Every business must measure the success of its marketing campaigns. One of the best evaluation metrics is the conversion rate (CVR), which shows how well your message resonates with your target audience and drives action. Improving your conversion rate can help your business boost efficiency and revenue.
In this guide, we'll cover everything a business needs to know about SMS marketing conversion rate. You’ll walk away understanding what it is, how to calculate it, and top strategies for improving it. Let's dive in!
Jump right to:
- What is SMS marketing conversion rate?
- What is the average SMS conversion rate?
- How to calculate SMS marketing conversion rate
- 11 ways to maximize your CVR
<h2 id="What">What is SMS marketing conversion rate?</h2>
An SMS marketing conversion rate is a metric that tracks how many people take action after receiving a promotional text message. The metric, expressed as a percentage, measures the effectiveness of a texting campaign.
Typically, for SMS marketing CVR, brands measure customer actions like purchases, booked services, signups, or replies.
Read more: Everything you need to know about SMS analytics
<h2 id="Average">What’s the average SMS marketing conversion rate?</h2>
Many factors contribute to a brand’s SMS marketing conversion rate, including SMS use case, campaign goal, and industry. For example, the average conversion rate for abandoned cart recovery texts is typically higher than for low-inventory alert messages. Additionally, D2C brands often see higher conversion rates than B2B brands that inherently have longer sales cycles.
While there are many factors that go into CVR, industry reports place the average SMS marketing conversion rate between 21 percent and 32 percent. Plus, 53 percent of marketers report that SMS is one of the top three revenue-driving channels for their business.
What is considered a good CVR?
It’s complicated to flesh out what a “good” CVR is because it varies so much by industry and SMS campaign goal. However, anything above 5 percent is considered a good CVR by online marketing agencies. Many brands are turning to SMS because it produces strong CVR because of its high open rate and stringent opt-in procedures.
<h2 id="How">How to calculate your SMS marketing CVR</h2>
Before you can calculate SMS marketing CVR, there are a handful of things you must iron out. Let’s break these down.
- Define a conversion. The first step is to define a conversion or the desired action you want your audience to take. You can choose from many actions in this step, including a purchase, signup, download, click, response, and more.
- Track your conversions. You also need to measure when your audience converts. Often, this includes using a unique SMS promo code, setting up a trackable link, or viewing replies. Accurate tracking is crucial in helping you truly understand your conversion rate.
- Find the number of delivered messages. You need to know the final number of SMS message recipients. This is one of the key numbers in the calculation.
Now that you have your conversion event defined, tracking set up, and total message volume, you’ll plug these into the formula.
The SMS marketing CVR formula
The traditional calculation for SMS marketing CVR is the number of people who took an action divided by the number of people who received the text message. Then, this number is multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
Here’s the CVR calculation:
Here’s a look at calculating CVR with actual numbers. Let’s say your product launch SMS marketing campaign was sent to 500 people and 100 took the desired action. Your CVR would be 20 percent.
Read more: How to calculate and maximize SMS marketing ROI
<h2 id="Ways">11 ways to maximize your CVR</h2>
Every business wants to improve its conversion rate as it means more views, signups, revenue, or feedback. Here are several ways you can maximize your CVR:
- Clean your SMS contact list. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency and performance of an SMS campaign is to ensure you’re reaching out to an engaged audience. This means that you’ll want to clean your SMS contact list regularly. You can create segments of unengaged contacts so you can remove them or send fewer messages to them.
- Use strong and clear CTAs. The call to action is one of the most important factors in any marketing message. It drives the audience to take your desired action. Make your CTAs clear, concise, and relevant.
- Personalize your messages. Personalizing your marketing text messages goes a long way toward improving CVR. Personalized product recommendations and tailored messages help customers feel seen and valued, which can drive improvements in conversion rate.
- Segment your contact list. In addition to personalization, segmenting your audience lists is a great way to improve CVR. This ensures the proper audience is getting the right message.
- Craft compelling messages. Your marketing text messages should resonate with your audience and be compelling. Give your SMS subscribers a reason to take action, whether it's a limited-time discount or a can’t-miss product offering.
- A/B test content and timing. One of the best ways to optimize marketing messages is to A/B test message content, CTAs, and send times. All of these play a part in optimizing a CVR. A/B testing can help marketers find what works and what doesn’t.
- Find your optimal timing. Pay attention to the timing of your mass marketing texts. You’ll want to test different send times and understand the best time to send a text in order to generate a higher conversion rate. For example, a restaurant may see higher conversions around meal times.
- Pay attention to message frequency. The reality is some people won’t act immediately when receiving your first message, but may after a second or third. Be aware that it’s okay to follow up. However, you also don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too many messages either.
- Create a sense of urgency. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a big driver of human action. That’s why marketers use this psychological phenomenon to their advantage. Don’t be afraid to create this sense of urgency in your marketing texts to improve conversion rate. You can create a sense of urgency by offering a limited-time discount, sending low-inventory texts, or using a time-sensitive CTA.
- Ensure tracking accuracy. To set realistic goals and optimize your CVR, you need to ensure you’re properly tracking your conversions. This ensures you know your starting point so you can refine and improve over time.
- Consistency at every touch point. One of the quickest ways to end a conversion is when there’s no logical continuation. For example, the landing page you send your customers to should be a logical continuation of the text message. Don’t talk about clothing and have your landing page take them to technology.
Drive higher SMS marketing CVR with Textline
One of the major components of a successful SMS marketing strategy is picking the right business texting platform. Textline is a top-rated SMS platform with high deliverability rates and metric-tracking features that help marketing teams thrive. Use Textline to A/B test messages, automate message timing, and segment your audience list.
Give Textline a try today free for 14 days, and see how marketing teams are improving revenue rates with high-converting SMS campaigns.
