50 SMS Marketing Best Practices

1. Create a text marketing plan

Before you send your first text, you want to establish a text marketing plan. Start by clarifying what your goals are. What do you hope to get out of SMS (short message service) marketing? How do you see it fitting into your larger marketing strategy?Think through the types of text messages you want to send. Will you stick with transactional messages to start (things like order confirmations and tracking information), or do you want to send promotional messages (like coupons and product release announcements)?It’s OK to have big ambitions, but it’s smart to start small. Don’t try to do too much on day one, dip your toe into text marketing before you head for the deep end.

2. Learn from past marketing campaigns

Even if text messaging is an all new frontier for your brand, the analytics you’ve gained from marketing on other channels are a valuable starting point. There’s probably a lot of overlap in what works for your audience across social, email, and online advertising and what they’ll respond to via text. Review your past results to identify takeaways you can apply to your text marketing plan.

3. Listen to your customers

Data can provide some valuable information about what your audience may want from a text messaging strategy, but you’ll always benefit from going straight to the source to fill in the fuller picture. The easiest way to hear from your customers is to send out a survey that specifically asks them what they’d like to see from a text marketing program.Then go a step further and set up customer interviews so you can hear directly from customers in their own words. You can gain valuable intel on what kind of marketing texts they like getting, which annoy them, and what messages most consistently get them to take action.

4. Clarify who your audience is

You have to know who you’re talking to before you can figure out what to say to them. Analyze who your customers are and what kind of messaging they respond to. The surveys and interviews from the last step will be valuable here. If you haven’t yet, create a buyer persona (or multiple buyer personas, if relevant) so you can better visualize who you’re talking to when writing each message.

5. Learn about relevant regulations

Business text messaging must comply with government regulations. Text messaging regulations focus on limiting behaviors like spam, unwanted contact, and data misuse — in other words, things that would be bad for business anyway. You want to stick with texting people who actually want to hear from you with the kind of messages they want to receive. That, plus using a text messaging platform designed with compliance in mind will go a long way toward keeping you on the right side of the law.

6. Invest in the right SMS platform

A good text messaging platform will provide you with features that make many of the other tips on this list much easier to manage. That includes (but isn’t limited to):

• Managing opt-ins and opt-outs
• Maintaining your list
• Using segmented lists for personalization
• Tracking analytics on campaign performance
• Including rich media, suggested responses, and CTA (call to action) buttons in your texts
• Maintaining compliance with minimal effort

The right platform can make a big difference in what feels possible for your text messaging campaigns. For a head start on this step, set up a demo to check out TrueDialog.

7. Register for 10DLC

Any business sending A2P (application-to-person) text messages (another way of saying mass texts) in the U.S. needs to register for a 10DLC (10-digit long code). 10DLC distinguishes your brand from scammers. Businesses are expected to register your brand and each campaign you launch with the Campaign Registry, so they can ensure brands stay within required guidelines when texting consumers. You can often do this within a portal on your text messaging platform.

8. Get registered for RCS

RCS (rich communication services) registration isn’t required like 10DLC, but using it opens up new features that create better opportunities for connecting with your audience. RCS messages can include rich multimedia features, like images, videos, and audio. You can also include elements that encourage recipients to take action, like CTA buttons and suggested responses.Plus, RCS messages are fully encrypted (unlike SMS), which brings a higher level of security to your communications — that’s good for all businesses, but especially important for anyone in regulated industries, like health care or finance.

9. Always get an opt-in

Always obey the golden rule of text messaging: only message people who have consented to hear from you. If recipients see your messages as a nuisance, that hurts your brand reputation and your relationship with that particular customer. That’s already a good enough reason to abide by the opt-in, but it’s also legally required.

Even so, 84% of people say they’ve received SMS messages from a company they don’t remember signing up with. Don’t be that guy (er, business). Only message someone after they’ve opted in.

10. Connect your SMS platform with your CRM

A strong text messaging plan is good; one that connects natively to your larger marketing campaigns is better. Integrating your text messaging platform with your other marketing software products, particularly your customer relationship management software (CRM), lets you run omnichannel campaigns.It also gives you more tools for personalization. If you can easily pull information about customers from the CRM when setting up your text campaigns, you can tailor your messages based on what’s relevant to them. For example, when you make a big update to a product, you could easily text everyone on your list who previously trialed that product with the news.

11. Promote your text messaging program and build your list

You know to only text people who opt in. But for a business new to text messaging, that creates a problem: how do you go from zero opt-ins to actually having people to text?You have to build your list. That means promoting your text messaging program everywhere you can: your website, your social feeds, your loyalty program, and your email list. Start with people you already have a relationship with — that’s your low-hanging fruit. From there, you may need to try out some different strategies like running contests or offering incentives to add new people to the list.

