Sarah: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our Campaign Monitor SMS launch event, Connect and Convert with SMS. My name is Sarah Madden Goodlad, and I’m the Senior Director of Customer Marketing, and I’m coming to you from Sydney, Australia. I’ve been with Campaign Monitor for a couple of years now. As a marketer myself, I love helping our customers leverage email to engage with their audiences, and I’m so excited that we now have another channel, SMS, to expand on our offering and to help you further connect with your audiences. I’m joined here today by my friend and colleague, Lily. Hi, Lil.
Lily: Hi, Sarah. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I’m the director of Product Strategy for Campaign Monitor, also in Sydney, with the lovely Sarah. Having been part of the SMS product development process all the way from early concepts to the awesome solution that we’re going to be showing to you today, I’ve already seen some really powerful examples of how our customers are applying SMS and the benefits it’s bringing to them and their marketing programs, so I am so excited to be talking to you about SMS today.
Sarah: Thank you. Let’s get started. As always, we have some housekeeping. We get asked a lot if this webinar is going to be recorded, and, yes, it absolutely is, so we will share it with you after the event so you can watch it again, share it with your colleagues, but, more importantly, so you don’t need to take notes. You could just sit back, relax and enjoy. If you have any questions, please enter them into the chat on the right-hand side. We’ll answer some of the most common questions live at the end. We’ve also got some of the team in the background answering questions as well. If you’d rather focus on us, on the conversation, you can minimize the whole panel by clicking the icon with a straight line and the small arrow adjacent to this viewing window. If you need to adjust your volume, you can do so in the settings on the bottom left or on your computer. Finally, if we suddenly freeze for whatever reason, refresh your browser, and we should come right back up. What are we going to be covering today? I’m really excited to take you through our agenda. We are going to be covering why you should care about SMS. Lily has got some really compelling stats that talk about customer sentiment and changes towards SMS. I’ll then take you through how to combine SMS with your email marketing strategy to create the ultimate marketing power couple and, a hot tip, it’s easier than you might think. We’ll cover best practices both from a sending and messaging point of view, as well as tips to crafting that impactful message. Then we’ll go through our SMS solution, what we built within Campaign Monitor, and show you what it’s in action, and then we’ll finish with some questions. Over to you, Lil.
Lily: Thank you. Okay. First up, you might be wondering, “Why would I care about SMS?” so let’s jump into some detail on just how impactful SMS is as a channel. As Sarah mentioned earlier, there are some really compelling industry stats that show the benefits of SMS not just to you and your business, but also to your audience, so, first up, I want to look at some customer trends. As consumers, our sentiment around receiving text messages has really evolved over recent years. We are now a lot more interested in receiving SMS marketing, and this has changed from compared to the past where there was a lot more skepticism around this as a channel. Now, we are very much interested in receiving SMS. In fact, 91% of customers say they’re interested in signing up to receive SMS messages from a brand, so a super powerful stat there. Not only that, but, actually, when you compare marketing channels, email and SMS are both the top preferred channels by consumers for receiving brand updates. There’s no denying that SMS is a popular channel and is becoming more and more popular by the minute pretty much. Next up, let’s have a look at how powerful SMS is as an engagement tool. I’ve just covered that consumers are really interested in receiving SMS, but, in addition to that, they’re also more likely to engage with SMS when you compare it to other marketing channels. Again, some awesome stats we’ve got on the slide here, 95% of text messages are read and responded to within three minutes of receipt, and the average open rate of an SMS message is 98%. I’m sure you’re already thinking about the potential reach that you might have with engagement numbers like this.
Sarah: Absolutely. As a fellow marketer, I think about that 95% of text messages read and responded to within three minutes and I think about the plethora of ways in which you can really leverage that.
