5 Ways to Tell if Your Holiday SMS Campaigns Are Effective [2023]

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The 2023 holidays came in a blink and will be gone just as quickly—and many businesses are using the opportunity to reach their audience via SMS.

After all, with holiday sales reaching over $950 billion for some industries, businesses would be foolish not to do what they can to maximize success in the holiday season. And texting is one of the most effective ways to reach people. Sounds like a winning combo, no?

But how can you be sure your campaigns are actually cutting through the noise and delivering results?

In this article, we'll explore key metrics you can track to measure the effectiveness of your holiday SMS campaigns, helping you optimize your strategy and maximize success.

By closely observing link clicks, response rates, opt-out rates, delivery rates, and overall trends, you can gain valuable insights into how your messages are resonating with your target audience and refine your campaign accordingly.

1. Analyze Link Clicks

With SMS, one of the best ways to measure your results is to analyze the clicks your messages are getting.

When it comes to texting, your campaigns’ CTAs often end up directing your audience to follow a link. So being able to see how many clicks your messages get can be a direct indicator of your messages’ success.

You can use link tracking features to see not only how many people clicked on your links but exactly who clicked on those links.

What’s even better is if you use UTM parameters in your links—because these allow you to see in Google Analytics where exactly your site traffic and activity is coming from. So you’ll be able to set up UTMs specific to your texting campaigns, and you’ll be able to track what traffic, sales, and conversions you get from this traffic.

If you’re not seeing good link click rates, here are some things to consider…

• Is your messaging content and CTA enticing enough to your audience?
• Do you need to speak more to the desires and pain points your audience cares about?
• Do you need to develop a better offer?
• Do you need to segment your list more so that you’re sending more relevant messages?

2. Measure Response Rates

What if your campaigns are more focused on getting a response from your audience rather than on getting traffic to your website?

In that case, link clicks wouldn’t be the best indicator of success—response rates would be much more useful of a metric for you.

Response rates will tell you how many people responded to your message compared to how many received it.

If your goal is to elicit a response and have more interactions with your audience, you’ll want to shoot for a high response rate to your messages. So if your response rate is low, you’ll want to consider adjusting your approach.

Here are some ideas to think about…

• Do you need to ask more engaging questions that prompt a response?
• Is your CTA perhaps too complicated? Do you need to focus it down to one very simple instruction that your audience can easily follow?

3. Consider Opt-Out Rates

Another metric to keep an eye on is your opt-out rates.

With SMS, it’s easy for people to opt out from your texts. All they need to do is reply STOP.

It’s normal and fine to have a few unsubscribes from your SMS campaigns.

However, if you have a high number of opt-outs, that’s a bad sign. A “normal” opt-out rate appears to be below 5% so if you’re getting opt-out rates higher than that, there are a couple of things you’ll want to consider:

• Is your message content valuable? Or are you sending messages your audience doesn’t care about?
• Does your opt-in process need to be improved? Are you sending messages to people who didn’t know what they were signing up for? (Or sending messages to people who didn’t sign up at all?)

4. Keep an Eye on Delivery Rates

Delivery rates indicate how many people are actually seeing your message.

Unlike email, most text messages are actually read. However, that’s only true if the message is successfully delivered to the recipient’s device (obviously). If you’re getting low delivery rates, that will hinder your holiday campaigns’ potential for success.

You should be getting 90–100% delivery for your messages. If you’re not seeing that, here’s what you can think about:

• Do you have a lot of landline phone numbers in your recipient list?
• Have you successfully registered your brand with the mobile carriers? (This just takes a few minutes—contact support to get started.)
• Are you using bit.ly or other public link shorteners?

5. Observe Trends

While analyzing more specific metrics (such as link clicks, response rates, etc.) is vital, it’s also legitimate to simply observe trends that you see in correlation with your SMS campaigns.

For example, when you send out a text campaign trying to get more people to view your website, do you see a spike in traffic?

When you send out a holiday sales promotion, do you see an uptick in sales?

If you’re seeing positive trends in correlation to your holiday SMS campaigns, that’s a good indicator that your campaigns are proving to be successful (although it’s best if you can get some actual data to support the general trends you’re seeing).

On the other hand, if your SMS campaigns are not yielding any observable trends, you may want to consider altering your approach. All of the bulleted points in the sections above would be good questions to ask to help evaluate how you might be able to improve.

Analyzing Results Will Help You Improve

Analyzing the results of your holiday SMS campaigns using any or all of the criteria above will help you make decisions to improve your messages.

And with the powerful potential of the holidays to help give your business a boost, any improvements you can make are a big win—every little bit helps!

What Results Are You Seeing?

So what results are you seeing for your holiday SMS efforts? Pick 2 or 3 of the criteria mentioned above to analyze your most recent campaign and see how you’re doing. Then make the appropriate adjustments for your next campaign.

Haven’t started your holiday SMS campaigns yet? It’s not too late! Get a free trial account at Mobile Text Alerts to get a feel for how it works.