Group Texts Need Compelling Calls to Action

How do you motivate customers to take action? Your call to action plays a significant role in getting people to act. With a short-form content like SMS marketing, it can be easy to be tempted to forgo the CTA; however, this greatly diminishes your campaign’s efficacy. When deciding what to include in your text, be sure that you include a strong CTA.

• Grab Attention. Get people to read your message or ad.
• Motivate. Motivate customers to take action
• Simplicity. Make it clear and easy.
• Wording. Choose the right words to urge action.

Attention Grabbing

 A strong CTA gets your customers to actually do what you want them to do.

Your CTA is only as effective as the number of people who see it and respond to it. Therefore, you need to grab your customers’ attention. Whether you are using SMS marketing as a CTA on your other marketing channels or you are developing one for your text content, you need to grab the attention of your customers. There are several components to keep in mind:

• Simplicity is key
• Use pictures
• Keep it personal
• Try some humor
• Ask a question
• Relate to their emotions
• Fulfill a need
• Provide an answer

These are just a few elements to help your marketing get noticed. Some work better for ads on which you might use an SMS as a call to action, but you could integrate most of these in your text CTA.

Incentives and Motivation
Another essential piece of the CTA puzzle is that it includes some type of incentive or motivating factor. You want to provide a reason for people to take immediate action rather than stopping to think about what they will do. A few ideas of what type of incentives to use are:

• Offers and deals
• Special access
• Save time
• Contests
• Privileged information

Find what your target audience would find as valuable. Offer them to have exclusive access to this. Develop something that can save them time and money. Then, tell them about it in such a way that they feel:

• They need to be a part of this.
• If they do not act right away, they will miss out.

Easy to Understand
Your call to action also needs to be easy to understand. Make it short and sweet with minimal confusion. One important area that can easily create confusion is the keywords that are commonly used as a CTA.

When choosing a keyword, you want to avoid using special characters, very long words, multiple words and other ways that might make it easy for people to make a mistake. This could mean the loss of potential subscribers or customers, because they will take action, but you will not gain from it.

When you write a CTA for your SMS marketing content, it pays to be short and sweet. This is because you only have 160 characters with which to work. However, this does not mean you should rely on abbreviations, text speak or other ways of shortening your message. This also could create confusion and reduce the efficacy of your CTA.

Choose the Right Words
The final component of an effective CTA for SMS marketing is that you choose the right words. You only have so much space to use, so you want to make sure that you fill it wisely. Start by using an action verb. This should be a strong verb that actually incites action. Some examples include:

• Buy
• Click
• Text
• Visit

These verbs might be short and to the point, but they still pack a punch. Add onto these verbs some additional words that incite urgency. These include:

• Now
• Today
• Limited time
• Don’t miss out

As you can see, these words all deal with time. They tell your customers that they need to act right away and invoke some FOMO: Fear of Missing Out.

Get your team together to create the best CTAs possible.

Ultimately, when you decide upon the words to use, do not worry about getting too creative. Although you want something that catches the eye while also relating to your business and the campaign, it does not need to be overly complicated. Simple can be effective.

Types of CTAs
Calls to action come in a variety of packages. To develop the perfect one for your messages, determine the purpose of the message itself. What do you want your customers to do? Do you want them to buy something or sign up for something or click a link? The action you ultimately want your customers to take informs the CTA you add to your marketing. Your goals and objective also impact what type of CTAs you decide to use. A few ideas of CTAs that work well with SMS marketing include:

• Buy something — people are shopping more and more often on their mobile device. Send them a text with an offer or product information and then make it easy for them to simply buy straight from the message.
• Redeem the coupon — mobile coupons have a high redemption rate. This is because it is easy for people to simply show a coupon they have on their device.
• Text a keyword to sign up — A keyword does not only work as an initial CTA for opting into your text marketing program. It can be used for other actions as well, such as asking questions or voting in a poll.

When you create your CTA, be sure to make it easy and make sense. If you add a link, make sure it is to the landing page you want them to go to.

It is important to always include a CTA with your SMS marketing messages. However, you do not want to use the same one all the time. Keep your content fresh and new so that it continues to be effective. Use these tools to create a template and foundation on which to build your program.

Try GroupTexting for free and see how effective your CTAs are.

Categories: Text Message Marketing Tips