a strong sms list is an ASSET that no one can take away.

Zuck can’t take away your sms list or shut down your account like with paid ads. 

The problem?

SMS is quite expensive compared to email.

You can still get a really good ROI, you just have to be careful with your costs.

I’ll break down some of that in this newsletter.

Frequency

Sms marketing is a bit more intrusive than something like email marketing where you can easily send 4-5 email campaigns per week without getting much backlash from customers. 

For this reason, unsubscribe rates are much higher for SMS marketing.

We want to send much less frequently and only send important messages to avoid annoying your list and keeping unsubscribe rates low.

I wouldn’t recommend sending more than 1-2 sms messages per week.

If you are sending more, you need to make sure you’re really segmenting your list to only send to extremely engaged segments. 

Avoid sending “nurture” content on sms, leave that to email.

Keep sms just for your important messages and announcements.

MMS vs SMS Messages 

SMS messages are the regular messages that are just plain text.

However, MMS messages are the ones that include an image or a gif in the message. 

MMS messages are usually 2-3x MORE expensive than sending an sms. 

Meaning, if you want to get a better ROI on spend you’d have to make 2x-3x more revenue with your mms messages to outperform sms message ROI.

In my experience that’s very rare to get 2x more revenue from just including a picture.

I would highly recommend just sticking to SMS text only messages to get the highest ROI from your marketing.

Stick to simple sms messages, and only do MMS (messages with pictures) when you really need to.

Message Length

In each SMS you only have 160 characters, which is NOT a lot… if you go over by even 1 character to 161, the price of your message doubles.

So, you do not have a lot to work with here… your messages need to be very short and concise. 

If you do need to go over, you’ll have to pay extra, and it’s very unlikely the increase will result in 2x more revenue and ROI. 

So, I would not recommend going over, just keep your messages super short and waste no space to save on costs.

160 characters or less!!!

Emojis

It would be amazing to be able to spice up your messages with eye-catching emojis, however they eat up your character limit.

They use a different kind of code and can have the equivalent of 35-50 characters in your message, which you already don’t have a lot of space in.

I would recommend not using emojis because of this…

SO, with all your character limits and limitations on images and emojis, your sms messaging has to be pretty bare-bones and simple.

Despite this, you can still generate some pretty crazy results with sms…

Like the below example 😉 

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand:
Joymode

Email Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jpkpplgJc54-qLHPg_YiTRLsDn5ZJoys/view?usp=sharing

Notes:
Sending an email like this one repeatedy is a great idea if you have a subscription option for your store.

You can add this in the post-purchase flow to people who buy to encourage them to subscribe.

Just as super simple email outlining the benefits of subscribing.

Template of The Day

Similar to the example, this hero section has a clear headline, subheadline copy, and a CTA way at the top of the email which helps with conversions.

If you want access to a bank of 134 mix and match templates like this equating to over 5,000+ possible email designs, click here » 

Helpful Links Of The Day

• The Welcome Flow That Makes $100k/mo

• Reviewing a $5M/year brand

• Our $40M email creation process

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Cheers,

Max

PS - If you want to join a community of 100+ members with daily tips from me, get feedback / support 24/7, AND get design templates that can make 5,000+ unique email designs click here » 

PPS - If you run an ecom brand and want to have a 15 minute strategy session with me, book a call here »