3 SMS marketing campaigns that successfully leveraged API

When looking at successful SMS campaigns, you need to look at the cost of your campaign compared to its generated revenue. In this blog you will learn a little more about how to discern if your SMS marketing campaign has been successful, and see some examples of great campaigns sure to leave you inspired. 

To know if an SMS campaign is successful it’s important to calculate its ROI. Calculating the SMS marketing ROI will help to determine if your campaign has:

Below are the steps for calculating the ROI of an SMS marketing campaign.

Determine all campaign-related expenses, including messaging costs, design, and staff time.

Measure the revenue generated through the campaign, using tracking links or codes to attribute sales.

Subtract costs from the revenue and use the formula:

ROI = (Revenue – Cost) / Cost.

Then interpret the result to assess your campaign profitability.

To improve your chances of achieving the best ROI possible, there are several factors you should keep in mind when crafting your campaign, and important key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track once it has been launched.

You should also gather customer feedback to help inform your view of how successful your campaign has been. This kind of qualitative data can often help to fill in the gaps between the numerical data.

Next, in order to meet your chosen metrics’ goals, it’s important to keep some best practices handy.

If you are unfamiliar with, or still relatively new to SMS marketing, it might be worth familiarizing yourself with the staples of different types of SMS campaigns.

SMS marketing is suitable for both inbound and outbound campaigns, depending on whether your aim is to incite your customers to action or to prompt a response.

The main appeal of this form of marketing is that SMS open rates can be as high as 98% – but this can be a double-edged sword, as it means that more of your target audience will read your correspondence, and you run the risk of higher unsubscribe rates if your messaging isn’t on point.

With this in mind, here are some SMS best practices to keep in mind when crafting your campaign.

Part of the reason why so many businesses invest in an SMS API is to manage the above factors while rolling out an SMS campaign. 

Here’s why SMS API can help to boost your success:

While SMS API pricing runs the gamut all the way from free to expensive, chances are that there is a communications provider whose API will be the perfect price point for your business.

SMS marketing is considered affordable in general, especially considering the size of the audience you can reach for very little investment. With the added heavy lifting an SMS API can help with, its value to your business is only increased.

SMS campaigns are very easy to track and measure, as shown by the simple KPIs above. CPaaS providers with robust SMS APIs are also able to provide you with succinct reporting and analytics for this data, making it even easier to track your campaigns and see what you need to do to boost your ROI.

Being able to draw such straightforward conclusions from your campaign results means less time and energy is spent deciphering data, making it easier to demonstrate your campaign’s success.

With SMS marketing it’s far easier to contact your customers at a time that is relevant to where they are in the buyer’s journey.

For example, alongside an appropriate customer engagement solution, you can program certain events to trigger a follow-up message to ensure you’re sending the right signals at the right time.

The term relevancy can also apply to the fact that SMS is the most popular form of communication on the planet, trumping phone calls and emails by a huge lead – why wouldn’t you want to utilize this widespread and effective channel?

The level of automation enabled by APIs makes it easy to scale your campaigns up or down depending on your audience. This means you can grow your business without fear of anything holding you back, safe in the knowledge that your API can handle heavy loads of automated tasks, even at peak times.

Being able to test out various messages and send times, and tweak these messages in real-time, make for invaluable optimization opportunities.

Being able to integrate your chosen API with your existing systems makes for a seamless workflow, with all the tools that you need at your fingertips and working together. When choosing an API it’s important to see which programs and platforms they work well with. 

Here are some examples of ingenious and effective SMS campaigns to inspire you.

A popular example, and for good reason, is cosmetics retailer Beautylish. They invited customers to share how excited they were that their order had been delivered, “on a scale from 1-5”.

Not only is this a great way to confirm that an order has been delivered and see how well it has been received, but it provides the opportunity to interact with customers in  their own language – the expressive world of appropriate GIF selection.

In an attempt to drum up tourism as travel reopened post-pandemic, Visit California played the role of a “needy ex”, fully committing to a style of texting that we’re more familiar with in our personal lives than from businesses. But this self-awareness was the campaign’s strength, and garnered lots of attention.

Working alongside Infobip experts on an SMS-based eCoupon campaign, Makro saw their conversion rate rise by 100%, while at the same time watching their manual workload drop by 20%. As you’ll see in our case study, this is a great example of a campaign leveraging multiple channels, specifically leading the way with SMS.