A Case Study of the Digital Marketing World’s Hidden Gem

Virtually all Americans – 95% – own a cell phone and use it on a daily basis. If you need to reach someone, you don’t send them an email, you send them a text message. Campaigns and businesses are starting to adapt to this fact and are increasingly incorporating SMS in their marketing campaigns. When you have a message that’s brief and urgent, SMS could be the right medium for your campaign. In this blog post, we want to walk you through how SMS helped us win big for one of our clients.

Our gubernatorial candidate is an outsider to politics, and our goal was to get 9,600 citizens across the state to sign a petition to put him on the primary ballot. Faced with the need to effectively market a large number of people, we turned to the SMS marketing platform, Opn Sesame. SMS marketing worked for us, and we believe it can work for you too. (Spoiler alert: our candidate got on the ballot!)

How We Used SMS

The plan is quite simple. As SMS users ourselves, we recognize that we are much more likely to open a text message from an unknown sender than a similar unknown message via email.

With Opn Sesame, we crafted three messages and input the phone numbers from our list. Each recipient read the same message followed by a simple call to action (CTA). If the user replied “YES” to sign the petition, this “YES” symbolized them opting in their data. Their data was then given to the campaign to contact the interested party and receive a petition signature.

What We Found

We sent a total of 11,181 messages and received 1,902 replies. This garnered a delivery rate of 83% and a response rate of 17%. Compared to email marketing, which generally produces response rate of 2.6%, this is a huge increase!

In comparison to the SMS response rate, email marketing has a similar measure called the click rate. Your click rate measures how many of the people who received your email actually took the bait and clicked the link you’ve sent them. The industry average click rate is around 2.5%. This makes our 17% response rate significantly more successful than an average email marketing campaign.

Why You Should Use SMS

SMS has a higher open rate than email. We can all relate to scrolling through our email inbox and deleting messages before reading. But do you do that with your text messages? Probably not. Even if we are simply opening the text to clear the notification, we are still reading and taking in that information. Studies have found that texts are opened 98% of the time when received by your customers, compared to the 21% industry average open rate for emails.

SMS is cost effective and efficient. In our own case study with Opn Sesame, we paid only $0.15 a text. If that already isn’t music to your ears, then consider this: SMS is quick to generate and send out. Who doesn’t love saving time? If you want to get really efficient, you can set up Artificial Intelligence to send automated responses to certain trigger words and phrases.

SMS allows you to reach a wider demographic than other forms of marketing. Text messages are personal, direct, and efficient — all age groups and socio-economic demographics engage with SMS, so integrating this platform into your marketing plan allows you to quickly and effectively reach all of your target audiences.

SMS also allows you to send dynamic content with videos, images, and gifs. Studies show that recipients engage more with dynamic content, so this is an easy opportunity to up your marketing creativity.

SMS is an ideal platform to add to your digital marketing strategy. It’s innovative, effective, but underutilized. A vast majority of Americans use SMS in their daily lives but rarely do businesses and campaigns take advantage of it in their marketing plans. We want you to get ahead of the curve and adopt the marketing world’s hidden gem – SMS. Contact IMGE to kick off your SMS campaign.