The 7 responsibilities of an SMS Marketer

SMS marketers can usually be found working in-house, employed at a marketing agency, or flying solo as a consultant. They’re a rare breed with niche expertise in a quickly expanding market, and as such, their skills are highly regarded and sought-after.

If you’re interested in becoming an exceptional SMS marketer, the first step is understanding the responsibilities and duties of the role.

1. Selecting the right platform

There are many bulk SMS marketing platforms out there, but they’re certainly not created equally. To truly excel at your work, you need the right tools. The SMS platform you go for must offer:

• automatic number formatting
• duplicate management
• landline filtering
• list merging
• opt-out list management
• quick SMS
• hard bounce reporting
• SMS keywords
• robust, flexible SMS API
• ISO 27001 certified servers

2. Managing online reputation

Your reputation as a marketer is everything in the SMS game, as it reflects on how well you’ll manage the reputation of your clients too. As an SMS marketer, you should protect your client’s reputation by:

• Getting customers’ consent before you message them
• Identifying the sender in every SMS campaign
• Allowing users to opt-out at any time
• Personalising messages by using recipients’ names (which 90% of customers find highly appealing, according to Statista)
• Setting up an autoresponder to ensure customers aren’t left hanging
• Using a dedicated virtual mobile number instead of a shared number, which means your messages are sent from the same recognisable number every time

3. Building a mobile database

Using an opt-in campaign to build your contact list (also known as inbound SMS marketing) is a way to reach people who are already interested in your product or service. You can build this contact list or database by:

• Using SMS keywords with a virtual phone number to get people to text-in for discounts, coupons or competitions
• Including forms on your website to encourage people to leave their contact details
• Adding your contact details to physical signage, flyers, and brochures
• Advertising your SMS keywords on social media, your website, or emails

When you’re creating inbound SMS campaigns, spam compliance is incredibly important. In Australia, you need specific consent from recipients to send them marketing messages. General consent (such as people agreeing to receive basic communications) isn’t enough. Legally, you must also identify yourself and offer an opt-out mechanism.

4. Running effective SMS marketing campaigns

As an SMS marketer, your campaigns should respond to the customers’ needs and, ultimately, have their best interests at heart. Improve customer experience by:

• Offering flash sales and promos that are relevant to the customer
• Sending out timely messages with tailored content so that customers feel listened to
• Using tried-and-tested SMS templates to ensure you’re only sending high-quality messages

5. Tracking the results of campaigns

A good SMS marketer will always be on top of their campaign data. The Burst SMS platform makes it easy to track data, showing your:

• Delivery rates
• Bounce rates
• Response rates
• Opt-out rates
• Click-through rates, if you use the Tracked Link Feature (which can also be custom branded)
• SMS traffic and conversions from analytics platforms like Google Analytics.

6. Ensuring pages are mobile-optimised

For SMS marketing, it’s vital to ensure your web pages are optimised for mobile. A load time delay of just 100 milliseconds on a mobile landing page can cause conversion rates to plummet by 7% (Unbounce). Optimise any links you have in your SMS messages to improve the customer experience and boost your ROI.

7. Integrating SMS into your marketing stack

All successful SMS marketers know that SMS can’t function in a silo. SMS and email marketing, for example, can and should be used synergistically. An email-to-SMS feature makes this even easier. Integration is key and allows you to synchronise your SMS marketing efforts with other tools like your email host, Marketo, Salesforce, and Zapier.

Burst SMS has all the features you need to become an elite SMS marketer while giving you the option of retaining your own branding thanks to our white-labeled SMS platform.