Opted-in, broadcast text messaging is a powerful digital marketing channel for campaigns because the content gets delivered and it gets seen. There’s hard work up front to grow your list that leads to a long-term payoff that’s hard to beat with email, social media, and other platforms.
Writing an effective marketing text message requires an understanding of the platform and how supporters interact with text messages generally. The copywriting tactics for text messaging are similar to email, but with a lot less screen real estate. They should be brief, personalized, urgent, and have a clear call to action.
Here are four elements to incorporate when writing an effective text message that gets results for your campaign.
Brief
With a maximum of 160 characters, your text messages can’t be very long, but you should always write with brevity in mind. Supporters will only spend a few seconds reading your text message so they should be easy to scan.
In those few seconds, you need to answer three questions for your supporter: who are you, why are you texting, and what do I need to do.
Personalized
As with other digital marketing channels, like social media, the content you share via text messaging should be similar to what your supporters normally receive. Text messages are usually sent between friends or colleagues who know each other.
Personalize your text messages by incorporating supporters’ names and areas into the copy.
Urgent
In addition to brevity, your text message must convey a sense of urgency that compels your supporter to act at that exact moment. You’ve only got a few seconds of their attention.
You have to give them a reason to act at that moment while you’ve earned a few seconds of their attention.
Call to Action
Make your call to action – what you expect the supporter to do – completely obvious. Text messages are great at cutting through the noise to get attention, but they should always serve as a jumping off point for additional action.
Donate. Attend an event. Volunteer. Go Vote. Text messaging is a versatile digital marketing channel, but you always have to “make the ask” with a clear call to action.
Always incorporate these four attributes into your text message copy in order to get results, but they’ll vary depending on your audience, so always experiment. What works for one campaign isn’t guaranteed to work for you.
To find out what works, establish the data points that will determine how you measure success and monitor them closely.
This article was written in partnership with Tatango, a leading provider of text messaging services for political campaigns. Click here to visit their site and learn more.
