Halloween isn’t over yet, but that still means you need to put the final touches on your Black Friday and holiday plans. If you want to reach your customers in a convenient way that also encourages interaction and action, you need to text them.
Use these holiday text messaging tips to write and send texts that will get people responding and taking action.
How 10DLC affects holiday messaging
Did you know that many businesses previously experienced delays when sending messages around Black Friday? This occurred due to carrier-instituted delays, which helped carriers manage the large number of messages sent during the holidays.
But as of 2021, that’s less of a worry because of the carrier standards known as 10DLC. These new business text messaging standards introduced by the mobile carriers help ensure all businesses have more of their text messages delivered.
If you have a 10-digit number you use for business texting, make sure your brand and use cases are accurately registered. Whether your business texting service provider is Skipio or any other service, you need to complete this registration to avoid carrier-implemented fees and fines.
Once you do register, you should not experience any significant issues with carriers throttling your messages.
So while you won’t have to worry about text messages being seen, you do still have to worry about sending messages that your customers will actually care about.
Limit the number of messages you send
Conversational text messaging platforms like Skipio aren’t built for blasting thousands and thousands of messages without expecting a response.
Yes, our platform will help you engage with buyers and you can send a lot of texts at once. BUT you don’t want to burn any bridges by sending impersonal blasts.
Blasting messages out to tons of people won’t automatically help your holiday sales or end-of-year-quotas either. People can tell when you’re sending them the same exact message you’re sending to everyone else. And customers usually dislike fake personalization efforts.
Sending too many unique messages can still be annoying though. There’s no need to text someone literally every single day for a week leading up to a sale and then every single day the promotion lasts. That counts as spamming.
So regardless if you’ve completed your 10DLC registration — which you 100% need to do before the holidays hit — carefully consider how many people you want to contact before hitting send to everyone in your address book.
Only send marketing messages to people you have permission to text
Have your contacts actually opted in to receiving text messages from you? If they haven’t, do not send them marketing text messages. Otherwise you’ll face much bigger problems than making a sale. Read more about TCPA.
This is true every single day of the year, not just for Black Friday.
Send unique text messages personalized to each customer
Yes, including someone’s first name technically counts as “personalization.” It’s the bare minimum though. Customers should receive messages unique to what they like and prefer.
How do you know what people like or want to buy? Well, you’ve hopefully been having conversations and saving notes about customer preferences.
Based on people’s purchasing histories and your other interactions with them, it shouldn’t be hard to create special offers relevant to different groups of customers. Use the information in your CRM, CDP, or any other software to build unique offers for different groups of customers.
In Skipio you can use Custom Fields to pull in individualized buying information for each message. Just remember that to successfully use a custom field you need to have the corresponding information listed in the profiles of any contacts you’re messaging.
Write messages that are short and sweet
Your holiday text messaging campaigns should complement any email marketing campaigns you run. But texts aren’t email, so don’t treat them like email. It’s that simple.
Send messages during normal business hours
Business texting is all about convenience, but respect your customers and their time. When scheduling messages, stick to general business hours (9 to 5) to keep yourself from being a bother and looking like spam.
Clearly targeted text messages will get people to act, so there’s no reason to schedule messages at odd times to try to get attention.
Be prepared to respond individually
Respond to any replies you receive in a timely manner. (That’s the advantage of 10-digit numbers in the first place.) Customers are probably going to have questions about your promotions or holiday offers. Help them out faster and basically guarantee a sale.
A quick response on your end shows that you value your customers and what they need. That’s key for building and maintaining an authentic relationship.
Start creating your holiday text messaging campaigns
Our last of the Black Friday texting tips is to get your Skipio account now so that you’ve got everything set up for a great holiday season. When you follow the advice mentioned in this post using Skipio’s automated features that help you prioritize conversations, your customers will take action.
This post was originally published on November 15, 2018 and was most recently updated on October 25, 2022. Major updates included newer information about 10DLC and specific instructions for sending messages in a conversational way to avoid looking like spam. Each section was edited to include more specific text marketing advice.
