The key step in measuring your SMS performance is to ensure that you’re looking at the right metrics. According to ITSMA and Vision Edge Marketing, 74% of marketers can’t say how their efforts impact their bottom line.
That makes it incredibly hard (if not impossible) to accurately determine your wins or losses – you simply won’t be able to measure your key performance indicators if you’re looking at the wrong data points. Since every text marketing strategy is different, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to measuring SMS campaigns.
You need to define your business objectives, then track the things which impact each of those specific elements. BSG has been a critical cog in the success of many companies’ SMS marketing campaigns. To better understand what you need to track in your SMS campaigns, this article will describe the top marketing KPIs.
If, on the other hand, you already have solid SMS analytics under your belt and would rather jump straight into creating a text campaign, you can do so with our bulk SMS solution.
What Does SMS Marketing Analytics Mean?
SMS marketing analytics are measurements of text marketing efforts and successes and depend on collecting data related to SMS marketing actions and campaigns. This can include everything from delivery and bounce rates to clicks. The ability to collect, aggregate and calculate these SMS marketing benchmarks allows insight into what’s working, what can be improved and the return on your methods.
For instance, if you send out an SMS marketing campaign with the hope of boosting traffic to your website, you should track how many recipients actually click the message’s embedded link. The click rates would be one of your top marketing KPIs.
Six Crucial KPIs for SMS Marketing Analytics
Here are six metrics to measure campaign success and help you better align your approach.
- Delivery rate = (Messages delivered/total sends) x 100
SMS delivery is a measure of the percentage of outgoing messages that arrive at their intended destination. SMS is more reliable than email because messages are delivered 98% of the time on average. Emails only have a delivery rate of 17-28%. Low SMS deliverability may indicate a technical error in the setup.
- Open rate = (Messages opened/total sends) x 100
Open rate is a top of how many people open your message.
Again, SMS’s average 98% open rate outperforms emails’ just over 20% open rate. A high open rate indicates that brands are interacting with the right consumers. If your SMS isn’t getting many opens, it’s probably not interesting enough to its recipients.
- Bounce rate = (Undelivered messages/total sends) x 100
The bounce rate determines the number of contacts that never received your SMS. Similar to the opt out rate, you will always have a number of bounces but it shouldn’t be higher than 3%.
- Click-through rate = (Total clicks / delivered Links) x 100
The CTR measures the number of times a link in your message is clicked, including repeat clicks on the same link. So, if you send out 40 SMS messages and 10 of your recipients click on the link within those messages, your CTR is 25%.
The average click-through rate for an SMS campaign can be as high as 30%, while it typically ranges from 6-7% for email marketing campaigns.
- Conversion rate = (Conversions / number of contacts, who received a message) x 100
SMS conversion rate shows the number of conversion actions performed by people after receiving your text. This can be recovering an abandoned cart. Both the CTR and the conversion rate can be only measured when a link is included in your SMS. These two SMS metrics show engagement and relevance of your messages to receivers.
- SMS marketing ROI = Total sum earned from the campaign – original expenditure
The Returns On Investment (ROI) is the most significant indicator of SMS success because it focuses primarily on your profitability. It explains the difference between how much it costs to run a campaign and how much revenue the campaign generates.
Other Important SMS Marketing Analytics KPIs
- Response rate = (Received responses/ requested responses) x 100. This KPI measures the percentage of people who respond to a message. But receiving user responses requires the integration of a two-way SMS texting.
Subscriber list growth rate = (Current subscribers – previous subscribers) / (previous subscribers) x 100. This enables you to calculate the percentage difference between the current and total number of previous subscribers.
How Do Businesses Use These SMS Metrics?
Emarketer reports that by June of 2020, 56% of US retailers prioritized messaging and SMS platforms over all other technologies. The question is why more stores are turning to SMS marketing for e-commerce and what kind of returns they can expect to see from analyzing their results
Here are the benefits of SMS marketing analysis.
- Decision making: SMS performance reports provide you with insight into how individual contacts are interacting with your SMS campaigns and messaging. You can use your text marketing analytics reports to improve future campaigns and see how well SMS is performing for you.
- Contact behavior tracking: Most short URL link tracking tools offer some kind of analytics (clicks, locations, channels, and specific times). By engaging these UTM parameters users can track source data and web traffic from links included in SMS campaigns. They also allow you to add branded links to your messages, increasing the possibility of a user clicking on those links.
- Contact growth management: Tracking opt-ins (and outs) via text campaign software can guide your messaging strategy and provide ideas for expansion.
- Targeted mobile marketing: Measuring mobile marketing KPI with SMS helps increase your ROI because you can target mobile phone users using gleaned data.
Best Practices for SMS Tracking
Here are some concrete steps you can take to boost the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaign.
- Define the metrics that align with your business goals
Not all metrics are created equal, and not all of them should be prioritized. In a nutshell, effective SMS metrics are those that reveal whether or not your efforts are bearing fruit (the ones you prioritized the most). They need to be measurable and consistent with your overall objectives.
- Build a subscriber list
An SMS marketing program is only as good as its subscriber list, so it’s crucial to grow that list rapidly, connect with customers, and boost retail sales.
- Use actionable SMS marketing strategies
Here are a few actionable ways to improve your SMS performance.
- Keep your message concise.
- Incorporate your brand name
- Incorporate a CTAs.
- Check your links.
Track, aggregate, and analyze marketing data
Adopt an efficient text campaign software like BSG to streamline SMS analytics and tracking. Look for the patterns to determine whether to go back to the drawing board or press on.
How Can BSG Help Interpret the Outcomes of Your SMS Campaigns?
Simply put, when you launch a bulk SMS campaign on BSG, your message is delivered via multiple suppliers’ routes to the actual phones of people all over the world, and you receive a comprehensive text message report on the results of your campaign.
The following tools are available from BSG to simplify your experience with SMS tracking:
- Sender ID Test: Check for sender name changes
- Timestamps and DLR: Receive valid and timely delivery reports from your supplier;
- SMSC check: Verify your provider’s SMS center.
- PDU data: Get delivered and undelivered message raw data.
- API integration: Integrate SMS verification API into your platform.
Ready to launch data-driven SMS campaigns? Get started with BSG.
