In our last video, we learned what SMS marketing really is. Today, we’ll learn how to get started. 

Now if you missed the last video, I highly recommend you watch it, but in short, SMS Marketing or Text-message marketing is the future of building loyalty and boosting conversions for your online store and is currently outperforming email open rate by 10 times. So how do we get started?

If you’re new to SMS marketing, setting daily and weekly benchmarks can help you get off the ground and start driving results from the get-go. So, Here are some goals to strive for during your program’s first 30 days:

[Days 1-3: Lay your strategic foundation]

In the first few days, Lay your strategic foundation. This will include Identifying your main KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, which are the things you want to measure and base your success on, so is that measuring open rate, clickthrough rate, sales, pick what you want to measure. If you don’t know, open-rate is a good place to start. In those first 3 days, you’ll also want to determine your list growth strategy, create your triggered welcome message, and personalize your auto-responder message. This will set up the necessary actions to run in the background so you can focus on building upon this channel. 

[Day 4-7: Put your SMS strategy in action]

Next, it’s time to move forward with your strategy. This can be anything from adding a phone number field in all of your forms, or only starting with abandoned cart popups. Those convert really well. Then, even if you only have a couple of contacts, send your first campaign message or broadcast text message. 

[Day 8-14: Maximize your SMS program ROI]

Next, begin laying the foundation for a return on your investment. Start testing your campaign messages and find their ideal cadence. Play with different messages going to different segments like potential customers, new customers or repeat customers to create your segmentation strategy, and send your first segmented messages.

[Day 15-21: Add new strategies to your SMS toolbox.]

Then, once the baseline is created, implement new strategies you find here or in your own research. Invite email subscribers to sign up for your text messages, grow your SMS list via social media, optimize your campaign cadence, and create your triggered transactional messages and post-purchase flows.

[Day 22-30: Expand and optimize your SMS efforts]

Then, moving forward from there, start the optimization process. Discover the ideal sign-up flow for your audience, start testing your triggered messages, integrate with your CX platform or support team, and keep growing your list.