How to Measure SMS Marketing Performance

This is a guest post by Justin Rockwell of OIR Interactive and TextBoard.

The most important aspect of running any advertising campaign is finding a way to measure its performance. Without measurable results, you risk wasting money on ineffective campaigns while missing out on easy opportunities to maximize the campaigns that do work.

Digital advertising has revolutionized the way marketers can track and measure all aspects of a campaign. Tracking data allows marketers to monitor a campaign’s ongoing performance and then make informed decisions on how to continue in the future. There is less guesswork with mobile marketing campaigns than any other type of advertising available.

Mobile marketing—SMS marketing in particular—is starting to become the most popular and preferred method for reaching customers. But in the haste to spread mobile marketing to clients and get text messages out to as many consumers as possible, too many marketers are losing sight of the things that make up a good campaign, and among the most important of them is how to measure results.

In order to measure the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaign, you must first decide your campaign’s primary goal. Then, determine what the key performance indicators will show whether or not that goal is being met. In other words, what things can you track and measure to assess the campaign’s efficacy toward achieving its goal?

Follow these simple steps for measuring the success of a mobile marketing campaign.

Click-tracking

SMS marketing messages often contain URL links that the user can click to follow to a mobile-friendly site for more information or purchase opportunity. Click-tracking measures all aspects of URL activity, and it is quickly developing into one of the most powerful ways to measure return on investment. To be effective, an SMS campaign should utilize click-tracking to learn every pertinent detail about the links that are followed and the purchasing interests and habits of the people who follow them.

Click-tracking provides useful data when analyzed against the campaign’s goal. If, for example, the goal is to push the subscriber to a mobile site to purchase a product over their mobile device, click-tracking will enable you to track the sales process from point A (message sent) to point B (purchase completed). Sites already using Google Analytics to measure mobile site performance can quickly generate a tracking code to be tagged onto any URL that is being sent.

TextBoard recently studied all the outgoing messages from the application to discover what kind of click-through rate marketers could expect from their campaigns. It surprised everyone in the industry when the metrics showed that links within an SMS marketing message held an average 19% click-through rate. This is more than four times the click-through rate of the average email campaign.

Keyword Tracking

The keyword you choose for your SMS call-to-action should be enticing, relevant to the product, and easy to remember. Still, some keywords outperform others, and knowing which ones yield the best responses can tell you a lot about your campaign overall. By using different keywords in different media and different locations, you can track the participation rate for each one and differentiate instantly the advertisements that are working from the ones that are not being read, heard, or followed.

Legends In Concert Myrtle Beach, for instance, ran an outdoor advertising campaign in which ads were placed on five billboards throughout the region. Each billboard contained the same call-to-action but used a different keyword. Legends tracked the number of subscribers that texted each of the five keywords for three months, and we discovered that the most expensive billboard had the lowest conversion rate. Without keyword tracking, Legends could have spent months wasting money on a medium that underproduced. Legends also learned that the overall conversion rate for the season on all boards combined was a whopping 16%. Without the keyword strategy and tracking we implemented, Legends would have had no way to measure the effectiveness of any individual billboard or the value of billboard advertising in general.

Call Tracking

Another great way to generate responses from your outgoing text messages is to invite subscribers to call a vanity 800 number to request more information or complete a sale. Using a custom number that redirects to the main line is an excellent way to measure conversion. Only one-third of all mobile devices are smart phones, so this still leaves a large number of people who can’t access your mobile website content from their phones. However, most phones do support the ability to physically click a phone number within a text message, so an 800 number is a good option for people whose phones don’t support typical URL activity.

Once an inquiry is made or a sale is completed over the phone, you obtain important data about the effectiveness of your text campaign in converting text recipients into callers. Systems such as CallFire can record the phone interactions for you to analyze later. A recommendation for locations with high call volume is to take a random sampling of calls per month, listen to them, and then extrapolate from the data the campaign’s total conversion. Even just reviewing the total number of calls generated from a text message will give you a grasp of the campaign’s response rate.

Coupon Tracking

Integrating a coupon code into any point-of-sale system is a great way to measure the results of an SMS campaign. If you’re able to use a unique code within the POS system you can then associate any purchases in the store back to a specific mobile subscriber.

If you don’t have the ability to work with a point-of-sale system to generate coupon codes on the fly, place a clipboard next to the register and take note each time someone presents you with a text message. Record a coupon user’s phone number and time of purchase, and analyze the data later to assess conversion. When you start to see a high conversion rate, you may consider upgrading your equipment to read texted coupon codes or to digitally store the subscriber information when a sale is made.

Track Multiple Metrics

Use as many of these tips as you can to achieve the ultimate goal of compiling useful data about your subscribers for better targeting and segmenting. The more segmented and targeted your subscriber list, the better the results. By implementing these tracking techniques, marketers can study exactly what level of engagement subscribers have with a brand. Also, don’t forget your inactive subscribers—those who have opted to receive your messages but have no purchase history. These are still valuable customers who just haven’t found the right offer yet. While the tracking techniques teach you a lot about individual subscribers, they also equip you with useable data about your campaign’s overall appeal, and you can use this information to reach those less active subscribers waiting for the ideal offer.

Justin Rockwell is the CEO of OIR Interactive and owner of the SMS marketing application TextBoard. Justin assists brands in developing and executing mobile marketing strategies including application development, online mobile content and text message marketing campaigns.

Tagged as: call tracking, click tracking, keyword tracking, mobile, sms, text message, TextBoard