7 Ways to Increase SMS Response Rates

Woman texting and boosting SMS response rates

Business SMS is naturally a two-way channel. It encourages person-to-person interactions which, for your brand, can lead to conversational marketing opportunities. But what do you do when your SMS response rates are low? 

There are plenty of reasons customers aren’t responding to your texts. A lot of these problems are easy to fix—and some just require you to tweak your strategies a little. 

Read on to learn 7 ways to increase SMS response rates. 

Text During the Right Days and Times

The easiest way to increase SMS response rates is to send your content when your leads and customers can actually reply to your content. Sending texts during convenient times will improve customer SMS responses, too; they’ll be more enthusiastic. Text during traditional business hours, which are 9am-5pm. You will also want to:

  • Consider time zones if your brand is in multiple regions
  • Avoid Mondays, when professionals are busy 
  • Avoid Fridays, too, when professionals may already be heading home or be done with work for the week 

Send Interactive Content

This tip may seem obvious, but it’s critical. If your team only sends static content, like coupons or announcements, customers won’t feel as though they need to (or even should) text back. It also makes them more likely to unsubscribe. Low SMS marketing response rates are common with these kinds of messages. Consider creating content that specifically encourages customers to respond. Truly interactive content includes:

  • Customer surveys
  • Follow up tips on product use cases
  • Personalized query or purchase follow-ups

Provide Real Value

In order to increase SMS response rates, your content has to both be interesting and provide real value. When creating your content, you have to ask yourselves what kind of content truly helps or inspires your audience. If your SMS response rates are low, you have to consider that perhaps your content isn’t either entertaining or useful enough. Focus your content around:

  • Customer service 
  • Collecting feedback on your products or business
  • Issues or hobbies that your customers may be interested in

Provide Immediate Customer Benefits

Customers need to know that they’ll get something out of responding to your business’s texts. However, rewards don’t have to come in the form of gift cards or products. Think of what your customer will get out of responding to your content. You can improve customer SMS responses and rates by sending content that rewards them with:

  • Immediate connection to professional advice (e.g., gift concierges)
  • The chance to choose a product or service (e.g., polls or surveys)
  • An opportunity to be featured in social media (e.g., social media competition)

Personalize Content

The more personalized your texts are, the more likely your leads and customers will pay attention. Create SMS templates that indicate custom fields based on your CRM. Your business SMS platform will use merge tokens to insert each recipient’s personal custom fields into outgoing texts. You’ll want to include key items like:

  • First names (and last names or titles if your company is more formal)
  • Order numbers
  • Loyalty statuses
  • Store locations

Target Smaller Groups

Just as your recipients will be more likely to read content with their personal information in them, they’ll be more likely to read content that is clearly geared toward them. Target smaller groups of recipients at once so you can create more specific text messages. For example, consider creating campaigns based on:

  • Loyalty statuses
  • Dates of last orders
  • Region

Add Human Touches

Your recipients are more likely to respond to your texts if it looks like they’re coming from other humans. Texts are already naturally considered a person-to-person channel, but there are a few other ways to ensure each of your texts seems like it is being sent individually from a single agent. To add this kind of human touch, be sure to:

  • Include an agent’s signature at the end of each text
  • Use casual, friendly language (if that fits with your brand’s style) 
  • Insert items like emojis and GIFs (again, if that adheres to your brand’s style) 

 

Want to learn more ways to increase SMS response rates? Check out our blog.

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