Capturing your audience’s attention is increasingly challenging, and it’s likely you’re on the lookout for new, creative ways to engage them. When it comes to your SMS, don’t let the 160-character limit also limit your creativity. Enhance any message with an image, photo, emoji, GIF, or even a video. These multi-media messages (MMS) represent a quick and easy way to integrate attention-grabbing elements into your text-messaging campaigns.

Take your creativity a step further with your next campaign when you incorporate a digital promotion. Interactive promotions like sweepstakes or quizzes drive people to your site and keep them engaged with your brand.

While there are a lot more creative ideas, here are just a few ways to get you started:

• Enter-to-win contests – Simple giveaways and sweepstakes are ideal for an acquisition campaign. Be sure when you choose your prizes to consider what’s valuable to your target audience. Looking for more customers? Give away a shopping spree or gift card to your business instead of a generic prize which will drive in many unengaged users.
• Quizzes – You can create quizzes for just about any topic. This versatility makes a quiz the perfect tool for every industry. Are you a financial business looking to engage your audience before tax season? Try a quiz such as “Will your tax return go up or down this year?” with some generic questions about employment status, family changes, or recent residence updates.
• Surveys – Want to learn more about your audience and prospective customers? Ask them! Consider surveys asking for opinions on current product offerings or ideas for future additions, surveys about website useability, or even about holiday spending expectations. You’ll be able to collect data about your customers to aid personalization and segmentation efforts in the future, and your audience will feel their opinion is valued.

By adding creative elements to your campaigns such as interactive content, contests, quizzes and surveys, you can increase your chances of standing out from the crowd and drive high engagement from your audience.

Case Study: Creative SMS campaigns generate 20 million contest entries

IHeartMedia is a global entertainment and media company. While email has always been their primary channel for their audience communication, the iHeartMedia team wanted to increase listener engagement through SMS, streamline their subscriber experience, and increase advertising revenue.

They began using mobile messaging software to run contests through SMS. They also began automating email newsletters for all 800+ radio stations with local content. This email solution allowed iHeartMedia to create a category-based national content newsletter program and launch a daily newsletter with a hybrid of local and national content.

Their SMS campaigns lead to a monthly average of over 20 million contest entries – proving that customers want more than just email as a channel. With the changes to their email program, iHeartMedia increased its daily email newsletter volume to over 10 million subscribers with a future target of 15 million.

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This is a snippet of our eBook, 5 Proven Tactics to Improve Customer Engagement with SMS. Download your free copy today to get even more tips for using SMS including customer loyalty programs, mobile wallets, and re-engagement campaigns!

If you’d like to find out how Upland can provide the tools to run engaging, interactive SMS campaigns, and launch quizzes, sweepstakes and more, request a demo and we’ll be in touch.