Building scalable SMS campaigns: 7 strategies for successful delivery
The way you communicate with your audience has a direct impact on how they receive your message. However, each communication channel has its own challenges. Selecting the right mix of channels strengthens your campaign effectiveness while ensuring your marketing team can execute efficiently.
SMS campaigns are a great way to engage with your audience and connect with them via their mobile device; 53% of marketers see SMS as one of their top three revenue-driving channels. But SMS can be one of the more difficult channels to scale—security concerns, message creation, opt-in status, deliverability, and content performance all need to work together perfectly for you to be successful. Especially if you want to create a high volume of unique and personalized links for those SMS campaigns as well
Understanding how to account for the unique requirements of different channels can significantly improve your potential for success and alleviate blockers. In this article, we’ll examine seven aspects of effective SMS campaign marketing and provide some techniques and methods to overcome them.
1. Define your SMS campaign strategy
Strategy is one of the most challenging aspects of SMS campaigns. But it’s also the most important—your strategic vision will impact every decision you make about your campaigns in the future and define how you track results.
Since SMS is such an intimate and immediate communication channel, you don’t have the freedom to iterate or “figure things out as you go” as you would with something like social media or email. Building a scalable SMS campaign means considering how your strategic outcomes and goals will evolve once you get started.
Focus first on what you know. Use analytics and reporting on past campaigns, SMS or otherwise, to better understand your audience and their needs. SMS campaigns are best suited for transactional messages, time-sensitive notifications, account reminders, sales, and promotional content, so keep that in mind when planning these marketing campaigns.
Use branded links so your audience knows these text messages come from you. SMS is just as susceptible to spam as email, and a recognized, branded link will go a long way toward building trust with your audience and SMS carriers. If your SMS provider or CRM doesn’t offer custom domains with their link-shortening tool – now is the time to switch.
With Rebrandly, you can also use dynamic routing for any links you send out via SMS campaigns to ensure that the right segment of your audience always gets to the right destination. Automating that process saves time for your team and helps create a more seamless experience for anyone who clicks on your branded links.
2. Automate high-volume link generation
Once you’ve nailed down the strategic goals for your SMS campaigns, start thinking about how best to build the underlying infrastructure to achieve those results. That can be tricky the first time—high-volume link management and automation are complex—and standard link management practices don’t scale effectively for larger, more involved campaigns.
Your team will need to consider how effectively your core infrastructure will scale with your campaign. Many systems struggle to scale up or down dynamically, which can strain your team and balloon costs if you’re not careful with infrastructure requirements.
Focusing on your infrastructure first will also help alleviate some potential scalability issues down the line. Using a link management solution like Rebrandly, which has a scalable SMS campaign API, will mitigate bottlenecks in your software that can decrease speed and impact link reliability.
Rebrandly’s SMS API provides bulk operations up to 100K/second link creation, domain management, link analytics, and QR code generation endpoints to facilitate these high-volume operations as efficiently as possible. So you won’t have to worry about how the campaign generation process will impact your ability to provide a good user experience.
3. Ensure link security and deliverability
Sending out thousands of links per SMS campaign means your team will need a concrete understanding of domain reputation and security. Billions of spam texts are sent monthly, so gaining your audience’s trust is already an uphill battle.
That’s what makes your sending infrastructure so important. The service you implement to manage bulk SMS campaigns and send out text messages can directly impact how SMS carriers will view your content. Platforms like Bird, which has an integration with Rebrandly, can help you manage your sending infrastructure and ensure deliverability for SMS campaigns of any size.
Another way to strengthen your reputation with SMS carriers is to use branded links in your SMS messages. Anyone who receives your message should be able to know intuitively that the link comes from a reputable source, and branded links are your best way to do that. Branded links can also increase your overall clickthrough rate (CTR), which, over time, will help solidify your reputation with carriers.
Rebrandly is GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and SOC2 compliant, so managing your SMS link security will help build trust with your audience and increase clickthrough and conversion rates.
