Tips and templates for success with promotional SMS campaigns

Could SMS be your secret weapon to success? Follow these tips for running promotional SMS campaigns and watch your sales skyrocket.

Amanda R - February 7, 2023

With so many ads, emails, websites and more all clamouring for your customers’ attention, how do you get your brand noticed? What’s the best way to tell your valued customers about sweet new deals and promotions?

Three words: Promotional SMS campaigns.

SMS is hands-down one of the best ways to contact customers. It’s personal. It’s affordable. And it’s oh-so-easy. Because, let’s face it, everyone’s got their phone with them, all of the time.

Question is, how do you turn SMS into your secret weapon for sales success? It’s simple. Just follow these helpful tips.

1. Create a plan (and a calendar)

First up, you need a strategy. If you don’t already have one, create a retail calendar that clearly maps out all the major retail shopping events for the year ahead. (Hint: google ‘retail calendar’ if you’re not sure of the key dates).

Pay particular attention to shopping events aligned to your brand and the products you sell. For example, if you’re a florist, then you’ll be circling Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day in your boldest, brightest highlighter.

With all your sales events mapped out, you can start thinking about scheduling your promotional SMS campaigns to coincide with each sale. Your goal here is to let as many of your customers know about the sale, as soon as it starts – so they can jump online or head in-store to grab themselves a bargain.

Don’t forget reminders and ‘last chance’ messages also work a treat during promotional campaigns, so schedule these in, too.

Top tip

To maximise success with SMS campaigns, you need to time your text messages to perfection. See the best time to send bulk SMS.

2. Make merge fields your BFF

To make sure your messages get noticed, put the power of personalisation to work. Nothing grabs a customer’s attention more than a personal greeting like, “Hi Cooper, we’ve got a sweet deal just for you”.

And the best bit? It’s oh-so-easy to add merge fields like customer names, product names or discount codes to your promotional SMS campaigns – even when you’re sending bulk SMS.

3. Free up your team’s time with templates

Got a spur-of-the-moment sale coming up? Set up templates for different types of promotions and sales events, so you’ve got a bunch of them ready for anyone in your team to use.

You don’t have to start from scratch here. We’ve got you covered with a comprehensive list of tried-and-tested promotional campaign messages that you can easily tweak by adding your brand’s unique tone of voice and product offering.

4. Keep a close eye on performance

Once you’ve started using SMS for promotional campaigns, keep track of how each campaign affects your sales. Do you notice that sales spike when you use a particular offer or discount code? Or maybe you see that sending at a particular time of day makes a difference? Monitoring things like this will help you make better decisions over time.

And don’t forget to use reports – like those available in the SMS Broadcast platform – to keep track of SMS response and delivery rates. This all helps you analyse the impact of your SMS marketing campaigns.