The Quick Way to Learn if Your SMS Marketing Campaign Converts

According to the Malaysian Digital Association, Malaysia has 44 million+ mobile subscribers. That's a whopping 1.4x the total population of Malaysia. This is huge for businesses in Malaysia and should be an ideal place to reach and engage with new and existing audiences.

There's an argument though that Facebook is all the hype with 1.28 billion active users every day it seems to be a no brainer for marketers to focus their efforts here.

Hold on right there, that's the total number of active users a day, globally. How does Malaysia fair? According to Facebook themselves as reported by soyacincau.com about 80% of Malaysians that have access to the Internet are on Facebook, that's about 18 million people.

From this perspective SMS Marketing seems to be the more attractive option. However, this article isn't written with the purpose to discuss about the differences between SMS Marketing and Facebook. Rather how to measure whether the campaign you're running through SMS is actually worth it for your business. Let's get right into it.

How do you begin measuring SMS Marketing ROI?

You might be asking, why calculate your SMS ROI?

You need to know which channels are working best for you and how much return you're getting to know where to spend your marketing dollars for your future SMS Campaigns.

Here's an example scenario.

It usually costs your company around RM100 to acquire a customer. You just got to know about SMS Marketing and want to test it out by trying an SMS Marketing campaign to generate new customers with a budget of RM1,000. You run this campaign and notice that it generates you 11 new customers. Was it worth it?

To find out if your campaign is actually worth it or not is pretty simple.

Just follow a simple formula and you're good to go.

Take the amount you spent (cost) and divide it with your returns. From the example scenario above you take the RM1,000 budget that you have as the amount you have spent (cost) and divide it with the number of customers it has brought back in (returns).

11 new customers. That makes for an approximate of RM90 per acquired customer.

Since you know that the typical cost it takes to acquire a customer (RM100) with the new campaign you have decided to run you realise that it only costs you RM90 to acquire a new customer.

Knowing this allows you to understand that you're SMS Marketing Campaign is performing fairly well against the usual customer acquisition cost you have previously been running.


via GIPHY

With this, you should be well on your way to becoming an expert on measuring your customer acquisition costs and using it as a benchmark to tell if your SMS Marketing campaign was actually worth it or not.

If you'd like to discuss more about SMS Marketing and how we can help you with your campaign, do get in touch with us here or if you'd like to learn more about the services we have on offer please visit our website.

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4 Marketing Strategies to Engage Generation Z

Marketing trends are cyclical, rotating around generations in a different social upbringing. Marketing strategies that target Baby Boomers, Generation X and Y, and the Millennials is something of the past with a new generation coming forth, Generation Z.

This generation is exposed to the Internet from a young age. Technology and social media is the norm for communication with family, friends, purchases, their workplace, etc.

Internet is no longer a shiny new toy, it is a necessity that every business should be on immediately. Generation Z is the modern day consumer, with the Internet widespread in a variety of industries and impacting everyday tasks and needs.

Businesses should start to put effort in understand the behavioral patterns of Generation Z.

Children are big influencers. Ask parents and most will tell you their purchasing behavior is strongly influenced by their children. That goes without saying that the purchasing power of this new generation is approximately $44 billion.

Generation Z consumers are different from other groups. Companies must deliberately craft information that target and engage them through the appropriate channels.

Targeting and engaging Generation Z:

1. Visuals

In our experience video is the number 1 engagement media for Generation Z, with pictures coming second and words being the least effective. Modern consumers want to instantly consume and access information conveniently quick. Being conveniently quick means adoption of marketing content that must cater to mobile. Mobile adoption rates in the smartphone categories have been changing the global marketplace and your business should implement this right from the get-go.

Just to name a few; Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest have a lasting popularity because the platform allows Generation Z to consume quickly, share with the social circles that matter to them, and rely on information that trusted influencers recommend conveniently.

Conversations are changing. Short video messages, photos embedded with text allows Generation Z to share their life experiences with rich depth compared to describing their experiences through text.

2. Clear & Concise

Research shows that the attention span of Generation Z is approximately 8 seconds. The blame for this shocking revelation should be on the existence of smartphones and their ‘scrolling’ nature. All of the social media apps or mobile web pages exist in a scrolling form. Scrolling is extremely convenient, in fact, it is too convenient. It causes them to just scroll through or swipe away if they’re not interested in a particular post at first glance. This is why brands’ content posted on social media need to be able to grab their attention instantly to avoid being scrolled through and ignored.

Messages need to be bite-sized: short, simple, and direct. Keep this in mind, ‘less is more’.

Keep your message on point like how a drag queen’s makeup is always on point.

3. Word-of-Mouth

As permanent tenants in social media, Generation Z has been groomed to enjoy sharing in social media. They can’t be fooled easily by marketing schemes and will only share things that they find interesting or genuine. Therefore, your content needs to be authentic.