4. Track individual SMS campaigns at scale
High-volume SMS campaigns can make link performance tracking difficult. Not only do you have to manage the outbound sending infrastructure and the inbound traffic to your site, but you also need to set up an effective way to capture and track data for thousands of events. The complexity increases more when multiple SMS marketing campaigns are run concurrently.
RelayTM, Rebrandly’s smart links for text messaging solution, is one way to efficiently manage the outbound sending infrastructure. Relay provides detailed click tracking and attribution that you can use to optimize SMS campaign performance by refining targeting to maximize ROI.
Another way to create a more structured data capture process is to assign UTM parameters to your links. These unique tracking codes help you segment the audience data you bring in based on your desired audience characteristics or behavior. This makes creating custom reports easier and diving into specific parameters for each campaign simple.
Intelligent traffic routing with Rebrandly also allows you to route inbound traffic based on different criteria, such as country, device, language, or date clicked. Serve traffic to different landing pages based on specific needs and track the impact of your SMS campaign on various segments of your audience.
5. Create personalized SMS campaign links
Personalization is one of the best ways to connect with your audience. However, a personalized experience requires a robust data infrastructure and dedicated support to scale effectively. SMS campaigns become even more challenging when your audience spans different countries/regions, has varying levels of engagement, and has significantly different wants and needs.
Dynamic links are one way to route traffic more effectively and ensure that every individual who clicks on your link hits a page tailored to their needs. Using Rebrandly’s API, you can easily route traffic based on specific audience characteristics and set up multiple landing pages per campaign. Add these dynamic links to personalized messages built using Relay, smart links for text messaging, and you can easily scale your one-to-one text messages..
With Rebrandly, you can also expire links for SMS campaigns with a specific end date, which ensures that your team can easily manage inbound traffic and scale your infrastructure up or down based on the time bounds of the campaign.
Evergreen and timed SMS campaigns can also help you provide a more personalized experience. Evergreen campaigns go on indefinitely and allow people to interact with the same link over time, whereas timed campaigns, like a sale or product launch, have a different purpose entirely. A time campaign, for example, gives you the ability to provide more specific information about an upcoming promotion or sale, which feels more relevant for your audience.
6. Monitor link performance
Whenever anyone clicks a link you send out via an SMS campaign, their experience needs to be as smooth as possible. Extended load times or incorrect routing can have a direct, negative impact on your ability to connect and convert. Managing this experience at scale, when sending out thousands of links with smart redirects, tracking parameters, and destination URLs, can be considerably more difficult as your SMS campaign grows.
Rebrandly’s API provides several options for optimizing this experience, with dedicated load balances to distribute traffic efficiency and a dedicated cluster of redirect engines to ensure instant link resolution. Our API can generate up to 10 API calls per second or 20K per hour, with the option to scale up to as many as 100K links per second with our unlimited option.
7. Analyze SMS campaign results
The larger your SMS campaign becomes, the more difficult it can be to analyze effectively. Scaling your reporting ad hoc will require a lot of backend support, which is costly and time-consuming. Rebrandly can monitor clicks in real time and process any inbound requests at scale. Your team will need to put in a lot of effort to track the sheer number of messages, clickthroughs, conversions, and tracking parameters involved.
With Rebrandly, you can create unique dashboards for each Workspace that give your team the real-time data they need. You can use that data to analyze results, understand your customers’ behavior when interacting with an SMS message, and make smarter decisions for future SMS campaigns.
Our Clickstream integration helps you collect and store all incoming click traffic data in the right bucket. You can easily manage any amount of incoming traffic, even if there are spikes, and route it efficiently without causing additional strain for your team.
This easily accessible data is ready for analysis by your data and marketing teams and ensures that your infrastructure team is not under additional strain. When scaling SMS campaigns, it’s essential to consider the potential impact on everyone involved and ensure that each individual has the time and capacity to engage with the results.
Scaling SMS campaigns is easy with the right tools
Understanding the potential challenges your team will face when building out SMS campaigns is the first step toward creating a more seamless experience for everyone involved. Tools like Rebrandly can help support your team with high-volume link creation, attribution, and reliability—so your team can focus on ensuring that every SMS campaign achieves your strategic messaging goals.
Learn more about how Rebrandly can support your SMS campaigns.
