OpenMarket – January 24, 2018
Data has the power to give brands invaluable insight on their customers. With SMS analytics, you get that detailed feedback faster than ever before.
One of the reasons marketers love email so much is that it offers such a significant depth of data. Analyzed well, it gives a clear view of customers’ preferences and behavior – and according. to research by MITSloan, analytics really do give brands a unique advantage over their competitors.
But fewer marketers realize that you can get a lot of the same data, analytics and reporting functionality from SMS messaging.
That’s powerful. Because when you combine data analytics with the power to reach 98% of your audience (and 90% of them within three minutes), you get feedback that’s detailed, complete, and fast. It means you can transform and improve the way you communicate with your customers.
Here are five ways SMS analytics can match email, pound-for-pound:
- Get real-time delivery and read receipts
One of the joys of SMS is that your customers open it so fast. And with this data, you get to understand their behavior – and refine your message – in real time.
For example, SMS analytics enables you to see real-time delivery and read receipts. Which not only helps you to identify your most successful messages, but also how long it took customers to open them.
You can test, learn, and build your understanding of how to send exactly the right message at just the right time – a true Empathetic Interaction.
- Squeaky clean cellphone data
Email bounces from your hard-won data are always frustrating, but they’re a fact of marketing life – and understanding what bounced and why gives you a clear indication of the quality of your data.
But here’s the thing: you can do exactly the same with undeliverable texts. If the number no longer exists, or the recipient has you blocked, you’ll know.
That makes SMS analytics the fastest, easiest way of making sure you always have your customers’ correct mobile number. It means you can base your customer contact decisions on an accurate picture of how many good quality contacts you really have.
- Understand what works – where
The way in which you communicate with your customers should be as individual as the customers themselves. What works for one customer in the United States may not resonate with another across the pond.
That’s why it’s vitally important to tailor your messages, based on a range of variables such as age, gender, interests, and crucially, country.
And because SMS is so easily traceable – no matter where in the world someone may be – you can gain deep insight into how different messages perform around the globe… then double-down on the best parts in each territory.
- Visualize data clearly
But the real beauty of the data you get from digital marketing channels is the insights they give you – and the actions you can take based on a solid foundation of data. The time and resources you save – and the extra engagement you achieve – once you’ve found the meaning in the numbers.
But number crunching is slow, and painful. Which is why digital marketing dashboards are so popular – and your SMS messaging dashboard makes it quick and easy to spot those insights and make those savings, just as you’d expect from email, Google Analytics, or your own CRM.
What’s more, when you add a quality SMS platform to your tech stack, you can blend text messaging data with all your other information (like your email client for example), to create a highly detailed, 360-degree picture of your customer.
- Track your message from departure to arrival
Understanding each stage of your SMS journey (including inbound messages from customers) is vitally important. But seriously – what good is it if you have to manually piece it all together?
That’s simply a headache in the making – lots of time wasted, and marketing resources spent trying to get a clear picture of how your customer and your brand communicate.
The solution: message lifecycle reporting. This gives you the ability to see individual journeys – across the entire life of the message – from the second it’s sent to any actions taken by the customer. With text, it’s perfectly possible.
SMS analytics: the end is nigh for guesswork
The possibilities of SMS analytics are endless – literally. As customers continue to demand more, and brands strive to deliver, your ability to understand the lifecycle of a text message will become increasingly indispensable.
To find out more about how SMS dashboard analytics and reporting can help you, check out our Messaging Insights package. Or if you simply want a chat, give us a call. We’d love to hear from you.