Website design By BotEap.comHello, this is the next article in a series of articles on how to measure return on investment in software development projects.

Website design By BotEap.comCompanies that are not effectively measuring the performance and profitability of their companies do not have an effective way to modify or improve their business model. To take this further, companies should measure the performance of all different business functions.

Website design By BotEap.comIn this article, we get very specific about how to effectively measure the exact return from bulk SMS campaigns. Remember this is only the opinion of the writers, feel free to comment and offer your own suggestions about it, it is about learning and sharing to make the business work better.

Website design By BotEap.comFirst, a little history. Most people will agree that SMS has gotten huge, the technology is simple, and most importantly very short, forcing you to quickly get to the point on whatever you’re communicating.

Website design By BotEap.comHowever, having said that, companies consider sending SMS to be a major benefit when done correctly, the cost-benefit ratio is exceptional. The dilemma is this, most of the companies that send SMS know that it is worth it because every now and then a customer walks into the store and says they received an SMS, how many companies can tell you exactly how much money they are making from? customers? Very few right? So how do you do it?

Website design By BotEap.comHow to measure

Website design By BotEap.comWe will use the example of retail companies that offer their customers a combination of services and products.

Website design By BotEap.comStep 1: Your existing clients are like gold, make sure you know as much about them as they will let you know, at least ask each client for their cell phone number and name, with that you can send a completely personalized SMS to that person and make it look like you wrote it yourself. You can create a sales profile for that customer, purchase pattern, etc.

Website design By BotEap.comStep 2: Decide what type of campaign you want to send to customers. Make sure every SMS that is sent to a customer has an offer / discount or something that ensures that your customers are always excited about receiving SMS from your company. Announcement or information type SMS is never a good idea, it can irritate your customer and possibly lose a customer or customer asking you to stop sending them. In other words, my suggestion is that if you are going to send a campaign, give something away, for example, a 10% discount on a specific service for a week to clients that you know are interested in that service, come find a gift because it’s your birthday. early. However, the point here is that an SMS campaign that is giving something back to a customer will always have a much higher return than a campaign that only offers information. Experience has also shown that the cost of offering something is cheaper than offering nothing at all when comparing the average sales value and the number of purchases made. Sometimes it is necessary to return something to the customer to get more out of the customer. Think about the line of that customer talking to someone else talking to someone else, etc. That’s just one of the many benefits of giving something back to the customer.

Website design By BotEap.comStep 3: Add a unique code to each SMS and indicate that the person must give the code to redeem the 10%, gift, etc. Now you know where I’m going with this, but you’re already saying that people won’t come to the store and present the number. I agree and disagree with this statement, the reality of adding a code of say 5 digits to the end of an SMS means that the customer now needs to take an action and this can be seen as negative, although remember that the goal is to measure exactly how many people return as a result of the SMS, interested customers who receive the SMS will come to your store and show the code if they are really interested in what you are returning. You will also get those customers who come to the store and say they received an SMS, a good system will allow you to take the cell phone number of that customer and check if they received the SMS and therefore receive the code.

Website design By BotEap.comStep 4: Your software program for making the point of sale must have a built-in part that allows you to enter SMS codes into the system, this then verifies the cell phone number of that customer and, what is very important, it must make your program automatically deliver that gift (product code, service code), the discount on the product or service, etc. automatically. So the customer will see that this SMS code really helps to get what is being given very quickly, making the customer more receptive to the same campaigns in the future. Most importantly though, your program will have recorded that a discount or item was awarded as a result of an SMS code – oh, and did I mention that anything else purchased on that invoice can also be directly attributed to that SMS! Why? Well, this is the impulsive buying syndrome that many people exhibit, now you not only get the customer to return to your store, but they have also bought additional items and services as a result of your campaign to give them something. Yes, there will be customers who are not like that, but experience has clearly shown that customers will buy more than you offer. Better yet, if you have a good sales team, they will promote products or services that complement the discounted product or service purchased by the customer due to the SMS sent. This means that you are actually using SMS to promote a product line to the customer by offering a discount to the customer on one of those products, you could also have negotiated a cheaper cost price with your suppliers for the product, therefore not it will affect your profitability on the product.

Website design By BotEap.comStep 5: Finally, your software program should have a specific report based on date range or SMS campaign showing ROI on SMS campaigns, this is not such a complex report, the cost price is made up of:

Website design By BotEap.com– the cost of the SMS campaign as a whole – the cost price of all items in the invoices attributed to the campaign

Website design By BotEap.comThe sales portion simply consists of the sale price (that is, the actual sale price minus the discount if that’s what was given) of all the items on all the invoices for that SMS campaign

Website design By BotEap.comThe report then subtracts the sales from the cost of sales to get the campaign profit and then shows a simple ROI percentage.

Website design By BotEap.comThat’s it, you now have a way to provide an exact way to track the exact return of an SMS campaign, more importantly, however, you need to have software that can offer these capabilities. Most customers (businesses) find that the success rate of customers responding to the number of SMS sent is probably less than 10%, but that the return and profitability of the campaign far exceed what appears to be few people return to their campaign. Remember that it does not take large numbers of people to make a good profit; In most cases, it only takes 2-3 returning customers to accept your offer. 10% of the 10,000 returning customers is a huge profit for any business, considering it took a well thought out SMS and 5 minutes to send 10,000 SMS to customers, that’s probably the best money you could have spent on marketing.

Website design By BotEap.comAlso remember that a report showing the ROI on an SMS campaign will help you greatly to be even more effective with SMS campaigns, i.e. what time of the month performs best, what season, time of day, what kind of discounts are more liked by the customer, etc. , all these business decisions can be made very easily with a report like this in front of your eyes.

Website design By BotEap.comOne final note: If you find that your success rate is too low for your liking, chances are your campaign is a bit general, rather than sending more specific campaigns to even more specific customers, who will definitely see your percentages increase, if that doesn’t work. . So maybe the problem lies in the service you provide to customers, great service always brings customers back. I have had clients who had almost no return on SMS campaigns and they sent the same SMS campaign that other clients had sent with great success, without telling them however, it was clear that they simply did not offer their clients a good service in any case. case, so no amount of SMS and discounts would help them.

Website design By BotEap.comHope this article has helped some people and businesses. Comments are always welcome