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A new season means new campaigns, and as you take on this new season, it’s time to start thinking about new ways to improve your SMS and email marketing efforts.

Maybe you’ve been doing the same campaigns year after year, or perhaps you’ve seen a decrease in engagement. Whatever the driving factor may be, now’s the perfect time to look at how your campaigns are performing and look for new ways to improve your efforts.

This article will provide you with some tips on improving your SMS and email marketing campaigns. With the help of these tips, you’ll have a few new ideas on how to refresh your campaigns moving forward.

Here’s a quick look at what’s ahead:

• Why use SMS campaigns as part of your digital marketing strategy
• Five tips to make the most out of your SMS campaigns
• SMS marketing platforms to consider for managing Your campaigns
• Why use email campaigns as part of your digital marketing strategy
• Fivewhatto improve your marketing campaigns continuously tips to make the most out of your SMS campaigns
• Email marketing platforms to consider for managing your campaigns

Why Use SMS Campaigns as a Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Before diving too far into it, let’s take a step back for those who are new to the idea of using SMS messaging as part of their digital marketing strategy. SMS messaging is a great channel to integrate into your marketing efforts because it’s where your customers are already engaging with their friends, family, and the other brands they love.

One of the most appealing things about SMS is that it has a 98% open rate, and messages are generally read within 3 minutes. On top of that, 75% of people want to receive offers via SMS — meaning your audience is eager and willing to engage with you via texting.

To make the most out of your SMS marketing campaigns, whether you’re brand new to the channel or a seasoned pro, you’ll want to follow a few tips and tricks to keep your subscribers engaged. The following tips are just a few things you can do to improve your SMS marketing campaigns this fall.

5 Tips to Make the Most Out of Your SMS Campaigns

When it comes time to review your SMS marketing campaigns and identify areas of improvement, it can be challenging to know where to start. Thinking out of the box will allow you to reach new lengths with your campaign metrics and continue to expand your SMS reach.

To help you start thinking about new ways to improve your efforts, we’ve pulled together a list of five tips to make the most out of your SMS campaigns this fall.

1.   Review Existing and Develop New Automated Drip Campaigns

Are you currently running automated drip campaigns? If so, when was the last time you took a look at how those campaigns are performing?

Chances are good, you set them and then moved on to your next big project and forgot about them. It’s easy to do since they run in the background and require little to no manual intervention from your teams.

The changing season comes as a reminder that it’s time to take a look back at those campaigns. You may identify that some can be retired or a new opportunity to develop new campaigns.

A drip campaign is an automated marketing campaign sent to subscribers based on an action or data point for those who may be newcomers. A few common examples of drip campaigns include:

• Welcome campaigns
• Retention campaigns
• Cross-selling campaigns
• Abandoned cart campaigns

This is an excellent example of an engaging welcome campaign. Once the user texted the keyword to opt-in, they were automatically sent a welcome message that provided them with value right away. After this message, if the brand has a welcome campaign that runs for a specific timeframe, the user may receive additional introductory messages in the coming weeks. Image courtesy of VoiceSage.

Drip campaigns are an effective way to reach your customers without having to schedule each message manually. And since the SMS message is sent based on the subscriber’s action, the content will be highly relevant.

So, how do you build an effective SMS drip campaign? Here are a few things to get you started:

• Think about where your customers are in their purchasing journey and keep campaigns relevant to their needs at each stage
• Set clear goals and build your campaign around this to see success
• Build relationships with your subscribers through personalization
• Add value to the subscriber in each message

If you’re looking to do more with your time while still providing your subscribers with a relevant and engaging experience, then identifying new opportunities for your drip campaigns is a great option.

2.   Use Interactive Elements in Your Campaigns

Integrating interactive content into your SMS marketing campaigns presents a unique way to share content and make your message stand out in a subscriber’s inbox.

It’s been seen that interactive content can generate up to 2x more conversions than passive content. So by choosing to integrate interactive elements into your SMS campaigns, you’re much more likely to have successful conversion metrics.

Interactive content can come in a variety of different forms. From ebooks and infographics to helpful calculators and quizzes — you can get creative with the content you’re building campaigns around. Image courtesy of Visme.

