Have you ever wondered what an effective SMS strategy would be for affiliate marketers? Well, keep reading on and sate your curiosity with these SMS marketing tips for affiliate marketers.
As an increasingly popular field, affiliate marketing benefits the brand as well as the marketer in a profound way. Since SMS is such a viable advertising tactic, it makes sense that affiliates can leverage it for increasingly better results. Let’s explore how.
Cast a Wide Net
Since affiliate marketers earn a commission based on how much demand they secure, it’s best to reach a wide audience.
One of the key draws of SMS marketing is that the vast majority of age groups and other demographics can be recipients. This is in stark contrast to other methods which are usually confined by age groups or income. But nowadays there are more affordable phones and even the most basic one will have SMS.
Take advantage of that and don’t be too selective about who you’re messaging. Depending on the products/services you’re working with, you might find an overlap between largely distinct groups.
For example, if you’re working with a brand that specializes in pet care you’ll be able to find demand from young adults, to relatively senior citizens. So make sure to appeal to a broad base.
Don’t Forget Your Links
Engagement is the goal and it’s the only way you can get your commission to increase. You’ll need to make sure that you have relevant links in every message that you send out.
Note that, relevance is the keyword. Now you should keep in mind that the service you’re providing won’t always depend on selling products or services. You can also incorporate links to social media channels as an alternative.
And there’s definitely a lot of opportunity in promoting the social media pages on their own, since that boosts brand awareness and shows the effectiveness of the messages.
It comes down to your priorities and requirements so try to keep in mind that you need to include some kind of link so that the recipient can further engage.
Use Scheduling to Keep Your Momentum
You also need to be mindful of maintaining a healthy amount of momentum. So you can’t send messages too frequently but you also can’t send them too rarely.
And as an affiliate marketer there are various responsibilities that you need to address alongside your SMS campaigns. Thankfully we now have apps and services that take the hassle out of the equation and schedule the posts for you.
Many in the field are unsure about how often they should be sending messages. The general consensus among marketers is that roughly 1 text a week is the best way to keep the audience hooked.
Since one can’t account for all their time, the best way to maintain this steady flow of communication is to schedule your messages so that your SMS app can sort things out automatically.
Make Sure Your SMS Software Suits Your Needs
And speaking of SMS apps, you can’t be too careful because you need certain services and features in order to successfully implement SMS marketing.
Note that, as an affiliate marketer the features listed below are the ones most important for your work:
- Bulk messaging, to reach a lot of people in one go
- CTR and delivery reports, so you know how many people are receiving the messages and clicking on the links
- Organizing drip campaigns
- Convenient methods to opt in and opt out
- Auto Responses and chatbot functionality for optimal availability
With this information in mind, you’ll find it much easier to identify the ideal solution for you. Since affiliate marketing will require its own toolset and not every service will be able to offer them.
It can be overwhelming to figure out where you need to start, which is why SMSGatez is actually a great one to consider. Since it features tools that are developed with affiliate marketing in mind.
Monitor Your Stats
As mentioned earlier, you need to choose an app that has the ability to collect information and share them in reports.
An affiliate marketer benefits from this immensely, since these kinds of statistics allow you to clearly determine the appeal of your strategies. You can see how many people are opening your messages and further engaging with your links.
If a particular campaign isn’t performing well, then you can refer to these reports for an idea of what needs to be changed. This could be with regard to testing the ideal time or keywords that you need to include.
For example, if you see that people are opening your messages at a certain time then you can adjust your campaigns to focus on that time slot. The same applies to the opposite case where recipients aren’t opening the messages.
It’s also very helpful to know which links actually entice people enough to click on them. More often than not, people are very active when it comes to discounts or coupons as mentioned in an earlier point.
Strategic Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a handy advertising tactic. It’s essentially a multi-layered campaign that only progresses further if you opt-in.
So recipients will receive a message asking them if they want to join in the first place and then the following messages will request them to input a specific code so that they can move on to the next stage.
Although if you want, you can also schedule messages to go out on specific dates. Usually this isn’t the case and most marketers prefer to set up trigger events through keywords.
Drip campaigns can also be a great way to organize a survey, so after answering a question recipients can enter the mentioned keyword to trigger the next one. This allows you to directly receive the feedback and preferences of your leads.
Be Responsive Not Robotic
Now that you know how important it is to schedule the messages, try not to get complacent about it. That means you have to add changes and personal touches along the way.
Most of the time this can include a reference to an upcoming event or mentioning the recipient’s activity on the relevant website (i.e, having an item in their cart but not checking out).
It’s also a popular choice to include the recipient’s name as it feels far more genuine that way. If all the messages you send are very similar, then you can risk losing interest. Which is why it matters to maintain a professional but personable tone.
Coming off robotic is generally a poor course of action because even though it’s easier to send the same message with minor changes, the recipient will instantly feel that lack of effort. And you never want your potential leads to develop such an opinion.
Conclusion
To conclude, affiliate marketers benefit greatly from relying on SMS as one of their channels. It’s a great opportunity for raising brand awareness, lead generation, as well as lead conversion.
Affiliate marketers can easily increase their commission by employing the tips included in this article as they provide a helpful guideline on how to proceed.
But don’t forget, before you can begin implementing these SMS marketing tips for affiliate marketers you need to enlist the aid of an SMS app that will do a lot of the work for you.
SMS marketing has never been easier!