Data and Analytics for SMS Marketing
As your business grows, your marketing efforts are going to play an enormous role in ensuring that your growth is happening at the rate and in the direction that you want it to. However without tangible and trackable goals, your tireless efforts to grow may be in vain. Data and analytics are the foundation upon which your goals should be set, tracked and finally: achieved. Determining what to track and how can seem like a daunting task without proper guidance and knowledge, which is why this guide will aim to arm you with the information needed to begin maximizing your marketing efforts.“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”
Which Statistics and Analytics To Focus On
What is a KPI?
According to the Oxford dictionary’s definition: A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an an organization, employee, etc. in meeting objectives for performance.
In essence, a KPI is a trackable goal or metric which is used to evaluate something’s effectiveness.
There are sevaral commonly used metrics associated with SMS marketing for businesses. Their order of importance cann vary depending on the industry, campaign, and audience.
Types of SMS Statistics
Delivery Rate: A Delivery Rate is the percentage of your texts which were successfully delivered by the campaign.
Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of your audience who has unsubscribed from receiving further text messages from the total number of subscribers in a given SMS campaign.
Response Rate: The percentage of your campaigns successfully delivered messages which were responded to by the recipients.
Response Time: The average time between when your audience receives a message and when they respond to it.
Click Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of clicks recieved on your messages which contain a link.
Time to Resolution: The average time between when you have received an inbound message/inquiry/problem and when that problem is resolved.
Time to Respond: The average amount of time between when you have received an inbound message and when that message has been responded to.
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Which Analytics to Focus On for Different Uses
Customer Service and Customer Support
Customer service or customer support analytics revolve around increasing satisfaction while taking care of customers in the short amount of time possible.
Consideration of your customer’s time is crucial to a quality customer service model. Which is why it’s no surprise that two of the important issues with customer service metrics have to do with timeliness. Time to resolution is the first metric to begin tracking and establishing goals for with the customer service or support industry. How long are your customer’s waiting for their problems to be resolved? If you don’t know, it’s time to start keeping track and slowly moving the needle to faster resolutions, without compromising the quality of your service.
Time to Respond is the second metric to focus on with Customer Service and Customer Support. When your company is receiving inbound inquiries or responses to your outbound campaigns, making your customers wait is the last thing you should do. Appreciating your customers time is something that they will notice immediately, and if it is ignored, it could result in the loss of a customer.
Sales and Marketing
The first and foremost metric to keep track of, is your delivery rate. In order to get your message across to your audience, you must ensure that your campaigns are being recieved and delivered properly before beginning to plan future campaigns or analyze your other metrics. The greatest marketing campaign in the world won’t matter if it isnt’ effectively reaching your audience.
One of the important statistics to keep an eye on is your businesses unsubscribe rate. If you are noticing high levels of unsubscribe rates, this should be a red flag to your current marketing strategy. Your audience may find your campaigns less useful than they originally hoped and even worse, they may begin to report your campaigns as spam. For a more comprehensive look at examples of spam text messages, take a look at our full coverage blog here.
Another data point to begin tracking for your sales and marketin efforts is your response rate. Your response rate is a quality indication of the effectiveness of your campaigns as well as an insight to your overall engagement with your customers. Higher response rates indicate a well received message, and shows your audience cares enough to take the time to initiate a 2 way communication channel.
SMS Statistics VS Email Statistics
Data and analytics for email campaigns share many common themes. Nealy all of the important metrics for SMS campaigns, directly correlate to email campaigns and data tracking. For more information on how to check your email campaign scores, check out our comprehensive article here.
Closing Thoughts
In order to improve your businesses marketing efforts and growth, tracking your progress towards quantifiable goals is key. Tracking data and analytics will allow your business to flourish, and will ensure your SMS marketing efforts yield the results you’re looking for.
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