Picture this: You’re selling used cars for one year and tracking the sales and profit every month. Losses are carefully considered, and discounts are calculated. But the accounting book at the financial closing shows some hidden costs to your business with no origin. And you keep tinkering with your brain about the extra overhead.
And comes out that the expense rendered towards the waterproofing of the shop and the Christmas bonus towards a new employee have been missed in the record keeping.
Minor misses like this might lead to distress in every business. And if you’re engaged in digital businesses, especially marketing, you must track all major metrics periodically to improve your revenue. Because what good is a campaign if not measured holistically?
You might be using text marketing and communication to engage your users. And are recording open rates and CTR. But still not sure where you can find room to improve. Here is a post about the list of the most critical KPIs any business should track as a part of their SMS marketing strategy.
Most Important Metrics in SMS Marketing and Communication
- Delivery Rate
You’ve built a huge customer database in several years after tracking users and seeking their permissions. The database has contact numbers and email addresses of all your valued, churned, repeat, and loyal customers. But users move locations. Change their company or businesses. And during this shift, they might abandon the numbers that you maintain.
Hence, you must track the delivery rate of your campaigns and compare the numbers that bounce your messages vis-à-vis your database. Reach out to the users with out-of-service numbers and seek their permission to add the working mobile numbers to your repository.
As the bounce rate reduces, you can score a better success rate for your campaigns. This also reduces your conversion cost.
- Opt-Out Rate
Chances of users unsubscribing from your campaigns (one or several, or all) are high. Users who might be interested earlier can drop out now because of a change in interest, fulfillment of the requirement, or simply discomfort with your SMS promotional program.
The opt-out rate can be defined as (the number of users who have unsubscribed) / (the total number of recipients). Once you measure this number, you should zero down on the reasons and resolutions.
We’ve already mentioned a few reasons. You can change a user’s interest. But you can surely offer them an easy way out, instead of letting your texts linger in their inboxes and become a cause of nuisance. This shows your confidence in your product and services and your respect for their preferences.
Another step you can take is rendering personalization in the SMSes. For example, you can personalize your texts based on users’ demographics, interests, and needs.
Define your segmentation finely and with proper demographics. Stop sending generic SMSes. Instead, send texts that might interest your users. Add an Opt-out option such as STOP or NO. Permission-based marketing is extremely important in the age of highly aware and sensitive users.
- Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate or CTR is the percentage of users who click on the embedded link in the received SMSes out of the total recipients. Most SMS marketing software clock 10-15% higher CTR than emails. And since you’d generate a unique URL for each user to make it trackable, monitoring individual responses and further engagement is easy.
CTR also helps you understand where a user is in their buying journey. And with small nudges and follow-up messages, you can push them down the funnel. These personalized links can be used to lead the users to landing pages, product carts that they have abandoned, or review pages of their recent purchases.
By assigning a unique link to each user, you can track individual recipients’ reactions, measure the campaign results, and analyze further with more data for improvement. You would also know which user hasn’t clicked on the embedded link.
Pro Tip: For CTR to work in line with regulations, follow all laws like GDPR, data sharing guidelines, and anti-spam policies of a state closely. This helps you stay ethical and responsible among your customers.
Bonus: Another KPI You Shouldn’t Miss
Conversion rate is the next critical metric when measuring the impact of your MMS and SMS marketing campaign. It is the percentage of recipients who took the desired action out of all those who received your SMS.
Your campaign might target signing up for the newsletter, seeking customer feedback, promoting a new product, or informing the users about your achievement. You may not need to track the conversion rate in the last agenda, as it’s an informative campaign. But in all the other 3 campaigns, you have a target to shoot at. And you can measure its success by checking how many users took the intended action by tracking the link(s) you’ve sent.
Conversion rate is highly effective in bulk SMS marketing. You can measure the variation in a campaign by checking the daily traffic to the intended link. This is highly effective in eCommerce businesses.
Partner with a Vendor with Best KPI Tracking
Textmunication is proud to have over 13 years of experience in the SMS marketing industry. With our innovative SMS marketing software—SAM—you can utilize more than 25 features and gain deep insights into your audience’s mindset. SAM helps you track all the above KPIs. Additionally, several other measurements, like read rate tracking, is also possible with our software.
Should you need a partner to help you guide you through your SMS marketing journey, reach out to us here.
