The click rate of the SMS

What is the click-through rate?

The "click-through rate" or "CTR" (Click Through Rate) is the percentage of people who clicked on a link after seeing it (clicks/impressions). For SMS, this statistic is derived from the number of recipients who clicked on the link contained in the SMS, divided by the number of people who opened the SMS.

For example, if 10 customers receive your brand's SMS and 2 of them click on the URL, the click-through rate is 20%.

How to calculate the click rate of an SMS campaign

The formula is quite simple.

Let's say you sent 500 SMS messages to 500 different phone numbers. Of these recipients, 50 actually clicked on the link in your SMS. This means that your click-through rate is 10%. 50 divided by 500 equals 10%.

To get this statistic, the challenge lies more in your ability to know the number of clicks on the URL. If this data is often available within a sponsored links, emailing or social ads campaign, few SMS providers give you access to these statistics.

At smsmode^©, we enable you to calculate click-through rates natively with the URL shortener function smsmode^©.

How does it work? Instead of using a classic URL in your SMS, you first shorten the link with the smsmode^©"URL shortener" function. Once you've shortened the link, you can place it in your message.

With this feature, not only do you save characters, but after you send your SMS, you will be able to see in real time how many customers have clicked on the link.

The Rich SMS feature, including a Landing-Page editor and URL shortener available on subscription, goes even further. It allows you to:

• centralize your mobile marketing campaign on one platform,
• edit a landing page with your colors easily,
• to know how many people clicked on its URL,
• analyze, as for an email, which CTA (Call To Action) was clicked on the mobile landing page.

 

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If you don't use the short link generator smsmode^©The tracking of link data from your SMS messages can only be done using analysis software such as Google Analytics, in order to analyze the results and performance of each campaign. In this case, be sure to set up filters on your links to ensure that clicks come from your SMS campaigns.

Unfortunately, adding UTMs will make your URLs endless, which lengthens and confuses your communication, not to mention the sense of mistrust that the link may cause.

What is a good click rate for an SMS campaign?

There is no hard and fast rule for what constitutes a good CTR. A satisfactory CTR depends mainly on the objectives set by the company. Each campaign has its own requirements.

A single click that leads to a conversion and therefore a sale can sometimes be enough, as this sale can cover your costs and match the expectations of your SMS marketing campaign. Other clients may need a CTR of more than 10% to generate a sufficient number of leads that would lead to an appropriate amount of new business being generated afterwards.

How to optimize the click rate of your SMS?

Let's start by sweeping away the obvious, including links in SMS is the best way to get clicks. Without links, the recipient of your messages has nothing to click and nowhere to go.

Assert your brand identity

A low click-through rate is often due to mistrust on the part of the recipient. To reassure them, remember to correctly identify yourself as the sender of the message. The best way to do this is to personalize your Sender ID. Failing that, at least mention your brand name in the body of the SMS.

Another good practice is to preserve your brand in the link. Unknown URLs can be perceived as spam. This can affect your performance.

Watch the number of characters in your message

An SMS is limited to 160 characters. If your link or message is too long, you risk incurring additional charges, or even sending a truncated SMS if you use an API and there is a configuration or request fault (nbr_message=1 for example).

Also take into account the mandatory presence of the STOP SMS.

Use line breaks

The line break costs you only one character, but it saves you structure. These line breaks make your communication clearer, more professional and allow you to present your link as a real CTA.

Personalise your message

The more personalized a message is to your consumers, the higher the click-through rate.

Some ideas for personalization:

• Use the personalization fields, to insert names, first names, company in the messages.
• Integrate SMS into your marketing automation workflows, to push a restocking, birthday or reminder offer.
• Segment your contact base to send the right product to the right consumer. (If you can't segment your base, you can always include two links in a message, one for men, one for women for example).

View link preview images and optimize your statistics with RCS

Have you ever heard of RCS? This new messaging protocol is a real revolution for mobile marketing. It allows for many things including personalized preview. To take advantage of this preview, all you have to do is set up a title, description and image when you create your link and then insert it into your SMS messages.

Stats soar with RCS! We've seen 3X higher clicks and conversion on RCS campaigns.

Contact us to find out how many of your contacts are compatible.

The next KPI

You now have all the keys to calculate and optimize the click rate of your campaigns. The next KPI to optimize is the SMS conversion rate, which will allow you to calculate the hit per transformation of each campaign and thus have a clear vision on the return on investment of SMS marketing.