Summary

• SMS marketing remains a reliable channel for reach and engagement today
• Lack of actionable metrics diminishes the appeal of SMS for most marketers
• Metricks, our dedicated solution, can convert your standard SMS campaigns into a growth engine

In the two decades since the first SMS campaign was sent in 2000 by a Finnish news provider who offered free news headlines via SMS, the field of SMS marketing has seen monumental growth.

Do marketers still use SMS in 2021?

Even amidst new-generation contemporary alternatives, the sheer reach and engagement SMS can unlock is unparalleled.

SMS’ efficiency as a communication channel is evident. 

• The average mobile user typically checks their phone 150 times a day or more, even if it is not ringing. 
• SMS also has a high deliverability rate. Its open rate is above 95% compared to 20% for email, and it promises better engagement rates compared to any other channel.

Then why do so many marketers ignore SMS?

Even though SMS marketing is low-cost, low-hassle, and within the media wheelhouse of most marketing departments, many continue to under-utilize its full potential. Part of this could be attributed to its perception as one of the more mundane channels with limited opportunities for innovation. Marketing teams would rather spend time and budget on the more high-profile paid search and social media channels.

Some marketers may view SMS strategy as a black box. With concurrent SMS campaigns, there’s no end-to-end analytics like with other digital marketing channels. SMS service providers can offer an aggregate view of how many SMS were delivered and how many could not be delivered for various reasons, with limited scope beyond that.

SMS tracking solution challenges

To address this, some tracking tools generate reports on individual link clicks, provided the customer engages with the link on the SMS. However, because end-to-end tracking is not established at the start, they are not able to re-target or nudge these customers back into the journey. This is because there’s no consistent method to know if the target audience member engaged with the communication. Furthermore, without the means to document ROI, marketers may feel the results are not commensurate with the time and effort spent.

Brands with huge volumes of customer data suffer significantly because of the manual processes involved in setting up SMS campaigns with multiple vendors. Campaign response data is delivered in batches and in multiple formats. With no consolidated view of all this data, gaining actionable pointers becomes an even bigger challenge. This means marketers either must wait indefinitely to get meaningful insights for improving the next campaign, or they have to run the campaign with incomplete analysis to keep up with timelines.

Historically, SMS marketing has also been fraught with DND issues. Ideally, marketers should get the opt-out and DND data in real time, so that they can manage the process seamlessly. With most current SMS processes, DND-related information becomes available only after the service provider scrubs the data and generates the report.

Metricks: SMS marketing made smart

Now that we’ve articulated all the reasons marketers are hesitant to use SMS—the channel that offers the highest open rates and almost instantaneous delivery—let’s look at how they can eliminate the roadblocks that SMS marketers face.

Introducing Metricks, the only integrated solution that enables marketers to engage, retarget, and measure impact through a single console.

Metricks puts Resulticks’ unique Smart Duo technology to work for you, delivering and documenting superior SMS results within a fraction of the time and effort required by multiple tools and cookie-cutter approaches.

Metricks facilitates integration of all your SMS service providers to optimize campaign cadence, performance, and outcomes. You can centralize and automate your audience outreach using consolidated opt-out/DND management, auto-scrubbing, unified signal capture, and other features with Metricks.

This is the only solution that helps you orchestrate multi-step journeys, map out real-time contextual communications, and personalize engagement with a minimal learning curve. 

Metricks delivers genuinely ROI-driven SMS marketing. You can continuously improve your SMS marketing performance with in-depth analytics, consolidated reporting, benchmarking, and more.

Here are some Metricks use cases:

Cross-sell and upsell

Multi-dimensional targeting

Trigger campaigns

Schedule a demo today!