Lily: Absolutely. On top of that, SMS is also a future-proof marketing channel, which is really important when you think about the constantly evolving marketing landscape that we all operate in today. The game has changed in recent years. Consumers now have increased expectations and are also more savvy about how their data is used. I don’t know about you, but I am absolutely more cognizant of who I’m giving out data about myself to and how it’s going to be used. As I mentioned, we’re all a lot more savvy there. On top of that, legislation around how marketers can use data continues to evolve, so we all need to be super mindful of these changing privacy requirements. What all of this means is that there’s never been a more important time to listen to what your customers want and deliver on their communications preferences. For this reason, we love to say that building relationships with your customers is like the Holy Grail. The best way to build relationships with your customers is by leveraging owned marketing channels like email and like SMS because this gives you greater opportunity to get to know your customers, who they are, what they’re interested in and also how they like to engage with you because, if you can own your own data and build that connection with customers, it’s going to set you up for success in the future. It’s also going to help reduce the impact of any external factors on your marketing strategy and business. If you think of recent industry changes like GDPR and Apple Mail Privacy Protection, they’ve really impacted how we communicate with our audiences. To recap, the game has changed, which means there’s never been a more important time to build relationships, and owning your data gives you the ability to do that while also preparing against external factors. All of this really means that SMS is going to help you future-proof your marketing strategy. I also just want to revisit this slide here, this stat here that we had on a previous slide, so 95% of text messages read and responded to within three minutes. It really proves that, now more than ever, we live in a mobile-first world and, with the rise of mobile technology, as well as customers’ willingness to receive SMS messages, it’s the perfect time to start embracing this as a channel, so let’s take a look at some of the potential benefits that SMS can provide to your marketing program based on this stat, that 95% read and responded to within three minutes. First up, I think the clear benefit is that SMS is perfect for driving urgency. With that three-minute response time, just think about the ways that your business might be able to leverage SMS to get that immediate response from your audience. Secondly, it’s also going to help you cut through the noise. We all know that, in today’s busy world, all of our inboxes are really crowded. We are bombarded by notifications at every hour of the day. As marketers, we need a way to cut through all of that noise, and combining SMS and email is the perfect way to make sure you can do that. Then, ultimately, all of this really means that you’re going to see increased speed of return on your marketing investment. Among all of the benefits that we’ve just covered, I think, from my point of view, this is absolutely the biggest and best impact because it’s the impact that you’re going to see back to your bottomline. With that, I’m actually going to hand it over to Sarah to talk more about how email and SMS work together.
Sarah: ROI is why we’re all here, so, yes, absolutely the most compelling. How to combine SMS with your email marketing strategy? We get asked this a lot by customers. Is it hard? How do you do it? The short answer is it’s actually easier than you think, so let’s take a look at some of the reasons why it’s easy. The first is the similarities between email and SMS are surprising. They are actually quite similar, the three ways in which they cross over. The first one is they’re permission based. Both channels require the audience to opt in to receive marketing. This means that then the audience for both of these channels are quite engaged. You can also employ the same list growth tactics you’ve tried and tested for email to grow your SMS list because your audience are really used to that type of method, so no new strategy is required here. The second is the power of personalization. One of the expectations consumers have when they provide their data is value, whether this be through offers or through personalizing their experience. SMS and email both leverage the power of personalization in the same way to engage, to build relationships and to increase conversion. The third similarity is high ROI. Like with any owned, direct marketing channel, because you have an engaged audience, you therefore, as a result, have a higher ROI than most channels. The next way to combine is to think of marketing SMS and email as the ultimate marketing power couple. Unlike with any power couple, email and SMS play a unique role when used in isolation, but, when used together, they make a really powerful team. By understanding what role each play when you use them separately and also together is incredibly important. Using some key marketing objectives, we’ve created a simple table that will really help with that decision making. The first marketing objective is a launch or an announcement. Now, with no character limits, email allows you to say more, doing justice to that launch or an announcement you’ve got planned. I love email for this, but where I think SMS can play a role is to notify customers that they’ve got a new launch or an announcement email in their inbox or to direct them straight to your website or landing page for that information. Now, by leveraging both channels, here, you can connect with your audience in the channel that’s most convenient while also driving engagement. The second objective is the newsletter. We love a newsletter here, and email is really perfect for this as it allows you to bring to life all the different elements and stories that you want to communicate. The third objective is an event invite. Now, I like email for the initial invite as it allows you to provide detail about the event, what customers can expect, as well as to bring to life any speakers. Where SMS really provides opportunity for your business is around the event reminder, so when you’ve got customers who have registered for the event. I love SMS here because, as we know, people are living on the go more than ever. Reminding someone about an event they’ve said that they’re going to attend whilst they’re on the go is really going to connect with them when it matters. The next objective is an offer reminder. Now, for the offer, I’ve said that both email and SMS can play a really important role here. I think email is really great to be able to tell the reason why you’re holding the event, this offer, apologies, and potentially some things that they can buy with that offer, they can visualize, you can visualize that, whereas the SMS can support this channel to direct them straight to your website for the offer. Where SMS really comes into its own is the offer reminder. SMS is great for driving urgency. We’ve heard that. It’s my pick for when it’s a limited time offer or you’re wanting to remind customers that the offer is about to expire. The big disclaimer here is that every business is different. These are just examples of how you could use both of these channels in isolation or to unlock the power of the combination particularly if you’re starting out with SMS. We also recommend you factor in your customers’ preferences and channel engagement when mapping out your plan.
