7 SMS Deliverability Tips: Here’s What you Need to Do for Sure-shot SMS Deliveries
As we are already in the first month of the new year, it’s really high time to adopt a new approach to improve your text deliverability and ROI. It requires a lot of effort, investment, and time to create and run high effort SMS marketing campaign, but only sure-shot deliveries of SMS can make everything worthwhile. All efforts go in vain if messages don’t reach their destination. Thus, marketers should consider every aspect that can drive text messages into spam folders. With the help of a few tried and tested tips, marketers can effortlessly steer clear of spam folders and improve SMS deliveries for better returns.
Tips for Improving SMS Deliveries
Texting without Consent is a Big ‘NO’
According to TCPA, texting customers without their consent doesn’t fall under the category of compliant texting. Even if a company has the contact numbers of its customers, the company cannot text without the explicit written consent of customers. Written consent doesn’t mean written consent on paper, but it should be documented and saved.
Texting without consent can lead to customer complaints and land text messages in the blocklist. So, to eliminate every possibility of texting without consent or texting mistakenly to ones who opted out, opt for a texting solution that supports privacy by design.
Double Opt-in is Highly Recommended
As the name signifies, double opt-in is a process when a brand obtains consent from the customer twice. The first is when a customer replies or tick the checkbox to receive texts, and the second is when a customer responds to confirm to get included in the recurring SMS program.
So, to fill your subscriber’s list with highly interested customers and eliminate every possibility of complaint about texting without consent, you must go for double opt-in. It is considered one of the best practices to prevent messages from being marked as spam and improve deliverability.
Back-to-Back Messages can Trigger Spam Filters
We all know that excess of everything is harmful. And this applies to text messages as well. Sending too many messages one after the other not only can annoy your customers and compel them to opt-out but trigger spam filters also. So, it is important to regulate the frequency of messages and schedule texts appropriately to distribute them evenly.
New Initiatives can Backfire
Testing new things during holidays can backfire and may not bring desired results. Reputation building needs time, and new things have zero reputation and trust. So, new initiatives are more likely to be impacted by spam filters.
Also, people are free on holidays. So if anything you send is not up to scratch, it will leave a bad aftertaste and last long in the people’s minds. Thus, do not go for new experiments with templates, branding, domains, and third-party partners during the biggest event of the year and play safe choosing strategies that work.
Positive Engagement is Crucial
Positive engagement is a crucial aspect to consider for reliable text delivery. Try to engage more and more with customers maintaining relevancy in text messages. Else, irrelevant texts can again annoy customers and lead to opt-out.
For example, Abandoned cart text is an effective way to revive lost connections and re-engage with customers. With such texts, not only can you remind customers of products lying in their cart but create a positive engagement.
Emphasize Phone Number Management
Incoming texts from different international originator numbers pose trust issues in customers. Also, it becomes difficult for them to recall a brand and past conversations. So, the chances are high that they may consider a text from a new number irrelevant and mark it spam.
Thus, phone number management is vital to ensure consistency in originator numbers. This plays a vital role in improving brand recall and winning the customer’s trust. Also, customers are less likely to mark texts as spam if they can easily recall sender IDs because they trust them.
Besides, you can also localize numbers to win the trust of customers. People are more comfortable responding to a text from a local number rather than a text from a number containing a different area or country code. So, you can segment people by country or area and localize numbers for better SMS deliveries.
Text Promotion is ‘NOT’ for all Business Categories
Not every business domain can reap the advantage of Salesforce text marketing. A few industries and product providers are barred from using texts for promotion. So, forbidden message categories for SMS & MMS that can be marked as spam are-
- High-risk financial services
- Third-party lead generation services
- Debt collection or forgiveness
- “Get rich quick” schemes
- Illegal substances like drugs, cannabis, CBD, etc.
- Gambling
- S.H.A.F.T topics (Sex, Hate, Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco)
360 SMS and SMS Deliveries
The success of any SMS campaign depends on SMS deliveries to a great extent. So, it becomes crucial to respect the customer’s privacy and not text them without their consent to prevent texts from being marked as spam and improve deliverability.
Thus, 360 SMS offers a fully functioning extensible preference center for SMS where you can opt-in or opt-out audiences based on their choices.
360 SMS serves many inbuilt categories, and on top of that, you can make your own point-and-click category for opt-ins and opt-outs and cater.
360 SMS has a 5-10 minutes setup, and you can start texting out-of-the-box compliantly. The best part is, we manage everything for you and take responsibility for SMS deliveries even if you Bring Your Own Number or carrier.
Improve SMS Deliveries and Returns
Marketers put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating and running SMS marketing campaigns. But often fails to bring the desired results, and the reason could be SMS delivery. There are several ways that marketers can consider to improve SMS deliverability and make a world of difference in delivery rates. Marketers can easily improve SMS deliveries by considering the tips mentioned above and every trivial aspect before launching an SMS campaign or sending bulk SMS. This further helps to improve marketing returns.
To know more about, how you can stay compliant and improve SMS deliveries, get in touch with our experts at sales@360smsapp.com or contact us here.