You have been planning your first SMS message for weeks and are finally about to send it out. It's concise, witty, and authentic yet it’s still not as attention-grabbing as you would like it to be. So, what happened? Well, in short, there is more to marketing than just the message. There are numerous variables that must be accounted for when promoting your brand through text and they can dramatically differ depending on the products you sell or where you sell them.
Knowing these variables is crucial to creating an effective SMS marketing campaign and growing your business. One of the best ways to determine what your customers are is A and B Testing.
What is A/B Testing?
A and B testing is a method of trial and error where you use multiple variants and iterations of your marketing message to ascertain how to best deliver it to the customer.
Using a randomised sample representing the average consumer (usually about 1000 or so people), you create two messages: one to serve as the control and the other as its variant. Each is then sent to half of your sample population to see which version of your marketing resonates more effectively. This experiment can be repeated with variations of the winning text until you are sending out the best version possible.
This is most useful when not trying to improve multiple metrics at once. More targeted tests for each one over a longer period of time provides a more in-depth look at your customer base and what they find most appealing in a marketing campaign.
What to Test
The factors you use to run your SMS marketing can vary wildly due to a multitude of factors. A and B testing aids in determining those factors and controlling for them. It also helps you to determine the most effective structure of your texts in order to resonate with the largest number of people. Thus, you can gather useful customer data, such as:
- Format - Does your customer base prefer marketing that’s primarily text, such as with plain text SMS, or a message with links to website, document or video? Is there an optimal length that texts should be?
- Time - Are your customers more likely to positively respond to messages received in the morning, afternoon, or at night?
- Offers - Do your customers have more of a response to flat discounts on items? Coupon offers? Holiday sale reminders? Loyalty points?
- Tone - Do customers prefer your marketing to be more informal in its word choice with the use of common expressions and slang, or would they like you to maintain the professional tone they’d expect from employees of your brand.
- Call to Action - What calls to action elicit the best responses from your customers? Do they respond better to an implicit incentive such as in “Try it for free” or something more concise like “Visit”? And would they prefer a call to action to come with a link to your website or a coupon code?
Having these data points and other factors accounted for within your campaign can provoke an overall improvement in your metrics. Done correctly and extensively, you’ll notice gradual increases in customer response rates, opt-ins, and overall revenue.
Connecting with Your Customers
A and B testing is a reliable method for better understanding the habits of your customer base when it comes to your marketing campaign. By sorting messages into specific categories based on interests and buying practices, you can appeal to each customer in a specifically tailored way. This creates a favourable reception for your brand and the services or products that it provides.
Contact touchSMS for Business Texting Services
Do you want to get in touch with your customer base through texting? Would you like to hear about our affordable, reliable, and efficient mass text plans? Call us today at +61 2 9518 7455, or at 1300 794 419 in Australia to get started and see what automated text marketing can do for your conversions.
Our services include live delivery reports, auto opt-out management, SMS customisation, email SMS, and much more.