For many businesses that run an e-commerce site email is their primary method of communication with their subscribers, sending emails to notify them of upcoming sales, thus driving them to purchase services or products from your site. However, as almost all customers will possess a smartphone, businesses should also strive to use SMS in the same way they do email, engaging customers to visit their sites and make purchases. In fact, SMS has higher open rates than email, making it a much better channel of communication in many circumstances.
If a customer provides a business with their mobile phone number and grants them permission to text them, it would be beneficial to include a web-link in any SMS message thus driving them to your site. This form of text messaging is known as ‘Smart SMS’ and can aid the growth of sales via one of the most direct and captivating marketing channels available today. This is because you can really track and monitor the performance of your sms messages.
As many businesses have realised by getting SMS marketing right, the benefits of SMS messaging to increase and prompt sales are endless. Many businesses however, are unaware of how to measure the effectiveness of SMS messages they send and also track the sales generated from each campaign…
Using Google Analytics and Google Link Builder
One way for businesses to track their e-commerce links included in their SMS campaigns, is to set up Google Analytics. This analytics service is free and simple to utilise and can be installed without too much hassle.
Having set up Google Analytics, the next task is to set up link tracking for SMS messages delivered to customers. This is accomplished by adding some code to the end of the site URLs shared in the text messages. Such links can be created through the use of Google Link Builder, which merely requires you to fill out a form to ensure the URL will work as desired. Details include: the website URL which will be shared, the campaign source (so you know where the link was accessed from), and the campaign name (related to the product or service the campaign’s for).
This enables businesses to establish who is clicking their links and where they are accessing them from, and even what time of day. This sort of analysis has obvious benefits to the business as it provides them with intel which can enable them to optimise their future campaigns.
Get Real Insights
Furthermore, implementing the methods discussed, businesses can create two different URLs which will individually be tracked when a recipient of those SMS campaigns clicks on one of the links. This provides a business with information which allows them to determine which of the campaigns is more effective and thus driving more sales, which campaigns merely bring window-shoppers, and which campaigns get ignored altogether. It can be a good idea to split campaigns based on cartains factors such as the time you send the message. Using these tools to measure and track SMS performance in such a manner means businesses can hugely improve their SMS marketing over time and experience and use text messages to increase their sales massively in the long run.
Another factor to monitor is the number of opt-outs you get for each campaign (if you get any, that is). But we wrote a post on how opt-outs can actually be used to enhance your SMS marketing skills: