According to Pew Research, more than 80% of American adults text, making it the most common cell phone activity. Couple that with the fact that an estimated two billion people will own smartphones by next year, and it’s easy to understand why marketers are hopping on the fast moving mobile marketing bandwagon.
And where marketers lead, Google follows – in October they announced click-to-messages extensions, giving customers a way to have an instant interactive connection with brands via SMS messages they initiated through PPC ads.
It’s safe to say that SMS for marketing is here to stay, but how do you use it to drive more than conversations? Here are a few tips that can help you increase your click-to-text and SMS conversion rate.
Increasing SMS / Text Conversions:
- Just Say No to Text Spam: Last year, Time.com published an article titled “Your Cell Phone Will Probably Soon Be Swamped with Retailer Text Messages” it outlined a scary near future of consumers at the mercy of unwanted spam-like messages filling up their smartphone home screens. Many companies have used SMS well, allowing customers to opt-in to messages for discounts and services, but the problem lies in businesses that decide to advertise first and ask (or let you opt-out) later. It’s smarter to either respond to inbound messages from clients or allow them to opt-in, not just take advantage of access to their phone numbers. As Buell says in the aforementioned article, “If this access begins to be abused, the relationship between companies and customers will erode very rapidly” – and since it’s a perfect place to communicate with and convert leads the last thing marketers need to do is ruin it by getting too text heavy handed.
- View Conversation Activity for Quality Assurance: Text messages are a great way to have conversations with customers who don’t want to chat on the phone, but you should be checking this communication for quality assurance the same way you do for phone call leads. One way to do this is by using a dashboard via a call tracking provider to send and receive messages. This not only allows you to make sure your campaigns are sending the right type of leads, it also allows multiple team members to view messages sent from one central phone number. With SMS dashboards you can coach your team on how to best respond to messages, optimize campaigns to capture the right type of text leads, and easily manage text message marketing among team members.
- Track Conversions from Text Activity: Google’s click-to-messages extensions are a great way to use PPC ads to initiate an instant, interactive connection with your customers via SMS. But there is a downside – Google is currently unable to track these text messages as conversions in Google Ads (formerly AdWords.) Advertisers who want to see how many texts their message extensions are generating have to create their own system to track and measure the success of their message extensions, which is arguably the most important part of really understanding if PPC ads are working for your business. Text leads are just like any other inbound lead, you need a way to track it back to the original marketing channel that drove it so you can focus your time and ad spend on making it happen more often.
SMS Texting for Increased Client Sales
Paxton Automotive was looking for a way to track and increase call conversions while still staying up to date with industry trends like mobile and SMS marketing. Paxton Automotive started using CallRail for their client’s SMS lead attribution and it transformed the way they closed sales and interacted with their clients:
“We use CallRail’s SMS feature quite frequently. In our high paced industry text messaging is a large part of our digital campaigns and lead generation from our direct mail campaigns. Not everyone reads their email or answers a phone call but everyone will see a text message,” said Brittany Ford, Sales Account Executive for Paxton Automotive.
Implementing CallRail call tracking has enabled Paxton Automotive to fill gaps in call attribution, listen to call recordings for lead qualification, and send sales ready leads directly via SMS and Text, allowing them to increase client sales by 15%.