Lily: I really love this breakdown, Sarah. I think the table is a really good resource to come back to when you get around to actually building out your campaign strategy, so make sure you save a copy of this one when we send around the materials.
Sarah: Absolutely, and I’m not joking when I say we sometimes, when we need to simplify our own marketing planning, we come back to this table and go, ” All right, how do we choose which channel to use?”
Lily: Me, too. It’s very useful.
Sarah: Yeah. Very useful. The third way in which you can combine, I guess, your SMS and email marketing strategies is when you come to growing your audience. Like with any new marketing channel, you need to grow your audience. Like we mentioned earlier, email and SMS are both opt-in channels, which means you can share the same list growth tactics. The good news is you don’t have to start from scratch. My first recommendation is to really leverage your email list. We know that these customers are engaged with you and used to hearing from you, so I would invite these customers to opt in to SMS. Remember that this is a value exchange, so offer customers something in return for opting in, whether it be a special signup offer, VIP access to special discounts or an exclusive access to content. The second tactic is to utilize your existing acquisition forms, so update your signup forms to include a field for mobile capture and SMS opt-in, and we’ll show you some examples of that a little later on. Now, Lil, take us through some SMS best practices.
Lily: All right. Now that we’ve covered the power of SMS and how it could fit into your email marketing program, we want to dive into some best practices. We want to give you some tips that you can take away and apply straightaway in your campaign, so let’s jump into it. First up, let’s take a look at some best practices around how and when to send SMS messages. As Sarah has just mentioned, you can use either signup forms or an opt- in email campaign to capture SMS opt- ins from your audience. The really important thing to keep in mind though is that you need to have explicit consent from your audience to send SMS, and you need to keep track of this consent at all times. You can’t send an SMS message to anyone that has not explicitly told you that they want to receive that for you. This is definitely the first and most critical step for getting started with SMS. Once you’ve got your list, you’ve got your opt-ins and you’re ready to send, start thinking about what time of the day and what day of the week you want to send to get the best results. Generally, industry regulations encourage sending between 8:00 AM and 9: 00 PM local time, but that’s a really huge span of time, and you’re not going to get the same level of engagement across all of those hours. Typically, you’re going to get better engagement in the middle of the day. You’re also probably going to get better engagement Monday through to Saturday as engagement with SMS is generally lower on a Sunday. Then the final thing to keep in mind around timing is time zones. Depending on where your audience lives, either across the globe or even across the country, just make sure that you’re not sending outside of hours in that person’s specific time zone as well. You might also be wondering around frequency of sending. Our advice is definitely less is more when you’re getting started. Don’t send more than one SMS a week to begin with. The reason we say this is because you don’t want your audience to feel overwhelmed. All that’s going to do is result in unnecessary unsubscribes. I don’t know about you, but if I am constantly bombarded with millions of promotional SMS messages from the same company in a matter of days, I’m going to get overwhelmed and I’m going to probably unsubscribe. To keep your list healthy, start small and build from there. Finally, we always say test everything that you do before you set it in stone. These are, of course, general guidelines, but different tactics are going to work for different audiences, so see what works for you and then build out your program from there. All right. Now, let’s look at some best practices around actually writing your SMS copy. We’ve already covered previously just how important personalization is across both email and SMS. Make sure you make your SMS messages as personalized as possible so your consumers don’t feel like they’re receiving mass communication. Just as you would with email, use what you know about your audience and their preferences to customize your message. The other