SMS Segmentation: Creating Your Strategy
SMS marketing can be an incredibly powerful channel to promote your business, regardless of the goal you are pursuing. With a whopping 98% open rate, it’s one of the most effective channels you can use to reach your customers. However, to harness the benefits of SMS, you need to have a carefully-planned segmentation strategy in place. Without it, you’ll be shooting in the dark by sending your subscriber's unrelated texts, hoping to get a sale here and there.
To avoid this, you need to carefully choose who you are sending your messages, and customize them properly. To help you with this, this article covers several steps and best practices you can follow to create an SMS segmentation strategy that works. Ready? Let’s dive in.
Why Is SMS Segmentation Important?
Have you ever been in a situation, where you struggled for days or even weeks to find the perfect gift for someone? And no matter what you can think of, it’s just not right, because you want your gift to be perfect, tailored to the needs, preferences, and interests of the other person. And most of all, you want your gift to reflect that you put time and consideration into it.
With the constant improvement of targeting strategies, your customers expect the same treatment. They want to receive relevant messages from brands that’d represent their needs. Irrelevant messages not only don’t do good for your brand but even worse, harm it by frustrating the customer. This is why SMS segmentation is important: it allows you to target your messages for different groups, offering them relevant and interesting content they can resonate with, and then utilize the data to make your campaigns more precise in the future.
Type of SMS Segmentation By Audience
There are several types of segmentation that you can consider for better results as you are drafting your SMS segmentation strategy. Here are some of them:
Demographic segmentation - This segmentation type allows you to group your audience based on their age, gender, marital status, and other demographic information that can potentially be useful.
Behavioral segmentation - This type, as the name suggests, segments the users based on their data and actions, such as their consumption and spending habits, activity status, response to one type of media as opposed to others, and more.
Geographic segmentation - This is the segmentation of the users based on their geographical location. It can be a narrow location like a cinema or a mall, or a city, state, or country.
Technographic segmentation - This type of segmentation is based on the technological preferences of your customers. What are the devices they use? In the case of SMS, it’s mainly smartphones and tablets. Additionally, technographic segmentation includes software, apps, and other technological preferences.
5 Tips For An Effective SMS Segmentation Strategy
Understanding why SMS segmentation is important, and what are its types is a crucial first step towards developing your strategy. Now that you have a grasp of them, it’s time to look at a few practical steps and considerations you can make to ensure that your SMS segmentation strategy will help you achieve your goals.
Separate The Engaged And Unengaged Users
Although most people who receive your SMS will open it, the sad truth is that not everyone will engage with it. Some people will click the link to see what you have to offer, while others won’t. This depends on your offer and their interest at that time, but some people are more likely to show interest in your brand with time. Make sure to separate those who are engaged with your messaging from those who aren’t, because these groups will require a different approach later on.
Start by defining “engaged.” For example, if you are sending an SMS to your subscribers every week, an engaged user could be someone, who clicked on a link at least once during the past month. Segmenting relatively people into smaller groups, and sending them more targeted and active messages is a great way to drive conversions from subscribers who are engaged enough to make a purchase eventually.
However, make sure to not forget the other group, the unengaged ones. They are an untapped resource you can benefit from. Remember that they gave you permission to send them messages already, so they are interested in your brand to some extent. What you need to do is experiment with different content to understand how you can re-engage them.
Group Past Purchasers And Non Purchasers
The people who’ve purchased and those who haven’t will display different behaviors regarding your brand. If you don’t have much data on them in the beginning and don’t know where to start, you can begin by separating them into purchasers and non-purchasers. For the first group, you can create educational campaigns about your products, offers, or any other type of campaign that will engage them and drive them towards taking a step. The non-purchaser group is a big opportunity to generate revenue. Experiment with different types of texts, CTAs, and channels to see what works best, and what to avoid. The type of content you’ll create will, of course, depend on your product, but discounts, informative, and engaging texts will most likely be on the menu.
Upsell Converted Users
Next, once you have the group of people who’ve made a purchase ready, you can use SMS to upsell them. If people have already purchased and had a good experience with your brand, attracting them back takes less time and costs less than attracting new clients.
An effective approach would be to make several segments of previous purchasers. Segment them into groups of people who've purchased relatively long ago, but don't do so frequently now, and into a group of active purchasers. Then, think of the ways you can engage them. loyalty programs, discounts, and small gifts can work wonders when you are trying to show the customer how special they are to you and inviting them back. Depending on your product or their past purchase, you can also go with traditional cross-selling, offering them complementary products to the ones they've already bought from you. Did they buy an umbrella? Maybe water-resistant boots would go great with that umbrella.
Take Note Of High-Intent Subscribers
Think of high-intent subscribers as an extremely engaged group. These are the people who haven’t purchased yet but are showing a great deal of interest in your messages. These are the people who’d, for example, browse your website, and add items to the cart, but not go through the checkout process. This makes them an ideal candidate for personalized follow-ups and relevant SMS since they only need a small push to make the purchase.
You can reach them by activating automatic cart abandonment reminders, or other personalized content about the product they’ve shown interest in and invite them to come back.
Consider The Location
Location, or geographical targeting, is one of the holy grails of segmentation. This type of segmentation is great both for local and international businesses for a variety of reasons. Using location-based targeting, you can reach people close to your location, for example, share about the ongoing sales in your store nearby, or congratulate them about a national holiday taking part in another country. With location-based marketing, the opportunities are almost limitless. Once you know what your goals are, you can make a list of ways location can help you target the right people to send them an SMS with your discount or promo.
Final Thoughts
The segmentation strategy of your SMS marketing will ultimately be based on your needs and goals, but one thing is sure is that you need one. Take a close look at the list of your SMS subscribers, and analyze the data that you already have to determine the most effective ways in which you can reach them with the offer they’ll be thrilled to accept. If you are feeling lost about your SMS segmentation strategy, these tips and strategies are a great place to start. You can then use them as a ground to build an extensive data-driven strategy. Good luck!
