With the explosive growth of eCommerce in the past months, if marketers and business owners want to stay on top of their game, they need to always follow the industry trends, and aim to make informed, data-driven decisions.
As your business grows, it will become more and more difficult for you to find your way through the vast universe of numbers, formulas, stats and KPIs, lurking from every corner of your Shopify store.
This is why we have compiled a list of 4 important metrics that are crucial for the success of your text marketing campaigns. Learn what each of them means and how it’s calculated. As a bonus you can expect some best practice tips – all packed for you at every step of your way.
Click-Through Rate
A click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio between the people who have clicked on a specific link in your text and the whole group of people whom you send your message to.
Let’s say as part of your Black Friday marketing campaign you sent a total of 10,000 text messages to your subscribers and 5,000 people showed interest in your offer, by clicking on the link in the SMS.
This is a CTR of 50% which is really impressive. It means that your offer was so appealing that it made 5 out of 10 people, who have opened your text message, follow the link and land on your website.
How do I improve my SMS click-through rate?
The values of CTR in different industries vary, but an average of 30% is a good benchmark for you to compare your performance.
We’ve prepared some advice in case you want to give this metric a little boost.
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Best practice tips to boost CTR:
- Get personal with your message – start off with a warm greeting, address your subscriber by name: “Hey Joanne, want to hear some great news?” This will grab their attention and make them want to find out more about your offer.
- Make your offer as clear as possible – is it a flash sale, is it a limited time only free shipping – be brief and direct.
- If possible – add an appealing visual to your message: MMS has proven to be 15% more engaging and effective compared to SMS.
- Use FOMO – it is a great way to nudge your subscribers to take action. Phrases such as “Limited time only”, “Until quantities last”, “Hurry…” will do the trick.
- Consider segmenting your target audience based on their behavior or other descriptive features, instead of sending the same campaign to everyone in your list. This personalized offer will make them more interested to click on your link.
Having a high CTR is a great headstart for every online store. It means that your messages reach the right audience and the offer is engaging enough to make them click on the link. And that you are doing a pretty good job with your SMS strategy!
But remember, that it is only the beginning of your journey – turning traffic into revenue. Your next step would be to think how to turn these website visitors into customers.
Conversion Rate
In the context of SMS marketing, conversion rates will show you how many of the people who clicked on a link from your text message actually made a purchase from your store.
Remember the Black Friday example from earlier? Well, let’s say the 5,000 clicks you got resulted in 2,800 purchases. This would mean a conversion rate of 56%.
The average conversion rate for SMS is considered to be around 45%, so if your results are above this number, it means you are doing well!
How do I improve my SMS conversion rate?
If you have a low conversion rate, it means that there might be something preventing your subscribers from making a purchase – it could be anything from unappealing website design, bad user experience, or extremely long and complicated checkout process.
Best practice tips to boost your conversion rate:
- Make sure your link leads directly to your offer. If customers need to click around to find it, they will most likely churn.
- Consider improving your website design. Remove any unnecessary information and make your top offers stand out.
- Sold-out inventories will have many sales prospects slip through your fingers. Add back-in-stock alerts to your store to make sure people will follow up on their inquiries.
- High shipping costs are the top reason why people leave your site without making a purchase. Consider offering limited-time-only free shipping and see if your CR will rise.
- Improve your checkout experience. Is it too long or complicated? Reduce the steps the customers need to take in order to finish their purchase, and try implementing some last-minute cross-sell strategies.
Now that you have some useful ideas in your pocket on how to increase your conversion rates, let’s move on to the next step in our journey towards success and see if we can boost the average value from each and every order.
Average Order Value
The Average Order Value (AOV) is the average amount spent per order and is one of the key metrics you should be following when trying to figure out ways to improve your store performance.
To calculate the AOV of your text marketing campaign, you need to divide your total revenue by the number of orders. If, for example, you scored 2,800 orders from your latest text marketing campaign, which resulted in $30,000 in revenue, this means the AOV of your store is $10.71.
How do I improve my AOV?
The AOV of your store depends on the type of products you are selling, but keep in mind that even a tiny increase in numbers will lead to a significant boost in overall results. So, how can you incentivize your customers to spend a lil’ bit more with each purchase?
Best practice tips to boost AOV:
- Set a minimum order value and add a small bonus in the form of free shipping or a free gift for customers who reach it.
- Group products in bundles and offer them with a limited-time-only discount.
- Try volume discounts – offer discounts on bigger purchases.
- Cross-sell – suggest a complementary item that is relevant to what your customers show interest in, e.g. paper packs as an addition to purchasing a home printer.
- Upsell – offer your customers a product with more extras or benefits (and consequently higher price), compared to the one that is currently in their carts.
By figuring out ways to boost your store’s AOV you will soon benefit from higher revenues and a steady growth.
Return on Investment
If we need to elect one KPI to “rule them all” – it would definitely be the Return on Investment (ROI). You can calculate the return on investment of a single text marketing campaign with the help of this formula:
If the 10,000 SMS you sent cost approximately $130 and generated the above mentioned $30,000… well, we don’t need to explain to you any further how great this result is 🙂 For the sake of the example, your calculated ROI in this case is 22,976%.
You can keep an eye on your SMS marketing ROI in the main dashboard of your SMSBump Analytics:
How do I improve my SMS ROI?
They say money saved is money earned. What does this have to do with ROI? Well, everything. Optimizing expenses is equally important and in the end – profitable for you.
If your ROI is not where you want it to be and you are struggling to find a way to make your campaigns cost-effective, let’s go through some top penny-saving strategies.
Best practice tips to boost ROI:
- Go through your SMSBump Analytics menu and recognize your top spending customers. Send them relevant offers, special discounts and upselling campaigns. With smaller investments you’ll get higher revenues.
- Analyze your top performing text marketing campaigns in Analytics. Why were they so successful? Was it the copy or the appealing visual? Try to replicate their success for future campaigns.
- Leverage automations. Any process you can automate, will save you time and money in return.
- Activate at least 1 abandoned cart flow. This powerful tool will help you recover a significant amount of your churned sales and you will soon see a major boost in ROI.
- Reduce costs – go through your production, distribution and marketing expenses. Small cuts here and there will result in an increase of your ROI.
ROI is one of the most important KPIs in marketing, as it helps you see “the big picture” and really evaluate if a certain aspect of your strategy is worth the effort.
Track all important KPIs with SMSBump Analytics
You will find all these marketing KPIs (and some more) within your SMSBump app. Just go to the Analytics section from the menu on the left.
You can track important metrics, such as revenue, link clicks, click-through rates, conversion rates, AOV, ROI and more for every aspect of your text marketing campaigns.
Whether you need information about your subscriber collection tools, one-off text marketing campaigns or automations & flows – it is all there, presented in a visual and convenient way, so that you can make all the important decisions, based on actual data.
Follow the link below to find out more about all the important stats available in your SMSBump Analytics menu, and how to track them for your text marketing campaigns.
Final Thoughts
This was our walkthrough among the most important SMS marketing KPIs – a world of numbers, percentages and formulas. It might not seem that beautiful or appealing to you at first, but trust us – as soon as you make these numbers grow, you’ll see what it was all about/there is really no greater feeling.
Learning how to properly analyze your KPIs and finding ways to boost all the important metrics, will be a real game-changer for your brand and business.
