While you may be aware that short message services (SMS)s are a great way to market your products and services, you may be less familiar with how to read the ensuing metrics from pursuing SMS as a form of marketing. This article has been written with the express purpose of guiding people on how to tell whether or not their particular SMS campaigns are playing out successfully.
Interaction Rate (IR)
This is a way of gauging how many subscribers are acting upon the SMS marketing you send them. These can be clicks on the message, click-to-calls, opening up your app, etc. This is expressed as a percentage. A high interaction rate is a good sign that your SMS campaign is useful to your users, and a low interaction rate means that few people are bothered, but you have room to improve.
Tracking your interaction rate is a great initial step to improving your SMS campaign and getting subscribers to act. After you have results, you can tweak and build upon that success or go back to the drawing board if things are lacking. To calculate your IR, simply divided the total number of clicks upon your messages by the messages you send out and multiply that figure by 100. For example, if you get 3,560 clicks in a month and send out 20 messages, you would have an IR of 178%.
Delivery Rate
This compares the number of messages that make it to a subscriber to the total number of texts that you send out to subscribers. A high rate means that your campaign is working. A low rate could be symptomatic of a few problems:
- Carrier errors.
- Incorrect phone number or information.
- Inferior quality SMS Gateway network.
- Spam filters.
Tracking delivery rates can inform your database’s quality. If it is low, you can clear out a bunch of invalid contacts so that only interested parties are messaged. This will raise the overall metrics of your SMS campaign, raise your reputation as a sender, and cut marketing costs.
Figuring out the delivery rate is a simple matter of dividing tests delivered by the total count of texts you send and multiplying that figure by 100. If 7 texts are received, but you send out 10, that is a 70% delivery rate.
Unsubscription Rate
This gauges how many people have unsubscribed from your SMS campaign. People may opt out for many reasons:
- Messaging is considered worthless.
- Texting too frequently.
- No initial opt-in.
- Not recognizing the number.
- Texts are considered misleading/spam.
A high unsubscribe rate could be symptomatic of several factors. Maybe you send tone-deaf texts, or your messaging comes at odd dates and times. Maybe you failed to set any expectations from your subscribers about what they were to be getting out of opting in. If your unsubscription rate keeps rising, reconsider your approach and let your subscribers know that you are paying attention. Calculating a campaign’s unsubscription percentage is a simple matter of dividing the number of opt-outs by the number of subscribers you had at the campaign’s start, then multiplying that result by 100.
Conversion Rate
This is a measure of how many people complete an action after getting your text. This could be a coupon, signing up for a list, recovering an abandoned shopping cart, etc. SMS tends to have a higher conversion rate than e-mail campaigns, meaning that your SMS subscribers are going to be considerably more engaged due to the value of a phone number over an e-mail address. Simply divide your number of conversions by the number of messages sent and multiply by 100 to find this percentage.
The Final Message
There are several ways to track how successful marketing via short message service is for your company, and you owe it to your business’s future to consider all of them. Be sure to track how many subscribers are actually interacting with your texts, that there are as few issues reaching your subscribers as possible, how many people are pulling out of their subscriptions, and how many of those texts truly contribute to purchases and other financially beneficial actions.
