Test marketing can be an expensive exercise through traditional channels and can take months to get results. SMS however, is a cost effective channel whereby A/B testing is quick and easy to set-up – results can be instantaneous.
The mobile phone remains the most personal item that we carry around with us at all times – it’s not like a newspaper or TV, our mobile phones have nearly 100% of our attention.
A single SMS is only 160 characters long – it therefore may not even cross your mind to focus on getting the content right. The reality is that the more creative and legitimate the content is, the better it performs.
By simply changing the creative content or timings of your SMS activity can quickly make a radical difference to the end results. When planning your A/B tests, consider as many of the elements below as possible;
Call to action - The creative copy in your messages that invites the receiver to respond.
Offer – Want to let people know about a sale or promotion? Try different pricing/discounts techniques to find out what makes your audience bite.
Know your audience - by understanding your demographic you won’t offend. If you’re sending an SMS to the elderly don’t use modern day “text talk” or you could choose to test
Voice SMS.
Hyperlink –Are you trying to drive people to your website? Then why not think about including a hyperlink in your text, directing the receiver to a webpage. This is becoming increasingly more popular and is definitely worth testing if your target audience have smart phones.
Timings - Look at the times that you send SMS, whether it is insurance renewals, car servicing, and hair appointments etc. Start identifying success patterns – think about when your customer would like to receive the messages.
The right SMS provider – Make sure that your SMS supplier delivers your messages quickly, so the messages are received when you want them to land. Do your research when choosing an SMS provider because some aggregators have message delays, making messages land at unsocial hours or not at all.
Once you have established what works and what doesn’t keep testing again. Consumer behaviour changes and will continue to change therefore so should your SMS messages.
Remember with
Bulk SMS you can send hundreds and thousands of fully personalised messages in seconds and get results in minutes. Every cell can have different offers, copy and targeting combinations, allowing you to A/B test (or even A/B/C/D test) multiple variants simultaneously.
Whilst the character limitation on text messages will prevent you from sending a full newsletter to your customers in this format, SMS can still be used to help increase your subscribers.