#143. 5 Tips for Top-Notch SMS Marketing Messaging | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hey everyone and welcome back to Email Einstein the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m a marketeer at an agency called Flowium. Here at Flowium, we are a bunch of email marketing nerds that love e commerce. And because we love what we do, we want to share our e commerce insights with you. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. I love this motto so much just because this little phrase, it’s basically the essence of what we do here at Fluvium and like in e commerce, email marketing in general. And I’m very excited about today’s episode because today we will literally be talking about delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. Today’s topic is 5 tips for crafting effective texts. And when I’m saying effective texts, it’s not text like hey, you up that you’re sending at like 6am to your best friend. This kind of text, I’m sure you guys know your way around it, but today we will be talking about marketing messaging. So five tips for crafting effective text. And I know that some of you might even be still on the fence about SMS marketing. And honestly, I was one of you guys. But as more and more brands start adding SMS marketing as a channel to their marketing mix, consumers get more comfortable receiving those text messages. And in fact, 48% of online consumers, that’s like, from the study that I read, 48% of them said that they would actually prefer to receive SMS message over email if it’s the message from the brand that they know and love. And I mean it’s, it’s crazy to me to think that by the year of 2025, and I found this number on that same study, is that globally businesses are predicted to spend $50 billion on SMS messaging by the year 2025. $50 billion, that’s a huge industry. It’s like, I mean, and it sounds like a no brainer considering that the average daily screen time of US consumer, like a screen time on the phone increased by 50% between 2019 and 2021. So people do spend more time on their phones. And what’s the better way to reach them than through sms. So yeah, so we kind of came up with a list of like five tips for crafting that perfect SMS message for your brand. Some of that information I got from like our talks with Klaviyo from some studies that we came across and that I want to share with you but also like talking to my colleague. Basically the experience that we are having here, it’s the experience talking, you know. So yeah, so tip number one, make it short. It’s kind of like an obvious one, right? It’s like on the surface because the message, the essence of the messaging is that it’s short, it’s like 160 characters long. That’s like all of the real estate that you have. But I read this study by Klaviyo. Klaviyo’s recent data actually suggested that there is a clear trend for the click through rates for text of fewer than 50 characters long. So Klaviyo data actually suggests that if your message, if your text message is less than 50 characters long, it’s going to get about 12% higher click through rates. Which is like insane to think about because I mean what is 50 characters? It’s a super short sentence, long, not even probably. And after about 150 characters customers stop dropping off suggesting that while shorter messages they do have like higher click rates. If you have something important to say, Definitely use your 150 characters and a long SMS message can definitely still work. What is also very important to mention is that try to stay away from this short SMS ish words like sub, lol and stuff like that. Unless it’s a part of your brand voice or unless it’s a part of your marketing. Right? Because I mean people are smart and people do understand when the message is coming from a marketing platform or when it’s coming from a real person. So as soon as they see that text, stop to opt out. They know it’s a message that is being sent from the brand. So you should still make the SMS sound a bit more informal because it’s like a less formal mean of communication compared to email. But I mean use as many as many like letters or as many as much real estate as you need. But it was just like really interesting to me that for some brands the text messages that are under 50 characters long they get much, much higher click through rates. So that was like interesting for me to learn. Tip number two, use your name. Use your name. A name, a brand, a number. It’s everything your customers should never guess off like who’s this email or who’s this SMS is from, they need to know who you are. They need to know like what you’re selling, what your text is about. Listen, no one likes anonymous text and the best way to do that is of course if you have like a dedicated number or a personalized sender ID to establish like who you are right away. But even if you don’t have that yet, it’s not a problem. You can send in it with like a little brand name at the beginning of the text just so your customer knows who this SMS is from. And I think in platforms like Klaviyo this is like an automated function. You will always see like the brand name at the beginning. But if you’re using like a different platform, always remember to add your name. It’s super, super important. Tip number three, and this one is kind of counterintuitive and you’re going to understand what I mean in a bit. When sending SMS messages, don’t use emoji. Crazy right? Because emoji is pretty much it was born from SMS and I know it’s almost counterintuitive. But listen, there is data that revealed like basic rule of thumb and I mean this rule of thumb, obviously it’s like if your niche is different it’s not going to work for you. But Klaviyo, they tested multiple brands from multiple niches and they actually found out that SMS without emojis performed like 1.5% better than SMS’s with emoji. In other words, skipping the emojis offered that like 1% boost on average in like conversion and click through rates. And to me it was like really interesting to see just because you know, the SMS is basically the place where you use emoji the most. But I think it’s partially because customers kinda expect a bit more like professional communication from the brand. But also I think the part of the reason was also that emojis, they actually can take the place of words. But having entire message be emojis, it might get some customers confused. And I mean besides when using emoji you have way less characters to work with because keep in mind that using just one emoji reduces your character count for an SMS from 160 characters to 70 characters. So instead of having that like 160 characters to communicate your message, you only have like 70, which is like not a lot to be honest. And if you use more than that, it’s going to divide your message into like multiple SMS messages and your customer will going to get bombarded with Like a sequence of messages which is honestly not ideal. So obviously it’s not like a rule of thumb that is working for everyone. So definitely test it for your brand. But if you’re for example selling like back to school supplies, or if you’re selling some like funky youngish, I don’t know, like makeup stuff, emojis, they actually come in practice for this type of brands and customers especially like younger generation, they might even like expect something like that. But if you are trying to get customers to like purchase something a bit more like expensive, like we have this brand that are selling like engagement rings that are like, I don’t know, like $5,000 engagement rings and stuff like that, for them, emoji might not be like a good fit. So again test it out. But remember that using just one emoji reduces your character count significantly. So that’s the advice number three, advice number four or like tip number four, put the link