Since SMS messaging is a bit limited on what you can and cannot include, such as more than 160 characters and multimedia, you might be wondering how you can consist of interactive content in your campaigns.

When it comes to incorporating interactive content into your SMS marketing campaigns, it comes in the form of linking to a page that houses that content. Your SMS messages then become a driver to those interactive campaigns.

So what is the benefit of using SMS to help build awareness of this campaign? Well, it all comes down to that 98% open rate. With the right campaign and the promise of a fun and interactive experience, your subscribers will be intrigued to click through and find out more.

3.   Provide Subscribers With Exclusive Content

Consider this scenario, your customers follow you on all of your digital marketing channels — from email to social and everything in between, including SMS messaging. If you’re sending them the same content on every channel, chances are good they’re going to grow tired of seeing the same messages over and over and start ignoring your marketing efforts.

To solve this brand fatigue, you need to ensure subscribers with exclusive content they can only get by subscribing to your SMS campaigns.

Many consumers feel that giving away their phone number is more personal and presents a higher risk than sharing an email. That means you need to make it worthwhile for your audiences to want to subscribe to your content.

One of the top reasons people choose to subscribe to SMS marketing campaigns is for exclusive content. You’ll likely appeal to more audiences and see higher opt-in and retention metrics by providing this content. Image courtesy of Listrak.

The appeal of exclusive content and offers might be just the persuading your customers need to subscribe to your SMS campaigns.

4.   Gather Customer Feedback to Improve Future Campaigns

To continue developing high-performing campaigns, you need to gather honest customer feedback. This insight will help you understand your customers’ changing needs and what you can do to continuously improve your marketing campaigns.

Gathering customer feedback doesn’t have to be limited to asking how your campaigns resonated or if your audience likes the number of times you message them. You can also use it to improve other business areas, like product improvement, or identify problems with delivery times.

But make sure to keep your feedback surveys and forms short. Your customers don’t want to spend hours providing feedback. The longer you make the questionnaire, the fewer responses you can expect to see.

People want to provide their feedback to you, but only if it’s convenient for them. That means you need to keep those feedback requests short and sweet. The more questions you ask, the less time people will spend on each question, meaning you’ll likely receive less valuable insights. Image courtesy of Outcry.

That being said, collecting feedback from your customer via SMS messaging can be done in several different ways. Here are just a few examples to start getting you thinking about ways to incorporate it into your marketing strategy:

• Campaign feedback requests that ask customers how relevant your marketing campaigns are to them and learning what they’d like to receive from your brand
• Product feedback requests that ask customers about a product, or products, they recently purchased
• Service feedback requests that ask customers about the services they received
• Delivery feedback requests that ask customers about their delivery experience and if the products arrived on time, as expected
• Event feedback requests that ask customers how they enjoyed a recent event
• Support feedback requests that ask customers about their recent customer support interactions

Not only will gathering customer feedback allow you to identify problems and strive for continuous improvement, but it will also show your customers you value their opinions.

People like to be heard, and when the brand they interact with regularly asks what their thoughts are, they’re eager to put their ideas out there. This will help you build stronger customer relationships and make your audiences feel like they’re being heard.

5.   Use an SMS Marketing Platform to do More With Your Campaigns

Tapping into an SMS marketing platform will allow you to do so much more with your campaigns. Finding the right tool with the right capabilities will provide you with the opportunity to continue to grow your SMS marketing efforts as your business continues to expand.

If you’re already sending SMS messages to your customers, you’re likely already using some sort of platform or tool to reach your audiences. But does it provide you with the services you need to continue growing your business?

When looking into an SMS marketing platform that can help you do more with your campaigns, look for one that provides services like:

• Simple SMS creation tools
• Campaign automation
• Trigger message capabilities
• Smart segmentation
• Predictive product and content tools
• Cross-channel integration capabilities
• The ability to add personalization

All of these tools will help you make the most out of your SMS marketing campaigns and provide you with advanced tools to continue growing your business. Once you’ve mastered the campaign automation workflow, it’s time to start looking at new capabilities such as predictive product recommendations.

With the right platform, the possibilities are endless.

