How to build the most effective text message marketing campaign for retail

SMS marketing is effective because texts actually make it to your customers, unlike the emails sitting in their spam folder. Current research shows that 98% of text messages are opened. That’s impressive—especially compared to the 20% average open rate for email.

Further research suggests that text message marketing provides very healthy returns on investments—up to 25x the cost. And customers who receive text marketing messages are 40% more likely to convert compared to those who don't.

Want results like that? Here are four cornerstones for creating a successful retail SMS marketing campaign.

Personalize SMS marketing campaigns

Marketing is best when it's personalized. Customers feel connected when they feel like you’re speaking directly to them. For example, simply using your customer’s name could result in 20% higher read rates and 31% increased sales leads. This is easy to do in Mobiz using {{firstname}} and other tags.

Further personalize your communications by using separate messages for different target audiences. You could send 18- to 40-year-olds one message, and 40- to 50-year-olds another. This way, you'll always make sure the message hits each recipient just right.

Mobiz makes personalization easy. With our tools, creating a unique link to a tailored landing page customized for your audience segments is a snap. It's not just names that you can personalize, but the content itself—you can easily and dynamically swap in and out chunks of content based on the audience data you're targeting.

Personalized sales and offers

Personalization isn’t just about content and messaging. It can also mean slicing and dicing your audience into segments and then targeting them with different offers or special sales. Sell clothes? Send a text about your skirt sale to women, and send one about a two-for-one deal on shoes to men. Sell books? Text your audience about new arrivals in the genre that you know they like or by their favorite author.

(Overwhelmed? It might seem hard to do all of that customizing, but it’s easy—we promise. Mobiz lets you this kind of segmentation in just a few clicks).

You won’t just be impressed by your resulting sales (although you’ll definitely notice that). You’ll also see that this level of personalization builds better relationships with your customers and creates loyalty.

Text to join loyalty

Customer loyalty is just as important as it’s always been. But the strategies we’re using to nurture loyalty and get customers to subscribe to our lists are changing.

With the Mobiz text-to-join feature you can set up a keyword your customers can text to voluntarily join a subscriber list. Share this keyword online, in-store, on printed media and your social media—wherever. Now, you can send this group of committed customers special deals or discounts.

Use an end-to-end SMS marketing platform

Mobiz SMS marketing his end-to-end, from creating landing pages to SMS delivery, to analytics. An end-to-end SMS marketing campaign tool, like Mobiz, makes planning easier and saves you time.

In addition, with Mobiz, each customer receives a unique link that leads to a unique and personalized landing page, allowing you to track their behavior through the funnel. That data lets you tweak your campaign in real-time to optimize performance. You can even segment your audience based on their behavior.

The right tools for retail text message marketing

Mobiz was built to help you effortlessly move through an entire retail text message marketing campaign. We’ve even thought of the things you might not have—like how to quickly build a full, personalized landing page that optimizes conversions.

Ready to get started building your first SMS campaign? Try out our free 14-day trial.