And the phone beeped again. The user almost impulsively jumped to check the message received.

If this situation sounds familiar, congratulations! You are amongst billions of people who are addicted to their smartphones. Now reverse the situation and imagine your customers in place of yourself. Wouldn’t you want the SMS they excitedly read to be a message from your brand? And wouldn’t it be great if it catches their attention instantly?

Here are 3 best practices to incorporate in your SMS Marketing Strategy:

1. Grow the number of engaged subscribers

Perhaps, it is rightly said that quality is more important than quantity. Don’t just build an SMS list for the sake of it. Add people who might actually be interested in your content.

A few of the ways in which you can do so are limiting the number of steps required to sign up (a complicated procedure might deter those interested), using an omnichannel strategy to promote sign-ups, and offering incentives like reward points or discount codes in exchange for signing up.

2. Retain those subscribers via useful content

Getting the subscribers to sign up is not all. The key is retaining them and converting them into customers which is only possible if the content they receive is actually useful to them.

Few ways of getting it right are conducting A/B testing to find out what works best, keeping your tone conversational, sending post-order and post-delivery notifications, thank you messages, and using an auto-responder to send texts communicating a discount or the usefulness of a product when the subscriber is close to making a sale.

3. Track the performance of SMS marketing campaigns

Just like all marketing activities, the performance of your SMS campaigns also needs to be assessed. This can be done via monitoring the increase in a number of subscribers, opt-out rate, revenue attribution etc.