SMS Marketing Platforms to Consider for Managing Your  Campaigns

That was the perfect segway into the next section — SMS marketing platforms to consider for managing your campaigns.

Here, we’ll look at a few marketing platforms to help you achieve your SMS campaign goals. Each of these platforms are great options that will provide you with the tools you need to create, manage, and track the success of all your SMS campaigns.

Listrak

Listrak is an integrated digital marketing platform that can help you take your SMS marketing efforts to the next level. You’ll be able to manage all the basics like message automation and customer segmentation and have the insights to develop highly targeted campaigns and drive cross-channel interactions.

The Listrak SMS marketing tools will provide you with everything you need to build all of your SMS campaigns. Whether the goal of your campaign is to grow your subscriber base, increase brand awareness, or drive increased revenue — this platform has what you need to get the job done. Image courtesy of Listrak.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can easily send broadcast emails to all of your customers or choose to target engaged users with triggered SMS messages
• You can integrate multimedia such as photos and gifs into your text marketing campaigns through MMS messaging
• You can create cross-channel marketing experiences that bring together all of your channels, including SMS, email, social, and more
• You can develop highly targeted campaigns that use actual customer data to integrate personalization and strategically influence subscribers to make a purchase

Pricing: The pricing for the Listrak platform is customized based on the specific needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what your plan would look like.

Attentive

The Attentive text marketing platform is an excellent tool for eCommerce businesses looking to drive online revenue growth. It provides you with all the capabilities you’ll need to reach new audiences, build relationships with your current audiences, and run all the campaigns your heart desires.

The Attentive platform provides you with everything you need to build comprehensive SMS marketing campaigns based on your customers’ needs. By creating customized journeys, you can send more relevant messages to your audiences when they need them. Image courtesy of Attentive.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can continue to grow your SMS efforts by developing click-worthy sign-up forms that allow people to subscribe to your campaigns easily
• You can share incentives that capture the attention of your customers and entice them to make a purchase
• You can send highly targeted messages that are relevant to the interests of your customers
• You can easily measure campaign success and identify new opportunities to improve future campaigns through detailed metrics

Pricing: You need to request a demo to understand what pricing will look like based on the SMS capabilities you need.

Textedly

Textedly is a great text message marketing tool that will allow you to connect with your subscribers quickly and efficiently. With many different plan options available, you’ll be able to choose the right plan for your SMS marketing needs and stay within your budget requirements.

Managing your SMS marketing campaigns can be simple with the Textedly dashboard. You’ll easily see how your campaigns are performing and a quick snapshot of all of your SMS marketing efforts. Image courtesy of Textedly.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can easily reach all of your subscribers to keep them updated about company news, upcoming sales, and special offers and promotions with mass group texting
• You can continue to grow your subscriber base by using text keyword capabilities to sign new users up to receive your SMS campaigns
• You can engage in two way SMS conversations with your subscribers to answer questions and improve customer service
• You can capture the most critical customer data and campaign analytics to identify new opportunities and drive continuous improvement within your SMS marketing

Pricing: Textedly provides several plan options for businesses ranging from the Bronze plan costing $24 per month to the Champion plan costing $2,800.

Why Use Email Campaigns as a Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

You’re probably already using email as part of your digital marketing strategy and for a good reason. Email is one of the most effective marketing channels available, and you can expect an average return of $42 on every $1 your spend.

But even if you already have a highly successful email marketing strategy, you may need to switch things up.

Thinking of new things to do with your emails can sometimes be challenging because you become set in your ways. To help you with that, we’ve put together a list of five tips to help you make the most out of your email marketing campaigns this fall.

As the new season rolls in, it’s a great time to look at how your campaigns are performing and make some adjustments to improve.

5 Tips to Make the Most Out of Your Email Campaigns

Whether you already have high-performing email campaigns or not, there is always room for improvement. It could be as simple as taking a look at your subscriber list and doing a little clean up — or maybe it’s adding behavioral marketing into the mix.

Whatever the adjustments may be, they will all help to improve your current campaigns.

In this section, we’ll look at a few tips to help you identify a few areas to refresh your campaigns to drive higher engagement rates and improve your current email marketing metrics.

