When it comes to marketing, you can hardly get more direct than SMS. Once your business manages to gather SMS subscribers, you have instant access to an unprecedented form of communication that allows you to send anything straight to a personal device (within reasonable limits).

However, if you don’t have a proper handle on how to measure the success of your campaign, you can’t improve on your technique.

ROI is generally quite high with SMS marketing, as sending texts is inexpensive, direct, and the chances of it being read are extremely high (sometimes as much as 95%).

Almost everyone is now mobile, and they read texts with much greater speed than print media, or even email. Therefore the initial contact is far easier to achieve, and your chances of success are greatly increased with well thought-out content and a user-friendly interface for any of your links.

ROI in SMS Marketing

When it comes to SMS marketing, ROI can be easily calculated by paying attention to the data. The first step is to establish your goals for the program. The next step is to formalize the metrics you’ll be tracking during the campaign.

With that in mind, here are the 5 most important metrics you’ll need to measure on your next SMS campaign:

Open Rates – This allows you to see how many texts were opened. For SMS, this is generally a high number.

Response Rates – If the message required a response, it’s easy to gauge effectiveness since the customers will send texts back to the source. If these types of messages yield a poor response, it’s likely something to do with the ease of the call to action. Keep things simple (usually a simple request for them to text back a word or code).

Offers Used – Again, it’s easy to see when a customer has taken advantage of an offer or coupon, especially when the offer was distributed exclusively through text to select subscribers.

Call Tracking – It’s an uncommon option, but you can invite a subscriber to call a number to find out more information. Obviously receiving a call from a customer is an excellent way to track the impact of a marketing strategy.

Click Tracking – Websites are an easy target for ROI, as they can be heavily regulated and controlled. You can therefore easily find out how many people have accessed your website’s mobile version, as well as those who’ve gone straight to the page or offer denoted in the text.

Owning all of this data allows you to see exactly where the faults lie in your marketing strategy; of course, this is also the key to improving. If any offers failed to produce results, either cut them entirely or assess how they can be made more accessible.

Using the specific data you can properly gauge which parts of your website were popular or avoided, as well as seeing exactly how active your subscribers are in terms of response. If there isn’t much activity, consider offering something with more of an incentive.

The Bottom Line: Information is key to the entire process, as is properly interpreting the data. No business can afford to waste time, effort and money on a scheme that produces poor results. Knowledge of how to properly run an SMS campaign should be absolutely paramount from the very beginning of any marketing strategy.

This post was written by David Kovacs who is a young entrepreneur and a marketing enthusiast from Hungary working for Silverstreet and loves to share his thoughts and articles on various channels in topics related to technology, marketing and business.