at the bottom. And that’s a very interesting one. Another almost counterintuitive recommendation, especially for people who are from the email marketing. But putting the link at the bottom as like the best practice for sms. And as we already discussed, character count is very important with SMS messaging. A text message has like average text message has like 160 character limit. You don’t get any extra characters unless you’re paying for an additional text. That’s why it makes sense to use those short links, right? So you use less characters without compromising on spelling or without compromising on delivering the right message and stuff like that. So you know that the length of the link is important, right? And thanksguard platforms like Klaviyo, they have this function built into the platform that you can actually shorten all the links automatically because like an average link it will takes up like 30 characters or more, right? And the obvious solution would be to use the link shortener. And when you use the link shortener, I mean the link is normally like 10 characters long or like 15 characters long max. But the important question is where you should put the links in SMS messages. I’ve seen the brands who are starting their SMS with the link on top. So basically you’re opening the message, the first thing that you’re seeing is the active link on top. That would bring you to like a sale page or landing page or whatever. But also like the majority of the brands are actually putting the link at the bottom of the message. And when Klaviyo SMS Data Science team ran the numbers, it actually turned out that link at the bottom messages performed much Much better. So to give you some comparison link at the bottom, like the link not at the beginning messages, they got like 11 click through rates and links at the beginning messages got 8.75%. Which is almost counterintuitive because in email marketing we can very often see that sometimes when you put that like CDA at the top of the email, it gets the majority of the clicks. Well, that’s not how it works in SMS world because when you are getting the sms you want to start off on a conversational note before asking for a click or for anything from your client. And I mean if you think as you would in a real world, in the brick and mortar world, picture yourself coming into a retail store and you’re just entering the door and then the first thing that you get and the first thing that you see is the business owner that, that like pops into your face and shouts like hey, only today buy one, get one 50% off only until the end of the night. I mean that would feel probably a bit like intrusive, right? And SMS is the same in a way. You want to. Even though you only have like 160 characters, you still kind of want to build that like a bit of a relationship with the customer with sms. Right? So before you ask anything of your customer, try building that like deeper relationship with your customer. Customer via text. You should be very like honest, plain, simple, no fluff, no exaggeration. Human interaction is important. That’s why you want to start with something conversational. Especially if you consider that SMS is a conversational, very like super conversational channel of marketing. So yeah, put the link at the bottom. That’s a good practice having some sort of like a message, call to action and then a link. And always, always remember to use link shorteners so you don’t use up that precious real estate. Okay, and the last recommendation that, I mean, I think it’s like the. How do you, how did they say it in English? Last but not least. Last but not the Least. So this is an important one again because you don’t have many like characters because you don’t have like a lot of space. You have to be very creative with that like message that you have. And using caps strategically can actually help. So tip number five, use caps strategically. Capitalization is a great way to draw the eye of your customer to the main selling point of your message. Like when you’re sending something about like the flash sale, maybe it’s a good idea to put that like flash sale in caps. Or maybe you want to let your customers know that the item they’ve been interested in is in fact back in stock. Then put this like three words in all caps back in stock. Capitalization. It’s great and it does work. It does draw the eye of your customer to the selling point of your message. But be careful with capitalization. And I’ve seen it across the industry, I’ve seen it a lot. Capitalization can be quite annoying when it’s overused and it even feels a bit aggressive right when you want to show that you are like shouting at someone. In the world of Internet or in the world of taxing, we use capital. So be careful with caps. Be more strategic with it. Think of the reason that you’re sending this message in the first place and then capitalize that thing. Capitalizing the discount code is also not a bad idea because that’s basically the main reason why you’re sending this message, right? Or if you’re like offering some perks like freebie or free shipping or something, capitalize that as well. You can pull out the right words to capitalize so that someone who will just like skim through their message, they will look directly at the essence of your message. They will look directly at what you are offering. Even if they are just like glancing through your message, they would still see like the main sort of like an essence of your sms. So yeah, so these are our tips. This episode was short and sweet. Five tips. I’m just going to summarize them for you again so you can start using them right away. First of all, make the SMS short. If you can use fewer than 50 characters, great. It’s going to get your click through rates high. If not, you can use more. That’s not a problem. Number two, use your name always, always to remember to introduce yourself your brand. The number customer should always know who’s getting in touch with them. Number three, don’t use emoji. Because emoji, they actually keep in mind that using that one emoji reduces the character count for an SMS from 160 to 70 characters. So be careful with emojis. Number four. Put the link at the bottom. Putting the link at the bottom versus at the top is a good practice. Just because you want to be a bit more conversational before you’re hitting your customer with an offer, you want to start off on a conversational note before asking for the click from your customer. Ed, that’s gonna, you’re gonna see a significant difference in your click through rates. Believe us, we’ve tested it multiple times. That’s a good practice to use. And the last number five use caps strategically. So there you have it. Five tips. And you guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode and we will have like some experts from the industry soon on our podcast who will be specifically talking about like SMS and stuff. Stuff. So in case you have any questions, you’ll be able to address those questions on the episode. And as always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. It is very important for us to get your reviews and if you leave us a review, if you send us a screenshot in exchange, we’re gonna send you some like a really cool Flowium gift, some really cool Flowium merch. It can be socks and can be magnets. I don’t know, I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be something fun and something cute and. Yeah. And as always, if you’re interested in getting like some more advice on how to establish a solid email marketing strategy for your e commerce store, definitely reach out to us. We have a free consultation or we have a free audit basically for your store if you want to do that. Definitely reach out to us. Thank you so much for listening and I hope to have you back here next Tuesday. Take care.