thing you should keep in mind is to be concise, but clear at the same time. We recommend keeping your copies snappy, but definitely don’t go overboard on abbreviations to the point where your message becomes completely illegible. You need to find that balance in the middle there. The character limit for an SMS message is 160 characters. If you’re using emojis, the character limit for an SMS message is actually only 70 characters, so we say to only use emojis when you have minimal copy like when you have a really short SMS message. As with any other marketing channel as well, SMS should really bring to life your brand tone of voice and your brand personality. One thing to keep in mind though is that SMS is definitely more of a conversational and casual format, so we encourage you to try and embrace that as it makes sense for your brand and within your brand guidelines. Also, make sure your message is branded. You need to make sure that your audience can identify who they’re receiving an SMS message from. The bonus is that Campaign Monitor will actually do this for you in the app. We’ve taken care of that so you don’t need to worry about it. Again, as with any other marketing channel, having a clear CTA is critical. Normally, in an SMS message, this would be a URL, but, to help you save character count, Campaign Monitor is going to automatically shorten any URLs you drop into your message for you so that you can have that clear CTA without losing character count, and then, finally, we’ve already covered how important it’s to have consent and opt-in for SMS messages, so make sure you always include” unsubscribe” instructions to give your consumers a way to opt out of your message. Again, the bonus is that Campaign Monitor will automatically drop this into your message so that you don’t forget. All right. Now, Sarah is going to take you through some example campaigns that put all of these best practices into action.
Sarah: Lil, thanks for these best practices. It’s so good to see them on screen. I think it really simplifies them. As you mentioned, we’re going to take you through some examples of how we’ve applied those best practices. With any marketing channel, crafting that perfect message is so important, but even more so with SMS when we’ve got such a small number of characters to play with. The first example I want to take us through is Frankie’s Fashion. Frankie’s Fashion have the objective of sending their customers a special holiday season offer. I am going to read out this particular message and take you through the best practices. Lily, here’s a special holiday season offer to thank you for being a valued Frankie’s Fashion customer, 25% off, reply “stop” to unsubscribe. The first best practice is personalization, so using Lily’s name. The second is short, but personal copy, letting customers know what the offer is and why, so the context, the company name, so making sure that we’re really adding that, but it’s in context. They’re receiving this text message because they’re a valued Frankie’s Fashion customer, a compelling offer, 25% off. You can see that we’ve shortened the URL here. Campaign Monitor SMS does that for you, and then the” unsubscribe”. Run Fun for Kids, so this is a not- for- profit organization that wants to remind registrants about their upcoming fundraiser event to maximize turnout on the day. The countdown is on, Lily, less than 24 hours until the Run Fun for Kids gates open, 3: 00 PM, the URL, and then, “Reply stop” to unsubscribe.” Again, we can see the personalization with Lily, the driving urgency with the copy. I want to call out the abbreviation to maximize character count. We’ve used very common abbreviation for the word hours, and that is our recommendation. Don’t abbreviate a word that’s not known to be abbreviated. Keep that really simple for customers so they don’t have to try and work it out. We’ve got reminders in here. We’ve got the company name, the shortened URL and, obviously, the
“unsubscribe” information. Then our third example is Online News. This is a media company who wants to increase traffic to their online content. Now, the thing I would like to highlight in this particular example is our connection in the copy to someone’s consent and contact preferences, so, ” Your daily download on today’s stories is now available.” This really implies that the customer has opted in for that daily download, I think that’s a really nice tie-in and a reminder here, as well as including things like personalization, the company name, and our URL, and “unsubscribe” copy.
