SMS Marketing Analytics and KPIs

Setting KPIs is an important part of your initial goal-setting efforts. Once you understand what you are trying to accomplish with your SMS campaign, you should be able to create measurable, time-based, and specific goals to determine your success.

Common analytics that you may want to consider include opt-in growth, redemption and conversion rates, click-through rates, and the number of people who unsubscribe. You may also want to consider which complementary marketing campaigns generate the most number of opt-ins, and what type of discounts or exclusive offers create higher levels of engagement.

Before selecting your SMS marketing service, you’ll want to find out what kind of SMS marketing analytics and SMS KPIs are provided as part of their offerings. Most services will offer a dashboard where you can see details for particular campaigns as well as their results. Having all this data at your fingertips will help you make better future decisions about your SMS marketing strategy.

Measure Your Success

Unless you work to measure how your SMS campaign is performing on an ongoing basis, it can be difficult to capitalize on your successes and minimize poorly performing campaigns. Check out the SMS marketing analytics section of your SMS provider’s product to familiarize yourself with how your particular service works.

You should be able to measure your success by looking at things like list growth, engagement, conversion and redemption rates, and unsubscribes. Be sure you pay attention to these SMS analytics on a regular basis so you can continually improve and refine your program.

List Growth

One easy KPI to measure is list growth. Without a solid list of engaged, interested customers and prospects, an SMS marketing campaign is destined to fail. Each time you launch a campaign to increase the number of SMS subscribers, be sure to measure its effectiveness.

For example, if you create a tabletop campaign at a restaurant that encourages customers to opt-in to your SMS program to redeem a special discount on their meal that evening, you may find a significant boost to the number of subscribers. Web advertising or email blasts that promise exclusive deals may also help you grow your list.

Engagement

Most SMS marketing programs are designed to nurture customer relationships or build new ones. You want to create campaigns that encourage customers or prospects to check out a new product line, participate in a survey, or share both good and bad feedback. By creating some SMS marketing analytics that measure how engaged your subscribers are, this can help you determine the types of activities they would most likely participate in.

Anytime you can successfully draw customers and prospects into an ongoing conversation, you build up valuable loyalty.

Redemption Rates

If you are offering special discounts, coupons or exclusive deals, you’ll want to measure SMS marketing analytics that tell you what percentage of each deal was actually redeemed. This data can help you determine which types of discounts or coupons your subscribers are most likely to redeem in the future, which should help you design upcoming campaigns.

When you offer discounts that still allow you to make a profit on a particular product or service, you can also see the level of revenue generated from a particular campaign. This information can help justify the cost of marketing initiatives moving forward.

Conversion Rates

The end goal for all SMS marketing programs is to convert interested prospects into paying customers. By paying attention to SMS marketing analytics that measure how many prospects actually end up buying a product or service as a result of an SMS text campaign, you can take a look at actual conversion rates.

These conversion rates may help you prioritize and design future SMS marketing campaigns as well as create campaign optimizations to continue your
company’s growth and success.

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

If you include a link to your website or ecommerce storefront from your SMS marketing campaign, you may be able to measure click-through rates as part of your SMS marketing analytics. The CTR shows what percentage of those subscribers who open your text message actually click on the link and continue their journey into a deeper engagement with your organization.

Asking subscribers to click-through to a particular page may be a way to launch a new product or service by providing more information on a webpage. You could also ask customers or prospects to click-through to access a brief online survey or feedback form as one of your SMS KPIs.

Unsubscribes

Although it’s important to measure how many new subscribers are opting into your SMS list, you’ll also want to measure your churn rates. These rates illustrate how many subscribers are opting out.

It can be helpful to look at particular campaigns that have a greater churn rate to identify something that was perhaps offensive or a series that might have included too many text messages. Use these SMS marketing analytics to adjust things like the time messages are sent or the frequency they are received by your subscriber list.

Specific Keyword Measurement

One beautiful thing about SMS marketing campaigns is that you can segregate your initiatives by keyword and audience. For example, if you are running multiple online advertising campaigns that each have their own keyword to opt-in, you can easily see which campaigns are most successful at building your subscriber list.

Once you have that information, you can also create subsets that will be targeted audiences for future campaigns. Those customers who opted in with such a keyword such as COUPON, for instance, may be the perfect candidates for ongoing exclusive deals or loyalty membership programs.

Earning Per Message (EPM)

Finally, companies may want to take a look at earning per message (EPM) as one of the important SMS analytics. This is especially useful in trying to evaluate the cost of an SMS marketing program against the return on investment (ROI). Most of the time, SMS marketing campaigns are one of the most affordable, easiest ways to reach out to your customer base.

In fact, text-base coupons are ten times more likely to be redeemed than other types of coupons. Converting the extremely high open rate of most text messages, which sits at around 98%, into sales can mean a very high EPM in some cases.

Take a look at the SMS marketing analytics offerings at DialMyCalls. Our affordable, easy-to-use service not only makes running SMS marketing campaigns fast and easy, but our user-friendly dashboard will help you keep track of these and other important KPIs so you can keep improving your SMS strategies.