These days, everyone has a phone. That’s not just a feeling, more than 97 percent of Americans own cell phones, and most of them check it dozens of times every day.
When you’re marketing to customers, you want to put your message in front of people wherever they are. Email is good, telemarketing works too; but there is no channel that has seen a better success rate than SMS texting.
Even if you have already taken the steps to implement texting into your marketing strategy, you also need to be able to track its performance. Keep reading to find out how to understand the numbers and evaluate the effectiveness of your automated SMS campaigns.
Choose Your Metrics
The first step to good marketing is good metrics. You want to have your key performance indicators (KPIs) set up so you can track the vital aspects of any campaign. Here are some common KPIs for an automated SMS campaign:
CTR/Open Rate – This is the number of times a message was opened versus how many messages were sent.
Engagement – For the most part, this means response rate. Of the people who opened the message, this is the percentage of people who responded.
Opt-Outs – This is used to track how many recipients have actively decided to remove themselves from your campaign list. If this number is high, you may not be targeting the right audience or casting too wide of a net.
Conversion rate – This is the number of recipients that become customers expressed as a percentage.
Cost per Acquisition – this breaks your operating expenses (at least the ones associated with marketing and sales) down to the individual customer level. Use this metric to determine how much money it costs for every customer you serve during a given time period.
Understand Industry Norms
Now that you’ve decided which KPIs to track, you need to set your expectations. Like all marketing campaigns, these metrics will vary from industry to industry. You’ll need to determine what kinds of results others in your sector or industry are seeing and, if possible, your competitors.
For example, open rates in finance and healthcare may be higher than in SaaS or real estate due to the increased importance consumers might have on the former over the latter. This just means that you limit your expectations if you’re in an industry where consumers are less likely to read or respond to SMS campaigns.
How to Evaluate the Return on Investment for Your Automated SMS System
Return on Investment (ROI) is both simple and complicated to determine. On one hand, it is a relatively simple equation. Just take the revenue you’ve generated from your automated SMS system, divide it by the cost of the system (including the payroll of the teams that operate it), and multiply the result by 100 to get the ROI percentage. Just a little bit of arithmetic will get you the answer.
However, it’s coming up with those numbers that can be the complicated part. Determining how much of your total business revenue was directly generated by your SMS system can be difficult without advanced integration or surveying acquired customers. Then, parsing out your operating expenses according to specific campaigns can be murky, especially when the payment of team members who worked on the campaign comes into the mix.
Regardless of the fiscal amount of ROI garnered from your automated SMS system, your KPIs will let you know how effective the campaign has been. If your open rates, your click-through-rate, and your conversion rate are all high, your system is working wonders. Getting customers through the door is all that you can hope for when it comes to marketing. ROI measures profitability, which is dependent in part on operating efficiency.
How RyText Can Help With Your Automated SMS System
If you’ve implemented an automated SMS system and are having difficulty determining how effective your efforts have been, or if you’re considering starting a new campaign and are unsure how to track it, RyText is here to help. We offer customized SMS solutions for businesses small and large. Take advantage of the surprising power of automated SMS systems and start seeing real results. Our solutions include convenient ways to measure your KPIs and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Contact us today to get started!