Lily: Oh, this is awesome. I was just thinking, while you were talking, Sarah, of all the promotional messages I’ve received that actually don’t comply with this best practice. I feel like applying all of these tactics is really going to help you stand out from the crowd as well and create a more powerful message.
Sarah: Absolutely, and just a reminder that we’re going to send you this webinar, so you don’t have to frantically write down these notes. You’re going to receive that.
Lily: All right. Now, I’m going to give you a run-through of how Campaign Monitor SMS solution works. First and foremost, our number one priority when we release new features and new products in Campaign Monitor is always ease of use. We know that all of you are really busy. You don’t have the time to invest in training your team on your marketing software, so what we’ve actually done is leverage the same interface that you know and love for email so that it’s actually simple to create campaigns across both channels and mean that we’re flattening that learning curve a bit as well. As you can do with email today, you can create and send an SMS campaign from one page, and then, in addition to that, having your email and SMS technology combined in a single platform also means you can avoid IT intervention. It means no plugins or integrations required. We know this is really important especially for those of you who are juggling multiple clients or teams within your CM account. We think that ease of use is going to give you some really great benefits and help you save time. All of that being said though, we’re always here to support you throughout the setup process. You will have the support of your Customer Success Manager or one of our team of SMS experts who are there with any questions and to help you get up and running. We also really want to help you feel confident pressing “send” on your SMS campaigns knowing that you’ve done everything to comply with the best practice. Many of the best practices that we’ve actually covered today are already built straight into Campaign Monitor SMS solution, so think about the automatic link shortening that I spoke about earlier or the default “unsubscribe” instructions that will be automatically added into your message. All of those things are going to help you apply best practice, and then, on top of that, we’re going to support you with best practice resources like this webinar, for example, that you can refer back to whenever you need to, and then we always love to bring this back to ROI because that’s what this solution has been built to help you increase. Not only is our SMS cost-effective, but it’s going to help you show quick return on investment by helping you better engage with your audience, to drive loyalty and also to maximize conversions. To prove just how easy it is to use this SMS solution, I’m going to show you a quick live demo now. I promise you, I am far from tech savvy, so if I can do this, I’m confident all of you can do it and probably can do it better than I can, so let me jump into the demo here. Here I am in my Campaign Monitor account. As with an email campaign, all I need to do is hit “create campaign” and I will have the option to toggle between either an email or an SMS campaign. That is super simple to do, both of these, from the one flow. Let’s take the example Sarah ran through earlier, which is Frankie’s Fashion, the online fashion retailer. Say, I’m Frankie’s Fashion and I want to do a special spring sale for my customers. I’m going to name my campaign and hit “continue”. From this page, I can do everything that I need to do in my campaign. I can create. I can edit. I can send. This will look familiar to those of you who are using our email interface today. All right. I’m going to click “add message”, and this is where I can start writing my copy, so I’m going to say, “Hi. A special offer just for you. Take 10% off your next purchase from Frankie’s Fashion,” making sure to identify the brand name in this message and to give that special offer to my customers. You can see that, as I’ve been typing, a live render of what the SMS message looks like on a phone is showing, too, so you can make sure your message looks great before you send. What’s missing here? A couple of things. First up, I need a CTA, so I’m going to drop in a URL here for my consumers to click through to. You can see, as soon as I dropped in that URL, it’s automatically being truncated over here because we’ve got this shortened and track link setting on here. That means that it’s going to save you on character count and also mean that, after I’ve sent my campaign, I can track who’s clicked on that particular link. You’ll also see that my “unsubscribe” instructions have been automatically added for me in there so I don’t forget to add them in. The other thing that’s missing that I should be adding in here is personalization, so I’m going to add in my first name personalization tag here. These work the same way as they do for email, so you’ll be familiar with these. I’m going to set my fallback to there, so it says, “Hi there,” even if I don’t have a first name field for all of my list. The other thing I could do