12. Provide an incentive for sign-ups

People have a lot of brands and publications competing for their attention. Handing over their phone number isn’t a small decision. For anyone who may be hesitant, you can give them an extra nudge by offering something valuable in return.Often that means a financial incentive like a discount on their next order. 49% of consumers say discounts are the main reward they consider worth sharing their data for. And the discount amount doesn’t necessarily have to be high. 50% say 10% off is enough to get them to sign up.

13. Be transparent with your audience

Tell people upfront what they can expect when they sign up for your list. That can include information on how often they’ll hear from you, what kind of messages to expect, and how you’ll use their data. Or more importantly, how you won’t use their data — be clear that you won’t sell or share it without their permission.

14. Establish consistent branding

You want your text messages to align with how you present your brand across your marketing strategy. Some of that falls to having a clear style guide that clarifies your overall tone. But if you use RCS, you can also add your logo, website, and brand colors to your account. Your text messages will visually look like all your other marketing materials, while also being clearly linked to your familiar online brand properties.

15. Do testing

Before you start contacting customers, do some internal testing to make sure everything works the way it should. Test out your opt-in and opt-out systems as well to make sure they work correctly. Send some test text messages to internal devices to see how they look. Ideally, you want to check how they show up on different types of devices and with different carriers, to get a full view of what your audience will see.

16. Develop message templates

You don’t have to start from scratch with every message, templates give you a head start that can save you time and help you re-use what works. Look up messaging templates and examples of what worked for other brands to use as a starting point in writing your first messages. Your text messaging platform may also let you create custom templates, so you can easily re-use messaging formats that worked well for you the first time.

Writing promotional text messages? Use our list of 50 promotional text message templates as a launchpad to get started.

17. Be careful how often you text

Staying in touch with your customers is good. Subjecting them to a barrage of irrelevant messages is not. 49% of consumers who expressed annoyance with business text messaging specifically complained about frequent messages as a problem. And 56% said they’d stopped buying from a brand because of annoying messages. Your subscribers don’t need to hear from you multiple times a day. Reaching out weekly or monthly is generally a more reasonable cadence.

18. Aim for consistency

While you don’t want to text too often, you also don’t want to disappear for months at a time. If customers go too long without hearing from you, they could forget they had a relationship with you. You want to get in touch often enough to stay fresh in their mind. Aim for a consistent cadence that keeps you in their thoughts, without becoming an annoyance.

19. Provide options

If those last two tips have you scratching your head wondering how any brand is supposed to figure out how often to text, there’s a hack for that: let them choose. 97% of people want the ability to control the frequency of messages they receive from brands. 81% say it would make them more likely to do business with the brand.When people sign up for your list, give them a chance to select how often they’ll hear from you. You might also let them choose what to hear from you about (e.g. which products, whether they want messages about sales and promotions or just order updates, etc.). Giving consumers some control over how you interact with them over text is good for them and for you. They’re less likely to feel annoyed by your messages, and you’re more likely to maintain their loyalty.

20. Use segmented lists

Giving subscribers that level of control may sound complicated to manage, but it doesn’t have to be. As long as your text messaging platform supports segmented lists, it’s easy to make sure you’re getting the right types of messages to the right people.Brands that use one big list are more likely to send at least some people messages they’re uninterested in, increasing the likelihood that they’ll unsubscribe. But when you set up segmented lists, you can ensure people only receive messages about the products and services they’re interested in.

21. Make opting out easy

Obviously you don’t want people opting out of your text messages, but messaging people who don’t want to hear from you accomplishes nothing. If someone wants off your list, make it easy. All they should have to do is respond to any text you send with one word (like “stop” or “unsubscribe”). Making it easy to opt out is required by law, but it’s also a good business practice. If you want a positive relationship with your customers, respecting their preferences is vital.

22. Keep your messages concise

SMS has a 160-character limit, which forces you to get good at keeping things short and to-the-point (although RCS lets you go longer). But even if the limit wasn’t a factor, aiming for brevity is a smart strategy on mobile. You’re competing with all the different apps and distractions people encounter on their phones. You have a limited window to get their attention. All your messages should be straightforward and cover the information you need to communicate as quickly as possible.

23. Be conversational (but professional)

Text messaging is an informal medium. You don’t want your messages to sound literary or academic. Generally speaking, the tone you use in your messages shouldn’t be too far off from how people text with friends, but with caveats. If your messages with friends frequently contain slang or profanity, leave that part out. You’re still representing a brand, so try to find the right balance between conversational and professional.

24. Follow standard mobile etiquette

Text messaging has its own rules of etiquette, just like other forms of communication. Understanding what’s standard (and what’s considered rude) can help you avoid putting your foot in your mouth. Some of the main text messaging norms to keep in mind when crafting your messages are:

• Avoid sending texts in all caps (it seems like you’re yelling)
• Avoid abbreviations (e.g. “u” for “you”)
• Be careful how often you use emojis (while they’re common in text messaging, coming from a brand, they can quickly become cringe)