SMS Lead Generation: Text Marketing for Your Leads

Text message lead generation has quickly become the preferred electronic communication. Sales is a numbers game and a staggering 95% of text messages sent are read by their recipient within 3 minutes after receiving it. Compare that to your email open rates.

Text messages are such a powerful marketing tool because they are simple, easy to use and lead to very high engagement. Almost a fifth of links sent via text message are clicked by their recipients, an unheard-of number in any other form of digital advertising. Follow the steps below to begin your own SMS lead generation campaign with Textedly.

Choose a Relevant Keyword

The first thing to do is to pick a keyword that your new leads will use to initiate contact with you and join your list. In order to begin receiving promotional messages from you, your prospect must text your keyword to your assigned shortcode. Because this keyword will be used on your marketing material, it is important that this word is relevant to your brand.

Example: Barbara Jones is a personal injury lawyer. She could choose a keyword like “INJURY” or “LAWSUIT” to represent her practice or something more personal like “BARBARA”. This will allow you to put clear and effective calls to action in your marketing materials. An example of how this would read in an ad is: “Were you injured in a car accident? Text BARBARA to 33445!”

Set Up an Auto-Responder

Once a prospect shows interest by texting your keyword to your shortcode, it’s crucial to text them back right away. That is the purpose of an auto-responder.

Your auto-responder should provide the information that motivated your potential customer to send a text in the first place. When you set up automatic text replies using Textedly, we also make sure that the automated texts include an easy way for the subscribers to opt-out of messages to comply with the law.

Your auto-responder sequence can include texts, website links, photos and more. It’s like having someone on call to respond to your text marketing leads 24/7. By quickly providing them with the information they need, you’ve given them the ideal introduction to your business, all without lifting a finger.

The “Secret Sauce”: The Follow Up

Now that you’ve got their attention and started the relationship, you’re going to want to stay in touch. It’s important to keep the momentum going with regular text messages. You’ll want to keep the focus of these followup messages on providing value and important content instead of simply promotional material.

There is a delicate balance to strike here. If you send messages too infrequently, you risk losing engagement with your audience. However, if you send too many messages, your leads may start to find it annoying and unsubscribe from future follow-ups.

There is no universal answer for what your exact follow-up strategy should be because it changes for every business and every audience. Think about your audience, why did they subscribe? Put yourself in their shoes and think about what kind of content you would want to see pop up on your phone.

Follow-ups create value because they strengthen the relationship between your brand and a potential customer without you having to do too much of anything. In fact, 50% of all sales happen after the 5th contact.