if I wanted to is add an emoji here so I can select whichever one I’d like to use, but, as you can see, this has now taken my SMS message to three SMS messages because, going back to what I mentioned earlier, a message with emojis in it is restricted to 70 characters. I’m going to decide that I don’t want an emoji in my message. I can delete that, and you’ll see that my message has gone back to being just one SMS message, and I’m at 152 characters, so that’s under the limit. As soon as I’m happy with all of that, I can hit “save”, and then my copy is ready to go. You don’t need to do anything with this “from” field. Campaign Monitor will automatically give you a phone number to send from. Depending on where in the world you’re sending to, that will either look like an alphanumeric number like I’ve got here or a standard local phone number. Because I’m in Australia and I’m sending to Australian numbers, I’ve got this alphanumeric number here. It’s called CampMon because this is our demo account for Campaign Monitor, but, if I really was Frankie’s Fashion, I’d probably want to name that something like Frankie’s Fashion. Next up, I can select my recipients. We will only show you the lists that you have that already have mobile phone numbers attached so you don’t have to scroll through a bunch of irrelevant lists. I can hit my spring sale camp list here, press “save”, and then I’m pretty much ready to go. You can see that, as soon as I’ve added my list, my first name personalization is pulling through here. I can refresh that a couple of times just to make sure all of the first names are working correctly, and then I can also see an estimate of how many credits my campaign is going to take to send. The number of credits you need to send a campaign will differ depending on where in the world you’re sending your SMS message to and also how long your SMS message is. Finally, when I’m ready to send, I can either send immediately or I can schedule for later in any time zone as you can today with email. Hopefully, that just goes to show how quick and easy it was for me to send the campaign. What I’ll also do is show you an example of what a campaign report looks like, so what are the stats that I can look at to see how my campaign has performed. Again, this will look familiar. It’s designed quite similarly to your email campaign reports. I can see a breakdown of delivery rates for my SMS message up here, as well as any hard or soft bounces that I might have received. You can also then see a breakdown of engagement. This will show me clicks, who specifically has clicked, and then what the click rate has been over time so you can really dive into the detail there, and then, finally, “unsubscribes”. If I wanted to find out more about any of these results, I could click into the relevant tab on the side here and really delve into the detail. That’s it for my demo. Hopefully, that was useful. What we’re going to do-
Sarah: Lil, I loved that demo. I, too, can vouch for the fact that you are not tech savvy, so I loved how easy that looked.
Lily: Thanks for that. Yes. No, but she’s right. All right, let’s now jump over to some Q&A.
Sarah: Amazing. Thank you. Thanks, Lil. I also really loved how it replicated our email campaign experience or campaign creation, so that was great to see. This is the end of our webinar. We’re at Q&A now, and I’m going to give Lily a bit of a rest, and I’m going to take one of our most common questions that we’ve had through today. The first is, “Do I need express consent to send SMS messages?” We’ve covered this, but I think it’s always really important to reiterate this. Yes, you absolutely do. Your audience needs to opt in to receive SMS, excuse me, before you can send them an SMS campaign. Make sure you also always include the ability to unsubscribe in your SMS so that your audience can opt out at any time, so both “opt- in”, yes, and also “unsubscribe”. Lil, here’s a question for you that’s come through. What are your tips for growing my SMS list?
Lily: Okay. As we mentioned earlier, there are a number of ways we recommend doing this. The first is leveraging your signup forms to capture mobile numbers and SMS opt- in from any new subscribers that you have signing up, so add that SMS field to your existing signup forms. The other thing you should do to capture SMS opt- ins from your existing base of customers is to send them an email campaign. Sarah gave a great tip earlier, which was that that should be a value exchange, so don’t just ask them for their mobile phone number. You should incentivize it in some way like via a special offer. Those are our two top tips for growing lists. All right. We’ve got some more questions coming through here. Sarah, will you be releasing additional SMS features in the future?
Sarah: Yes. Absolutely. We always iterate on our products to ensure we’re giving the best possible experience within Campaign Monitor. We listen to our customers’ feedback. We see how they use the product to determine, I guess, the next feature that’s required in the future, so, yes, absolutely. Lil, you covered this, so I’m going to hand this one over to you. What is the character limit for an SMS?