Incorporating influencers into your marketing strategy is an excellent way to achieve this. Generation Z tend to look up on opinions from a third party to obtain a non-biased opinion. Hearing it from a social media influencer which happens to be an expert in a particular field will definitely convince them into believe in your brand.

Furthermore, testimonials, reviews, and postings from people who’ve really tried it is important as well. Use your customers to convince your customers to trust your brand.

4. Locate Them & Go To Them

Put effort in finding out which social network is the widely used by Generation Z. While Facebook holds the record for the most amount of users among all social networking sites/apps, it is unlikely that you’ll reach a huge amount of Generation Z users in Facebook. Research has shown that Facebook is populated by mostly adults, while Generation Z regards Facebook as less interesting and is constantly looking to be entertained by new alternatives. New social networking platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and etc are more preferred by Generation Z as its mechanics and nature differs greatly from Facebook and offers a more innovative way to communicate with each other.

Understand these trends and factors to reach and engage them successfully. Most brands make the mistake of thinking that targeting 10 year olds are a waste of time, effort and money. This is by far the worst mistake they’ll ever make because these Post-Millennials are forming perceptions towards brands since an early age. They play a huge part in their parent’s buying decisions and has huge potential in turning into your loyal customers in the future. It is definitely a long run investment that benefits your business greatly in the future.

Find out more on how your business can focus on crafting marketing strategy to engage Generation Z while having peace of mind of having technical infrastructure being taken care of here.

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3 Magic Tips to Increase Your Marketing ROI

Data is everywhere. Everything from social media followers, to unique visitors through ppc, or organic visitors generated through SEO. It can be overwhelming, but don't get confused about how marketing analytics relates to ROI. All you need to do is set a clear, short and long-term objectives to surely start the beginning of profit improvement and well planned resource allocation.

Often ROI underperforms due to distractions in the expected performance. The solution? Recognize the distractions and execute differently.

1. Start by Planning

Plan for ROI. Value exists in quantifying the expected outcomes from the marketing activities you are about to enter into. Learn what to measure, when to measure, and how to measure them so that your marketing investments make quantifiable logic. In order to achieve your goals, make sure you establish specific steps to ensure that the processes that you are embarking on has clarity wrapped around the actions you are going to take.

There is a great desire for every campaign to be measured but only very few are able to effectively evaluate the ROI of each channel employed, and only half are using web analytics tools to measure marketing campaign effectively.

Start by creating an initial outline. Look at historical data (if none, don't fret just start) and notice if there are any trends that work parallel with campaigns carried out or outliers that occur when no marketing activity has been carried out. Make sure there is an implementation plan to install analytics into your existing plan. Without it you will have no capability to measure the results of your campaigns effectively.

Once you have both your initial outline and web analytics implementation plan in place you should come to realize that measuring ROI is a lot easier when you have a good plan in place. Preparing this has benefits as it relates to senior management in terms of marketing dollars and gives them a good expectation based on the objectives you have outlined allowing them to identify the anticipated ROI.

Make sure you keep in mind to:

1. Align your marketing plans and analytics with financial goals your organization has.
2. Use predictive modeling in the analysis of your marketing data.
3. Make sure to capture customer engagement data from social feeds to show positive conversions.

2. Don't use vanity measures

Distractions are always nice to have, but you shouldn't tempt yourself with them. Followers, likes and number of shares gives good bragging rights but they do not correlate to conversions or revenues. You should focus on metrics that convert. This in turn equates to ROI. Use metrics like lifetime value, blog shares, cost per acquisition, engagement, and number of active users. 

Mentioned before there is a wealth of data available but it is important that you collect the right data. This saves you time and allows you to make better decisions. This helps you to: 

1. create better customized reports with the data that matters to your company, 
2. consistently track your customers behavior, 
3. and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns with better accuracy.

3. Sales

Your customers aren't like before, customers today are informed buyers. They make purchases based on blogs, reviews and social networks. Good news. Now with the efforts above you should be able to gain a wealth of information on your customers' behaviors. There is a value to knowing that information but your team and senior management can't relate. Why? Simple, because all that data isn't in the form of revenue.

Bring it all back to where we started. Get your team and senior management on the bandwagon. Your marketing campaigns that produce quantifiable ROI should suggest that everyone should focus on how marketing impacts sales not spend that is not measurable in terms of revenue.

Use data to increase sales by:

1. Use analytics
2. Understanding the journey of the customer
3. Creating a ROI discussion throughout the organization not just marketing and sales.

Data is really important to organizations today. Focus on your marketing ROI and don't let pesky technological infrastructure bog you down. Find out how - click here.

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