‘Tis the season for businesses to connect with customers and boost sales. But with the increased volume of emails and social media posts during this time, it’s difficult to stand out from the crowd. However, text messages let you connect directly, personally, and quickly with your audience.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to create effective holiday text marketing campaigns and will cover the following topics:
- Planning and Preparation
- Writing Compelling Text Messages
- Optimizing Message Timing and Frequency
Plan and Prepare
Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Set clear and specific goals to start creating your holiday text marketing campaign. Are you looking to boost sales, promote a new product, or enhance brand awareness?
Clearly define your objectives to guide your entire strategy, helping you measure success and adjust future campaigns.
Define Your Target Audience
You need to define, understand, and segment your target audience. Your customers are the core of your business, and to maximize holiday sales, you need to know them inside and out.
Go beyond surface-level demographics and get deep into their needs, preferences, and pain points. The more you know about your customers, the better you can tailor your text messages to meet their desires.
Begin understanding your customers by conducting market research. This includes various activities such as surveys, focus groups, or interviews. Collecting data and insights from these sources gives you a clearer picture of what your customers want.
It’s also important to segment your audience. Segmentation allows you to create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific customer groups. By understanding your customer segments, you can create messages and offers that are highly targeted and relevant, which ultimately helps you get more sales.
Choose a Reliable SMS Marketing Platform
Choosing the right SMS marketing platform requires time and research. But when you find the right fit for your business, texting practically guarantees that you reach more of your customers, leads, and target audience.
Skipio is a conversational messaging platform specifically made to help you engage leads consistently and keep customers longer. Explore Skipio’s key features to learn how our tools help you boost engagement and grow revenue during the holiday season and beyond.
Write Compelling Text Messages
Keep Messages Concise, Clear, and Actionable
People’s attention spans are short, especially during the busy holiday season. Write concise messages that convey your offer or promotion clearly. Texts aren’t meant to be like emails, so don’t make them long like an email would be.
Use language that inspires action, giving recipients a clear understanding of what you want them to do.
Personalize Messages
Personalizing your holiday SMS messages is one of the best ways to make them more effective. This is done by using the recipient’s name (but that’s just the bare minimum) and by referencing information like their favorite product, most recent purchase, past interactions, etc. In Skipio, Custom Fields and CRM integrations automatically pull in this information even when messaging large groups.
Tailor messages to address the specific needs and interests of each segment. For instance, if you’re targeting a group interested in stocking stuffers, your content should highlight gifts made specifically for that purpose. You can tailor your messages in ways like this, no matter what industry you’re in or what type of products or services you offer.
Use One Strong and Clear Call-to-Action
One of the quickest ways to lose a customer is to confuse them. To avoid this, don’t ask your audience to do too many things. Include one call to action that tells the recipient exactly what you want them to do. Avoid overwhelming recipients with unnecessary details that may dilute your message.
Make sure your call to action is easy to understand and follow, driving recipients to take the desired next step, whether making a purchase, redeeming a coupon, or signing up for updates. If applicable, add a link to make it even easier for the recipient to take action. Clear message copy converts customers.
Use Emojis and Holiday-Themed Language
People are more receptive to playful and holiday-themed content during the holiday season. Strategically sprinkle emojis into your messages and use holiday-themed language. This adds a touch of personality to your texts, making them more engaging.
We’ve compiled some holiday phrases and text templates to make it easy for you to incorporate holiday-themed language. You can find them here.
Optimize Message Timing and Frequency
Identify the Best Times to Send Messages
Timing plays a crucial role in the success of your text marketing campaign. The best day to text customers varies from industry to industry and even business to business. After looking at customer behavior trends, start conducting tests. Determine which days of the week get responses or action from your audience. Over time, you’ll discover which days to send texts and increase engagement and conversion rates.
Customers often reside in different time zones. Send messages at times that will be the most impactful to those in each area. This is especially important for time-sensitive offers and making sure text messages are seen at the right time.
You can gather time zone information automatically through sales or by asking people when they opt-in to receive text messages. To make it easy to use that information, automatically group your customers by time zone in your CRM, text messaging platform, or both. From there, you can further segment your customer lists when it’s time to send them specific offers.
Determine the Frequency of Messages
If a text message subscriber or customer receives messages too frequently, they are more likely to unsubscribe. Be aware of how many texts you are sending and mindful of different audience segments, as preferences for message frequency can vary.
Depending on the type of business, you’re limited in the number of text messages you can send daily. So, if you’re a sole proprietor, you shouldn’t send more than 3,000 text messages daily. (Private and public for-profit businesses have higher limits.) These limits, imposed by mobile carriers through The Campaign Registry, help prevent spam communication, which we all benefit from.
Stand Out from Your Competitors
A well-executed holiday text marketing campaign requires some planning, but by setting clear goals and working through these steps, you can create a campaign that stands out from your competitors and resonates with your audience.
