Texting is a highly personal form of communication. You're reaching out to someone on their phone, which often lives in their pocket. It's a very effective outreach method for just that reason, but it does require a careful approach to maximize benefits and minimize annoyance.
The sections below provide you with best practices to help you craft better outgoing campaign messages to receive a high rate of responses.
Crafting your campaign message
There are several tools available in TextUs to help you craft more personal messages for campaigns. When you are crafting your campaign message, consider the following best practices:
Personalization: First, remember to have a greeting and personalization. In most cases, it’s a good idea to address the contact by their first name. It helps make your contact feel like the message is personalized just for them and increases their excitement about reading and responding to it. Ultimately, remember that you don’t want your text message to read like spam.
Identify yourself: Make sure you identify yourself, especially if it’s the first time you're sending a text to someone. If you've set up your signature in Profile Settings, your signature will automatically attach to your campaign message.
If you choose not to use a signature, we recommend adding your contact information, your name and/or your company information somewhere in the body of the text message.
Clear and concise messaging: The next thing to keep in mind is that you want to give a clear and concise reason as to why you're reaching out. You'll want to avoid jargon and use language that is easy to understand while conveying the benefits of your product or service.
Call to Action (CTA): Include a clear and compelling CTA that tells the contact what you want them to do next. You don't want to direct someone with a text message to call you, or email, or stop by your office. You want them to respond to you via text.
You can format your CTA so that the contact can reply with a one-word response. For example, "Reply 'YES' to receive updates via text message" or "Reply "YUM" to claim your discount code".
Mobile-friendly: Finally, make sure that your marketing texts are mobile-friendly. Your contacts will read your texts on smartphones, so your content should be easy to read and navigate on mobile devices.
While TextUs does not have a default text limit, and your org admin can set your account’s messaging limit, remember that smaller character counts usually mean higher response rates. It’s a good idea to keep your message concise and to the point. We’ve noticed that TextUs customers with higher response rates do better with carrier filtering (which we'll look at below).
Preventing carrier filtering
Mobile carriers often use filtering systems to identify and block spam text messages, malicious attachments, or links that could harm users or their devices. This helps protect users from unwanted and potentially harmful content.
To make sure your messages and campaigns aren't caught in a carrier's spam filters, there are a few things to keep in mind when creating your campaign messages:
Don’t use recycled content or duplicated content. Send several individual messages with the same content could get your messages flagged as spam. If you need to send the same message to multiple contacts, we strongly recommend sending a campaign instead.
Avoid typing in ALL CAPS. This will cause the carriers to mark your message as spam due to the overuse of special characters.
Don't use repeating dollar ("$") signs, exclamation points ("!"), or excessive punctuation.
Avoid including phone numbers in your messages if possible. The number that you're texting from will appear on your contact’s phone when they receive your message. If your TextUs number is different from your office line, you can set up call forwarding so that calls can be routed to you. Including a phone number in the message can cause the mobile carriers to think that you are redirecting traffic, which they view as spam.
Include email addresses or URLs sparingly in your text message. If you include a URL in every outgoing campaign this can be viewed by a mobile carrier as redirecting traffic and can cause issues for you in the long run.
If you do include a URL and want to shorten it, we recommend using our built-in link shortener. Using a third-party link shortener such as Bitly or TinyURL could get your message flagged as spam by mobile carriers and affect your deliverability.
Add opt-out language like “Reply STOP to opt out” to some of your outgoing messages and campaigns to stay compliant.
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