1.   Track Subscriber Behaviors and Leverage That Data in Your Campaigns

Integrating behavioral marketing into your email campaigns is a huge opportunity. Having access to your customer’s browsing and purchasing behaviors will allow you to create highly targeted campaigns that resonate with each subscriber on a more personalized level.

Behavioral marketing tactics are a great way to engage with your audiences. Not only will it help you stand out from the competition, but your customers will be more willing to share their data with you to receive these highly targeted campaigns. Image courtesy of Impact.

That’s because you can serve them content that is related to the article they read on your site or the products they were recently browsing. This level of insight into how your customers interact with your brand will allow you to curate the most relevant experience possible.

Not sure how to leverage customer data to your email campaigns? Here are a few simple steps to help you get started:

• Track how your customers are interacting with your business online
• Determine what important actions the users may take
• Start conversations around these actions and behaviors

By using behavioral data, you can create a more customized experience for your audiences and drive an increase in sales due to the relevancy of the content.

2.   Review Your Subscriber List and Customer Segments

When it comes to email marketing, having a clean subscriber list can make or break the success of your campaigns.

If you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers but if only a quarter of those subscribers actually engage with your content, you’re likely not going to meet your campaign goals. To really drive successful campaigns, you need an engaged subscriber list.

To do this, you’ll want to keep up with seasonal maintenance on your list. This means removing identifying and removing inactive users and dead emails. Taking the time to clean up your data will be well worth it once you start seeing higher metrics and more engaged audiences.

This cleanup also applies to your customer segments.

When you consider that marketers who use segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue, it’s important to keep those segments up to date.

Having clean customer segments will result in higher campaign performance across the board. Eliminating inactive subscribers will leave you with more engaged audiences, resulting in higher open and click rates on your messages. Image courtesy of Smart Insights.

You may be using a tool that allows you to automate segmentation, so this clean-up may not be as time-consuming — but it’s still important to do. Take some time to review your segments and make sure you’re not missing any new campaign or segmentation opportunities.

3.   Make the Most Out of Your Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are another highly effective way to drive engagement with your subscribers. Because these messages are highly relevant to the user’s needs, they’re much more likely to engage.

To put some stats around these messages, transactional emails generate an open rate average of 44.9%, a click-through rate average of 10.4%, and a click-to-open rate average of 20.1%.

Marketers across the board agree that transactional emails are essential to their business. By taking these emails and reimagining what they can do to help reach your goals, you can open yourself up to a world of opportunity. Image courtesy of Marketing Charts.

If those stats don’t have you jumping on the transactional email bandwagon, I’m unsure what will.

Some of the most common transactional emails companies use include:

• Order confirmations emails
• Shipping notifications emails
• Delivery confirmations emails
• Password reset emails
• Invoice emails

But many marketers don’t take full advantage of these email types. They simply use them to share an update with the user based on their transaction, which is fine, but there’s a world of opportunity here.

You can easily integrate marketing content, product recommendations, and other relevant information into these messages. Think about transactional emails as an opportunity to upsell, cross-sell, and provide customers with relevant content such as how-to guides on recently purchased products.

Using these emails for more than just information sharing will allow you to continue the customer journey and provide customers with the things they’ll need next. It will also drive and increase revenue and sales for your business in the process.

4.   Test Email Elements to Better Understand Your Audiences

Testing your emails is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t from a technical and content standpoint. The more you know about how the elements of your emails are performing, the better campaigns you can create in the future.

There are so many areas within your emails that you can test to understand better how your audiences are engaging with your messages. Whether it’s seeing what subject line grabs the reader’s attention or how personalization plays into the mix — it can all help you create higher-performing campaigns. Image courtesy of Optinmonster.

Many elements of your emails can be tested, such as:

• Subject lines
• Day of the week
• Time of day
• Frequency
• Mostly images vs. mostly text
• Links vs. buttons
• Personalization
• Call to actions

Each of these elements can be tested to determine how they best perform. From there, you can take that insight and put it into action in future campaigns to make the most out of each message you’re sending.

If you skip the process of testing your emails, you may find yourself in the same cycle of sending campaigns that result in mediocre results. So if your goal is to continue growing and improving your email marketing campaigns, testing is a must.

