It’s crunch time for finalizing your Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions and deals. You ready for it?
Use these Black Friday business texting tips to ensure the most people see your messages and act on them to help you have the most successful holiday season.
Only text people with their permission
The absolute last thing you want is to get hit with a TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protect Act) violation. Only send marketing messages to people who have opted in to the communication.
If someone tells you to stop or replies UNSUBSCRIBE, honor the request immediately. Read more about TCPA and talk with a legal professional in your area if you have questions.
Limit the messages you send at one time
Okay, hear us out. This may seem very counterintuitive to what you want to do for a big BFCM promotion.
Before 2021, if you had a 10-digit number, sending too many messages at one time or in a very short period of time would likely result in a carrier violation. Your messages would not be delivered by carriers — for a time at least. These suspensions lasted anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
Now with 10DLC and The Campaign Registry, as long as you registered your business (which your business texting platform of choice likely requires), you hopefully won’t have messages throttled by the mobile carriers.
But that doesn’t automatically mean you’re not spamming.
The right messages get responses, so imagine sending a single message to hundreds, if not thousands, of people at once. You must be prepared to reply and engage in return but you can’t do that if you blast your entire list all at once.
Intentionally time your text messages and segment your contacts so you’re not sending totally identical messages to everyone.
Send specific offers to select groups
You waste significant time and resources by sending customers a promotion for items or services you know they dislike or simply don’t care about.
In contrast, messaging a specific group of contacts with a specific offer yields more sales and more responses.
Segmented offers convert at higher rates and open up real conversations, helping you build relationships and sell more in the future.
You likely already used insights and information from your CRM or customer database to strategically create BFCM offers. To prep for the big sale days, confirm the lists of contacts who will receive each offer and do a final edit of the text messages.
Personalize messages beyond the offer
According to a Marketo study from 2015, 79 percent of consumers will only engage with an offer if it has been personalized to reflect previous interactions the consumer has had with the business. People already felt that way in 2015! So imagine how much more important personalization is now.
The minimum you need to do? Include people’s first names. But you show your customers that you value them by putting genuine effort into your personalization.
Reference info like a customer’s favorite product, most recent purchase, etc. (In Skipio, use Custom Fields and CRM integrations to automatically pull in this information even when messaging large groups.)
Personalizing your messages is easiest when you add contacts to different groups/lists that then each receive specific offers. If certain people love one product and don’t care about anything else, it feels contradictory to receive promotions about stuff they have zero interest in.
Send more than one message
Sending just one message announcing a promotion and never talking about it again won’t exactly help you. People need reminders.
Build up the hype before and during the BFCM weekend by sending a series of related messages. Drip your varied promotional messages to your customer segments.
Send a message at least a few days before your promotions begin. Tease the relevant deals and make sure people know when the promo starts. Reply quickly and thoughtfully to any replies you receive.
Then, the day the promotion begins, send a reminder. Give extra details about any active offers and include a clear CTA for how to act on the promotions.
Keep messages short and to the point
Sure, Skipio gives you 320 characters. But don’t use them all if you don’t need them. Long-copy ads may work great for Facebook, but texts aren’t ads. Give people the information they need to act on your offer, not a long story about why they’re the perfect customer for a certain item.
And if you plan to send multiple messages, as you should, it’s easier to keep each individual message more focused rather than sending novel-length messages.
If a promotion or offer is more complicated, send a digital flyer to share those details.
Respect the time of day
You might be open extra hours or run your promotions at unique times for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Double-check the times you plan to send your text message offers to ensure they aren’t going out at totally wild times.
If your promotion starts at 7 a.m. Eastern on Black Friday, don’t schedule a text to send 2 hours before that to remind people. A 5 a.m. reminder isn’t helping anyone on the East Coast. It REALLY doesn’t help your West Coast customers.
So maybe you plan to send a reminder on Thanksgiving Day instead? Still not ideal…
Instead, schedule a reminder to go out on Wednesday. Then, some time in the morning on Black Friday, schedule a follow-up message about the day’s promotion.
If you have a Skipio account and worry you’ll forget, adjust your automated message delivery hours within your profile settings to ensure all drip campaign messages go out at the right times.
This blog post was originally published November 5, 2019 and was most recently updated November 7, 2023. A new text marketing tips graphic was added and each section was updated to match current industry standards for business messaging, including new insights on 10DLC regulations.
