20 Jan 2023
4 min read

How to Track the Impact of Text: A Quick Guide to SMS Attribution

Rockerbox - Maggie Tharp Written by Maggie Tharp
on January 20, 2023

Any marketer in 2023 knows it’s important to meet your audiences where they are. That means knowing the social channels they’re active on, the streaming platforms they use, and the methods of communication they’re most likely to respond to. One of the most effective communication channels you should be looking at adding if you haven’t already is SMS marketing.

But it’s not just enough to use SMS marketing—you also need to have a solid way to measure the impact of your promotional texts. In this blog, we’ll cover some common questions around SMS marketing and walk you through how Rockerbox can help you see the value of your SMS marketing in context and tie your marketing messages back to concrete revenue.

What Is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing involves using text messages to deliver promotional messages, order updates, survey requests, and other customer communications to further marketing and revenue goals. Like email marketing, SMS marketing requires users to opt-in to receive messages before a business can market to them.

Why Use SMS Marketing?

Essentially marketing by text, SMS messages–even from businesses—are effective. They have an estimated open rate of anywhere between 82% and 98% and an equally impressive response rate of 45%—both far better than standard email numbers. On top of unusually good engagement rates, SMS messages are slated to grow in popularity YoY for close to a decade.

When crafted with your audience in mind, SMS messages can drive sales and help you retain current customers with a level of personalization that your audience already expects.

3 SMS Trends to Watch

Like any marketing channel, SMS marketing is constantly evolving and changing due to a variety of different factors. In 2023 and beyond, here are a few trends to be aware of as you craft your own SMS strategy.

Influencer Use of SMS

It’s not just businesses that can benefit from the conversational nature of SMS marketing. In 2023, influencers may start to use the platform more to interact with their fans and engage them in a new way.

SMS to Boost Retention

Looking to increase customer satisfaction and retention? SMS can be a great way to give your customers the personalized communication they want when it comes to orders and customer service issues, ultimately keeping them happy and potentially more likely to purchase in the future.

You can take this a step further and leverage SMS to show existing customers new product offerings, offer discounts, or provide customized recommendations based on past orders history. All of these things can help to drive repeat purchases.

Focus on Privacy and Consumer Consent

Spam is never welcome, no matter if it comes in the mail, your email inbox, or your text messaging app. In 2023 and beyond, marketers should be prepared to maintain high standards for sending only relevant text messages to users that have clearly opted-in to receive them. The CAN-SPAM act in particular bans businesses from sending consumers unsolicited messages and also requires messages to clearly be promotional in nature.

While it shouldn’t be a threat to legitimate businesses sending quality marketing messages, the FCC heightened privacy standards even more in October 2022 by proposing new restrictions on spam/scam texts that would stop such messages at the mobile carrier level.

Tracking SMS Marketing with Rockerbox Attribution  

Whether you’ve just started to test into SMS, you’re a veteran on the platform, or you have no experience on it at all, you need a way to see how it’s impacting your bottom line. Headlines tout SMS marketing’s popularity and the high open rate and response rates are attractive, but you can’t know exactly how well SMS marketing will work for your company and your customers unless your activity is based on a platform of accurate marketing measurement.

With Rockerbox, you can track your SMS messages along with every other marketing touchpoint in your strategy to better understand whether SMS is helping or hindering your progress.

Uncover Revenue Impact

In a nutshell, your goal is to boost revenue with any new channel you tie. With Rockerbox, you can track your SMS activity directly back to your revenue so you know whether your investment in SMS platforms is a good one. Not only is this helpful to your company as a whole, but having this kind of visibility satisfies the needs of marketing leadership and the C-level who need to understand high-level what’s working.

In the event that customers are only signing up for the SMS messages to get a quick discount before purchasing, Rockerbox can help you dive into this too.

Assess Channel Overlap

Your SMS marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. With Rockerbox, you can dig into the overlap between SMS marketing and all of your other channels, from social to search and beyond. Finding out the channel overlap can tell you:

  • Where the redundant channels are in your marketing mix (i.e. Would your customers have converted anyways without the investment in a particular channel?)
  • When it comes to in-platform reporting only, are your channels taking credit for the same conversions?
  • What marketing channels do users often interact with that drive high-revenue orders?

One particularly relevant way to leverage channel overlap visibility for SMS is to look at the overlap of email and text notifications and look at the impact on average order value. If AOV is lower with both kinds of messages, consider switching to one method or the other.  

Monitor SMS Signups as a Conversion Event

Depending on your business, you may want to track SMS signups as conversion events themselves so you can analyze the activities that led up to them. With Rockerbox, you can set custom conversion events (including SMS signup), based on your specific goals and strategy.

This can help you in particular with lead generation campaigns, uncovering things like whether it’s cheaper to optimize Facebook to drive SMS signups followed by SMS messaging driving to purchase than directly optimizing Facebook to drive purchases.

Next Steps: Get a Demo Today

Wherever your marketing strategy goes in 2023, you need a way to keep tabs on what’s working and what’s not. Schedule time today to talk with our team about how Rockerbox can take the hassle out of accurate marketing measurement.

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