5.   Use an Email Marketing Platform to do More With Your Campaigns

Just as we discussed with SMS marketing, investing in the right email marketing platform can make all the difference for your email campaigns.

Email marketing platforms provide you with many of the same benefits as SMS platforms do — you can easily create, manage, and report on your email efforts. They also allow you to tap into technology that you may not have access to on your own.

When looking for the right email marketing tool for your business, look for one that provides you with tools like:

• Email automation capabilities
• Customer journey and workflow building tools
• Simple email creation tools
• Segmentation and contact management capabilities
• Personalization and dynamic content

To help you find the perfect email marketing tool for your needs, we’ve pulled together a shortlist to get you started.

Email Marketing Platforms to Consider for Managing Your Campaigns

This list of email marketing platforms is just a starting place to help you find the right tools for your business needs. Each one will provide you with the things you need to succeed in your email endeavors and create high-performing campaigns.

Listrak

Listrak is not only a great option for businesses looking for an SMS marketing platform, but it also offers all of the email marketing tools you’ll need as well. Whether you want a tool that makes creating emails simple or has predictive marketing tools, the Listrak platform can help you achieve your email marketing goals.

The Listrak platform makes it easy to create, manage, and analyze your email marketing efforts. With the right insights, you can identify new opportunities and improve future campaigns to make the most out of each message. Image courtesy of Listrak.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can take the stress of building emails away with a simple drag and drop email builder that allows you to integrate personalization with dynamic capabilities easily
• You can build email campaigns based on the customer journey to ensure you’re sending the right message at the right time based on real-time customer behaviors
• You can send intelligent triggered campaigns that engage audiences with relevant content such as back-in-stock alerts, price drop alerts, post-purchase notifications, and more
• You can drive an increase in revenue by using predictive product recommendations to identify products that your customers will be interested in based on previous purchases and browsing behaviors

Pricing: The pricing for the Listrak platform is customized based on the specific needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what your plan would look like.

Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is another great email marketing option. It will allow you to create engaging emails that drive higher engagement and increase sales revenue. You’ll be able to do more with your time with the help of the tools this email marketing platform has to provide.

Easily create personalized messages that resonate with your customers based on their interests. Using smart segments will save you time and provide your audiences with more relevant content, resulting in higher engagement rates. Image courtesy of Campaign Monitor.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can easily create customized emails with the help of predesigned templates and an easy to use drag and drop email building tool
• You can automate the customer journey to ensure you’re sending the most relevant message to your audiences based on their personal journey
• You can create intelligent segments to group similar audiences together and create hyper-targeted campaigns at scale
• You can send transactional messages that engage with your subscribers based on the interactions they have with your brand

Pricing: There are three plan options available, including the Basic plan costing $9 per month, the Unlimited plan costing $29 per month, and the Premier plan costing $149 per month.

AWeber

AWeber is an email marketing platform that can help you build stronger relationships with your customers and improve your email marketing campaigns. With tools that simplify the process from creation to deployment and tracking performance — this platform has all the tools you’ll need to create high-performing campaigns.

Creating professional emails can be a simple task that anyone on your team can do with the AWeber platform. You’ll no longer have to stress about pulling your graphic designer or coding team into the process. You can do it yourself, no matter what your skill level is. Image courtesy of AWeber.

Here’s what you need to know:

• You can easily build professional emails without the need to know to code or even have a background in design with the help of Canva integrations
• You can create automated drip campaigns that enroll customers based on their qualifications and avoid having to run each campaign manually
• You can integrate personalization into your messages and create targeted messages with segmentation capabilities
• You can track campaign success with reporting and analytics capabilities to gain insight into how each email is performing

Pricing: There are two different pricing options, standard and high volume pricing. The standard pricing plans start at $16.15 per month and increase based on the number of subscribers you have. While the high volume pricing is customized based on the needs of your business.

Make the Most Out of Your SMS and Email Marketing This Fall

As the leaves start to change and the seasons shift, now’s the perfect time to take a step back and look at how your SMS and email marketing campaigns are performing. Finding new ways to tweak your existing efforts will allow you to improve and provide your customers with a more engaging experience.