To successfully create a mobile messaging campaign, you need to create an experience that delights. Mobile is by far the most personal marketing channel, so consumers have an incredibly low tolerance for poor campaigns– but fear not! Answer the following six questions, and you will be ready to launch an effective and exciting mobile messaging campaign that your customers will love.
Step 1 – What’s your goal?
Ask yourself: what am I trying to accomplish? By setting an engagement event goal and a conversion event goal, you’ll have easily measurable results and insight into how your personalized mobile engagement is performing. A few definitions: engagement event goals inspire customers to take a single action, such as acquiring email signups, registering for an event, or getting answers to a survey. Your conversion event goal should focus on building a relationship with your subscriber, and should bring the subscriber into your CRM (customer relationship management) system. Examples of conversion event goals are driving loyalty program sign ups, data collection, or building a mobile subscriber database.
An ideal mobile messaging campaign uses an engagement event to create a conversion event. Think of sending out a coupon to be redeemed (engagement) then prompting subscribers to join a loyalty program for future offers (conversion). Providing an incentive that delivers immediate value and sets subscribers up for an ongoing relationship is the ideal mobile messaging campaign.
Now that it’s clear what you want to accomplish, the next step is reaching your audience.
Step 2 – Where’s your audience?
Knowing where your audience spends their time is critical to building an effective mobile messaging campaign. Do you have a great Facebook page? A store where customers go? Magazines they read? Twitter followers? Email subscribers? All brands have an audience: nail down where they are, how many are in each spot, and how many you estimate will convert to your goals. It’s helpful to build a simple table like this:
A table such as this one helps break down complex mobile programs into small, actionable steps.
Step 3 – What gets them excited?
Now the fun part – creating that mind-blowing CTA that stops your customers in their tracks and makes them say, “Yes.” If you need some help with this, you’re in luck. We’re experienced in the art of crafting a good CTA, and also offer a gallery of examples on our CTA blog. The key points for a good CTA are incentives, clarity, compliance, and strategy. Simply put: offer something great, be clear, be legal, and align it with your marketing plan.
Because you will be promoting your mobile messaging campaigns cross-channel, using unique keywords to track where customers sign up makes it easy to later analyze which channel was most effective.
Step 4 – What will your first message be?
At this point you’re cruising; you know your goal, you know where to post your CTA, and you know what that CTA will say. The next big question is: what will your first message say?
With such a small amount of space, choose your words wisely. Below is a recommended format for your first message:
Step 5 – What next?
They came, they saw, they engaged. So, now what? The next message is all about accomplishing your second goal of building a relationship. Now that your customer is happy with offer in-hand, it’s an opportune time to ask them if they would like to receive more great offers – and don’t be afraid to ask for something in return. We recommend collecting a piece of information on your second interaction. Often people collect data such as email address, zip code, first name, buying preferences, age, etc. Example:
Be sure to only ask subscribers for more information if it will provide them additional value. Never collect info that can’t be used to send them better offers.
Step 6 – How did we do?
Congratulations! You made it through your first mobile messaging campaign. Now, let’s check your results. Go to the chart you created before and add two more columns, Goal 1 Results and Goal 2 Results.
See where you did better than expected and work on growing that channel. If you didn’t do as well as expected, why not? Understanding and identifying areas for improvement are just as important as executing a slam dunk campaign. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Use customer data and past campaigns to improve and adjust future campaigns.
BONUS: Pictures are worth a thousand words.
Creating a successful mobile messaging campaign can absolutely be done with SMS alone. That being said, MMS or Rich Media Messaging can take your campaign to the next level. With MMS, companies can have a subject line + 500 characters + media (picture, video, audio). Think of MMS as an amazing add-on to boost engagement and take your campaign to next level status, sure to engage and delight your customers more than ever before.
To learn more about creating successful mobile messaging campaigns, why not see it in action? Check out a quick demo of Waterfall’s platform.