Whether it’s your first time sending SMS campaigns or you’re a seasoned professional, the only way you can see the value of your campaign is by tracking it and measuring its return on investment (ROI).
Calculating the value of your SMS sends can help you make improvements going forwards, and can help you understand what your customers respond to the best.
Deciding on a goal
Before sending you should have an idea of what you are looking to achieve with each campaign. A few common goals are:
- Increase the number of sales and revenue
- Increase the number of customers claiming an offer
- Increase the number of leads
- Encouraging the number of downloads of asset
- Increase number of new subscribers
- Increase traffic to website
- Collect feedback and obtain responses
A successful campaign should help you achieve the goals you’ve got in mind. So where do you begin?
The best place to start is with your contact data. At the core of a successful SMS campaign is accurate recipient numbers. The cleaner your data is the higher your delivery rate will be.
To find out your delivery rate you’ll need to calculate:
Number of Delivered / Total sent x 100 = Delivery rate.
A low number would suggest that a data audit should be considered before your next campaign.
An improved delivery rate should also lead to an improvement in the open rate of your campaign, so the next step comes to tracking the performance.
Click-throughs
If you’re looking to send traffic to your website whether it’s to fill out a form, check out a page, or make a purchase, we have a free feature that you can use to track the clicks on your URL within your text message. By simply including a URL to your destination page within the text message and then clicking ‘URL Shorten’ icon, you will be able to view how many people have clicked the link within the ‘Analytics’ section of Messagebox. You can see exactly who has clicked your link and how many times which is perfect for any follow up campaigns or reminders.
Sales
If you’re looking for something a little more sophisticated and want to track sales and revenue, you can use something called UTM parameters. This is a little extra information at the end of your URL that you can customise yourself inline with your business’s tracking structure. You often find this tracking on marketing emails and it can similarly be applied to URLs. For more information about how to use UTM parameters read this article by Google.
Conversions
Measuring conversions relates to your goal and will generally look like ‘the number of people who took action’ divided by ‘the number of recipients’ x 100 and that’s your general ROI. In terms of a monetary value, finding this is as simple as taking the cost of your campaign send and comparing this to the number of goals that were achieved, i.e. the number of appointments booked, the number of items sold, the number of coupons used etc.
As with email, there are sweeping statements about the average click-through rate or response for a campaign but the best way to make improvements is to set your own baseline and work from there and you’ll see how SMS can help you meet your goals.
We’re keen to help you enhance your campaigns and see the true value of the humble SMS, so don’t hesitate to ask us for help with your future campaigns, drop us an email at info@textmarketer.co.uk or give us a call on 0117 205 0202.