Everyone likes to talk about how well SMS marketing works but leave you to fend for yourself when it comes to actually growing your SMS lists. Sure, you can invite people to join your SMS list (and hope they do), or you can bake it into your referral program and watch your SMS lists grow just like your revenue.
This article will teach you to not only grow your SMS marketing list but also improve your subscriber list with high quality leads through referral marketing. We'll also go through SMS marketing best practices just to be sure that you're set to launch your new text message marketing campaign.
In this post, we feature our Attentive integration as the example workflow.
It's true, SMS text message marketing is a powerhouse when it comes to acquisition and boosting revenue. SMS open rates can get up to 98 percent and SMS marketing messages conversion rates up to 20 percent. No marketing efforts that bring those same results.
Avoid buying any SMS marketing lists and instead focus on growing your list through other marketing efforts, like with referral marketing or a loyalty program.
A lot of the principles we apply to referral marketing apply to SMS marketing too. To keep your SMS marketing list growing, make it easy to find and enticing to join. Here are the easiest ways to have the biggest impact:
Since referral marketing is our bread and butter, we'll dig into how to get new subscribers through referral marketing.
When an Advocate refers a Friend after completing a purchase, visiting your site, or responding to an email from your referral campaign, they have the option to enter their phone number into a Friendbuy referral widget in order to subscribe to SMS messages from your brand.
Friendbuy captures mobile phone numbers for both the Advocate and the referred Friend to build your SMS subscriber list. Our integration with Attentive allows you to send these phone numbers to segmented lists that are created in Attentive, so you can send personalized messages to each subscriber. We'll cover how to segment your SMS list more later.
While you’ve already got the attention of your valuable customers, give them another way to receive product information, offers, and other updates from your brand. Build your SMS subscriber list using these three tips:
Friendbuy makes it easy to encourage Advocates to sign up to receive texts from you. Attentive’s simple, two-click process lowers the barrier to entry and increases conversions.
Include an offer for referred Friends to encourage them to provide their phone number and email address to redeem a coupon code toward their first purchase.
Friendbuy sends the coupon code distributed to referred Friends to Attentive, so you can send them a segmented message and remind them to redeem their coupon code via email or SMS.
Once you have the capability to send text messages to customers, what do you do with it? Leverage your list of subscribers by keeping customers engaged and excited about referring their friends using tactics such as:
There’s an added bonus: All of these strategies also help continue to grow your SMS subscriber list. Attentive also collects email addresses so you can grow your email list at the same time.
Once you've got all of those phone numbers, you'll want to segment them so that you can send highly targeted SMS messages.
Here are a few examples of how you can segment your list:
Friendbuy’s integration with Attentive helps you grow your brand presence by capturing phone numbers of both advocates and friends and adding them to your subscriber list. This allows you to communicate directly with existing customers and referred friends who have recently been introduced to your brand through trusted Advocates.