Please note: 

To unlock this capability, you will need to have added OptiText to your Optimove package. If you can’t see this feature in your Optimove instance, contact your CSM to find out more. 

 

 

To help you make the most out of your SMS campaigns sent with OptiText, we recommend taking a look at the best practices laid out below. These include guidelines in terms of content, scheduling, data handling, and more – all to make sure your SMS campaigns achieve the highest impact while respecting your customers’ data and ensuring you follow general guidelines for the channel.

 

As with other marketing channels, ensuring you are only sending marketing messages to those of your customers who have opted in or subscribed is important. When someone "opts in", it means that they're agreeing to receive promotions and other advertisements from your company through their phones.

 

Opting in, when it comes to SMS marketing, is also a key part of regulatory guidelines.

 

With OptiText, you can enable your customers to opt-in (and opt out) in a number of ways. Learn more about consent management for OptiText here.

 

To improve the impact of your SMS marketing messages, we recommend making the most of your first-party data and personalizing your messages in a way that makes sense and adds value for the customer.

 

It’s super simple to add personalization tags to your SMS templates, you can learn how to create templates and add personalization here.

 

Using Short Links

Short links are condensed URLs that can be used in your SMS marketing campaigns to save character space, as well as improve campaign performance tracking. Short links direct the customer to your intended landing page on your website or app.

It’s recommended to always use short links in your SMS messages, as it is not possible to track Opens when it comes to SMS. Therefore, short links not only ensure the customer gets where they need to go, but also help give more visibility into customer engagement and how your campaign is performing.

You can use Optimove's link-shortening tool directly from the SMS template builder, to create short links, and track who clicks on your campaign. Find out more about building SMS templates here. 

 

As with any marketing campaign, it’s important to preview your messages before sending them out to your customers. In Optimove, you can preview your SMS messages as they are being created using our live preview in the Template Builder.

 

Make sure to check what your SMS message looks like on both iOS and Android devices, and double-check all of your content and personalization tags for errors before sending.

 

When it comes to the frequency at which you send out SMS campaigns, this will depend on the campaign type, the campaign timing, which segment you are targeting, and more.

 

As with all marketing campaigns, you should aim to ‘interrupt’ your customers as few times as possible, to ensure they stay subscribed to your campaigns, and get value from your messages. This is particularly important for SMS campaigns, where the messages are even more front-and-center for the customer.

 

Consider both the frequency of your campaigns, and carefully review the priority and exclusions for each of your SMS campaigns to avoid overwhelming your customers.

 

When creating SMS campaigns, scheduling is a key part of your planning that will impact how the campaign performs. Not only should you take into account when will be most impactful for the customer, you should also be aware of local guidelines in your targeted geographic areas.

 

For example, in the UK, guidelines state that you should only send promotional text messages to your customers between 9am and 8pm. In the US, this is similar, with most guidelines stating that you can target customers between 8am and 8pm. Therefore, it’s recommended to stick within working hours when it comes to scheduling your campaign – and make sure you are aware of the geographies you’re targeting and the guidelines that apply to those locations.

 

Using multiple channels for your marketing campaigns, as opposed to one, is proven to increase your ROI and improve the visibility of your marketing messages.

 

Make the most of your SMS campaigns with OptiText by combining SMS with your other marketing channels, both as part of Triggered and Scheduled multi-channel campaigns. Find out more about creating multi-channel campaigns here.

 

When creating your SMS template, please be aware that the maximum number of characters for a single SMS message is 160. We would recommend keeping messages shorter than this, as the length of each message may also vary depending on the recipient-specific data when using personalization tags.

 

Please note:

If you include any emojis or other Unicode, the character limit for your SMS messages changes to 70.

 

That said, we do not limit the number of characters that can be included in an SMS template, and templates with additional characters will simply result in additional messages being sent to the recipient. For example, a message with 400 characters could result in 3 individual SMS messages being sent to the recipient.

 

URL shorteners are often helpful for saving character space in marketing messages or on social media, for example. However, when it comes to SMS campaigns, using URL shorteners can often result in your campaigns being blocked by mobile network operators in certain geographies. You can learn more about guidance and regulations surrounding your message content here.

 

Use your full URLs for things like privacy policies in your SMS messages. It is helpful to create dedicated pages on your website to allow for this to be your dedicated SMS link.

 

There are a range of regulations from countries globally that may impact how, and what, you send to your customers as part of your OptiText campaigns.

 

Read more here to find out about each of the individual regulations, and guidelines for compliance in key geographic areas.