6 things to consider when conducting an audit of your SMS program

As director of email marketing at SmartSites, I work with my team to conduct account-wide audits all year long to help brands pinpoint where they have room to grow.

While we typically look at a brand’s email marketing program, the health of their sign-up process, their segmentation strategy, and their SMS marketing all in one audit, it’s a worthwhile exercise to look at your SMS program on its own several times throughout the year—especially after you send a new campaign.

Here’s everything my team and I look at when determining the health of a brand’s SMS program.

1. SMS segmentation strategy

Even brands with sophisticated email segmentation strategies often still batch and blast their subscribers on SMS, and it’s a huge mistake. The people who sign up for your text messages are not all alike, nor do they want to get the same content.

Here are 8 SMS segments that even a brand that’s new to SMS can—and should—build:

• VIP SMS subscribers: those who’ve spent above a certain threshold or have made above a certain number of purchases with your brand. Send exclusive deals, sneak peeks, and early-bird promotions.
• Prefers SMS: those who’ve recorded their preference for texts over email when opting in. Send text messages instead of emails whenever possible.
• Highly engaged SMS: subscribers who are regularly opening and engaging with your text messages. Send them your best texts—you’ve already established the relationship.
• High-intent SMS shoppers: shoppers who’ve started a check-out in the last 5 days but haven’t finished. This is a great segment for testing a campaign or flow before launching to a bigger audience.
• 30- to 90-day engaged or newly subscribed: people you can send to every week. Send campaigns, updates, and useful content.
• SMS location-based: those in specific geographic regions. Send personalized, relevant content about local events, brick-and-mortar stores, or buy tickets or sporting apparel, for example.
• SMS win-back: those who have decreased engagement on SMS. Send discounts and special offers to try to re-engage this segment.
• SMS error: those who subscribed to your text marketing but aren’t getting them. Use this segment to help you understand why failed deliveries are happening and prevent further deliverability issues.

2. The SMS opt-in process

Plenty of brands’ SMS sign-up forms aren’t recording SMS consent correctly. I’ve seen brands collect phone numbers without consent and then wonder why their SMS list isn’t growing—they simply haven’t mapped the information subscribers are entering to the correct field.

It’s definitely worth your time to test your SMS opt-in process periodically using your own phone number.

Some ways to optimize your SMS opt-in process are to:

• Use a double opt-in to confirm sign-up.
• Include compliance language that explicitly states you’ll be sending marketing messages to the people who are subscribing.
• Make sure you include that compliance language on your website as well as in the sign-up form.

3. SMS compliance

Speaking of compliance, one of the biggest problems I see with SMS programs is brands with a host of compliance issues, including:

SMS consent status

Because SMS is a more personal channel than email, governments worldwide regulate it more.

Make sure your subscribers have explicitly agreed to get your SMS marketing. It’s also important that you don’t require SMS sign-up to make a purchase—you can even get fined if it seems like signing up for SMS is required.

The description of your privacy policy and the terms on your website

Your privacy policy must be very clear, and it must be posted wherever the person is signing up. Make sure you’ve covered all your bases by including it on your check-out page, banners in emails, or a third-party quiz or form.

Most marketing platforms don’t have a way to check this for you, so it’s on you and your team to make sure your language is clear and specific and where it needs to be.

Regional compliance

If your brand operates internationally, it’s important to know that foreign governments have different standards for SMS compliance. Brands can’t share certain content regionally, so my team and I will either deliver different messaging abroad or create a segment to make sure those subscribers don’t get content that isn’t allowed.

Each way that a brand is out of compliance with their SMS program puts them at risk for steep fines and even lawsuits. If your SMS list contains 100,000 contacts and you’re out of compliance with a few thousand, governments can fine you up to $1,000 per offense—so it’s worth checking this regularly so that you protect your brand and your bottom line.

4. Missed opportunities

We often see opportunities in existing automated email flows to conditionally split in order to add SMS as an additional touchpoint for people who have opted in.

You’d be surprised how many brands don’t have an SMS touchpoint for their core automations, like:

• Welcome series
• Abandoned cart
• Post-purchase
• Review requests

For the right crowd, adding SMS touchpoints to those campaigns can help increase your ROI and give you a chance to tailor content to the channel that works best for it.

5. SMS campaigns

It can be embarrassingly easy to overspend on your SMS program—a situation I often find when auditing a brand’s text marketing. Simple mistakes like using one too many emojis can turn one SMS message into two, doubling your spend.

Keep an eye on character count limits and how they vary when using emojis. For instance, in Klaviyo, 160 characters is the limit for one SMS, but if you use an emoji or special character, it goes down to 70.

Similarly, depending on how you’re using images in your texts, as well as how your SMS marketing platform handles MMS pricing, MMS could end up being either more or less cost-effective than SMS.

Optimizing your SMS campaigns for length is a good idea whether you’ve budgeted for MMS or not, and whether you’re using emojis or not.

6. Competitors’ messages

Of course, every brand wants to stand out from the competition. But first, you have to understand what the competition is doing.

So, my team and I will ask our clients for a list of brands whose SMS programs they admire. We then subscribe to their text marketing and trigger communications like a welcome series or abandoned cart reminder to see what an admirable brand’s cadence and content are.

Conduct an audit of your SMS program regularly

SMS is a delicate channel, and it’s new enough that plenty of brands struggle to get their footing. It’s worth setting aside time and budget to keep an eye on each aspect of your text marketing.