Lily: Okay. Cool. Just to recap, for an SMS message, it’s 160 characters. One thing I didn’t mention earlier is that, just because the character limit is 160 characters, it doesn’t mean you actually can’t go over that character count. You can actually send a longer SMS message, and it will still show up on your customer’s devices as a single message. It won’t break up into multiple, but, in that scenario, what will happen is that you would be charged for multiple SMS per subscribers. If you have a longer message, it doesn’t mean that you can’t actually go over the character count, but it is worth being aware of what the implications for that are, and then, as I mentioned before, if you’re adding emojis in, your character count is reduced to around 70 characters. Again, if you’re comfortable exceeding that limit, go crazy with the emojis. Our top tip is actually just to use them when you have a short SMS message to send. All right, we have another question around consent and opt- ins here, Sarah. How can a subscriber unsubscribe from SMS?
Sarah: Yeah, we’ve spoken a bit about the need to include “unsubscribe” instructions in your SMS, and we’ve shown some examples. You absolutely should include your instructions in your SMS that the audience can opt out, but, depending on where you’re sending to, this could be copy instructions like, “Reply stop’ to unsubscribe,” or an opt- out link directing subscribers to an “unsubscribe” page. The good thing is Campaign Monitor SMS has” unsubscribe” functionality built into our solution tailored to the relevant legislation in the country you’re sending to so you’ll never forget it, and you almost don’t even need to think about it. It’s just there. Lil, I think we’ve got time for two more questions, this one for you. We’ve had a lot of questions about best practices. We’ve spoken about it, but I think it would be good if you could take us through, I guess, a bit of a recap on SMS best practices.
Lily: Sure thing. Okay, so high level recap, engagement is likely to be better around the middle of the day, Monday through to Saturday. In terms of frequency, start with one per week and build from there. Don’t send too many to begin with. In terms of writing your copy, embrace that conversational tone as it aligns with your brand tone of voice, and personalize as much as you can. It’s as important for SMS as it is for email. Then, also, don’t assume your audience knows who is sending a message to them, so make sure that your consumers can easily identify who they’re receiving a message from.
Sarah: Great tips, Lil.
Lily: Awesome. It also looks like we’ve got some people interested in getting started with SMS who are wondering how long does it take to get up and running with SMS, Sarah.
Sarah: Great. I’ll take that. We can have you sending your first SMS campaign within one to two weeks, so just in time to use for the holiday season. It’s not too late. Our team will work with you to set you up with an SMS package that meets your needs and give you all the support you need to send your first campaign, which takes us to the end of our live Q&A, but probably leads very nicely into our next slide, Lil.
Lily: Awesome. Okay. If you are interested in SMS and interested in what we covered today or even if you just want to talk to us a bit more about our SMS solution, we’ve got a handy QR code here on the screen. If you scan that, it will take you to a landing page where you can fill in your details and direct your query through to one of our SMS experts, and they’ll get back in touch with you to find out more. If you can’t use that QR code, we’ve also got the URL here on the screen as well.
Sarah: Super easy, Lil. In terms of resources, we have an SMS resources hub. Our team have been hard at work doing a ton of research, pulling together all of the best practices, so we’ve got some resources that will be helpful if you’re starting out with SMS or, if you’re already using SMS, the resources can offer you best-practice help to really firm up your approach and your existing strategy. Again, scan this. It’s a different QR code that’s going to take you to that resources hub, and we’ve got the URL there as well. Now, in terms of us sending the recording of the webinar, keep an eye on your inbox. We will be sending you a copy of the webinar recording, a link to these resources, and we’ll answer any questions that we haven’t had time to answer today. That will all be on that resources hub. It’s super easy. That is coming to you on November 11th, so watch your inbox for that. That is the end of Connect and Convert with SMS. Thank you so much for joining us. I am really excited about, as I said, adding SMS to our toolkit and to helping embrace, so thank you. Lil, thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining me. Oh, I think you’re muted, Lil.
Lily: Sorry. My headphones just died on me there right at the end, but I was just saying thank you, everyone, for joining and have a great day or a great evening, depending on where you are. Bye, bye.
Sarah: See you.
