SMS marketing has been proven to be an effective means to communicate with customers and grow your business. But how can you tell your marketing efforts are yielding good results?
No matter how great your campaign is, if you don’t have appropriate metrics in place to analyze your SMS statistics and interpret what they mean, you would not know which way your campaign is going and how to get the best out of it.
So below are some essential metrics can help you see whether your campaign was successful or not:
Delivery Rate
This metric shows you how many messages reached or did not reach the recipients of your contact list. SMSexperience offers a unique Duplicate Removal Number system that filters and removes duplicate numbers to prevent wastage. In this way, the delivery rate is calculated only from those numbers to which the campaign message was really sent. Although the delivery rate is usually above 90%, factors such as the list of numbers, DND, telecommunications networks, etc. can influence the delivery rate.
Growth Rate of subscribers list
The numbers game equally applies to SMS marketing. Growing your list allows you to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself better in the industry. Given that there will always be opt-outs, growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size is not an option.
You can determine the growth rate by deducting the number of previous subscribers from your current number of subscribers and dividing that figure by the number of previous subscribers. From the figures, you can tell how fast you are growing your list of subscribers. As your subscribers increase, so does your ROI.
Click-through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate shows you the percentage of subscribers who initiated action by clicking a link in an SMS whether directing them to a webpage where they might make a purchase or learn more about a product, service, or offer. It gives you direct insight into how many people on your list are engaging with your content and are interested in learning more about your brand or your offer.
You can use certain SMS software and tools such as Google Analytics (link to related blog post) to track the number of clicks from your SMS campaigns. Once you have the figure, easily calculate your click-through rate by taking the number of the clicks and dividing it by the total number of delivered SMS then multiply by 100. The higher the click-through rate, the higher your ROI!
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take valuable action by responding to a call to action. Conversion doesn’t refer to sales alone; it can be a reply, a phone call, a sign-up, a subscription to your newsletter, or simply a visit to your website. Sales conversions, however, relate to purchases only. SMS marketing has an astonishing 45% conversion rate.
To calculate conversion rate, divide the number of subscribers that take action by the total number of subscribers in your campaign. You can do this for sales conversions alone if you are particular about sales but it is important to analyze the overall conversions as this would enable you have a better understanding of the products, services or offers that are actively engaging your audience and generating actions. With this you can focus on creating more performing content to get even more conversions.
Text-a-code Response Figure
The response figure in this term is defined as the number of people performing text-a-code actions other than click-throughs and conversions at a given period. For example, the number of people who texted the support code or other response codes. This metric might seem trivia but it gives you a picture of how people are engaging your content. You can use this information to create stronger relationships with your recipients. Don’t focus on sales alone.
Opt-out Rate
Yes, nobody likes to talk about this, but opt-out rate may be one of the most important metrics you need to take into account when measuring your SMS marketing campaign. Certain subscribers would always opt-out after receiving a marketing text message regardless of how good your SMS campaign is. They may simply want to limit the number of text messages they receive from different senders or that they no longer need your service or they find your SMS an encroachment on their privacy.
In any way, a high opt-out rate should raise a red flag. It could be a signal of a number of problems in your bulk text messages such as poor timing and audience targeting, high frequency, or irrelevant message content. Monitoring your opt-out rates will allow you to rethink your content and strategy and come up with what works for you.
Cost per subscriber/ROI analysis
It is important to know the exact cost of each conversion gotten before you can rate the success of your SMS marketing campaign. Tracking how much you spend for each converted subscriber will help you know your ROI per campaign.
To work out the cost of SMS per subscriber, divide the cost of each delivered SMS message by the conversion rate. You would want redemptions and profit to outweigh the cost enough to justify your investment in the campaign. Return on investment (ROI) is probably the most important metric. It measures the efficiency of SMS marketing investment. To calculated ROI manually:
(Amount gain – Amount spent) / Amount spent) x 100
Alternatively, you can calculate ROI using software and tools such as Google analytics.
SMS marketing is more effective when measured correctly either manually or with automated tools. To find out more about how to measure your marketing campaign on SMSexperience, reach out to our expert by sending an inquiry to info@smsexperience.com or call +2347068832575.