In the last few months carriers have become incredibly aggressive in blocking text messages from reaching their customers. So much so that industry wide, text message deliverability is reaching all time lows, matching email open rates at about 10-20%.
Now unlike email, open rates for text messages are about 93%, and response rates at close to 40-50%. So the more text messages that you can deliver, the more successful your campaigns will be.
There are proactive strategies that you can use to drastically improve your deliverability.
Use Local Phone Numbers for SMS #
One of the best ways to get your text message delivered is to use a phone number as close to the target contact as possible. The more local the number that you have, the more likely it is that your message will be delivered.
When looking at the anatomy of a phone number, first you have the area code, which can include multiple towns, then following the area code you have the 3 number prefix, which further narrows down the location.
When you pull a list within a particular geographic region, it is worthwhile taking a look at both the area code and the prefix of the phone numbers of those leads, to see if you can identify the best phone number to subscribe to that will have the highest rates of deliverability.
Rotate Phone Numbers #
Although all of our phone numbers are guaranteed to be clean, not all phone numbers are created equal, and some numbers, especially from certain area codes and prefixes will trigger more blocks. If you’re seeing that your phone number is getting blocked, sometimes the best solution is to rotate it to a different phone number close to that location, first with the same prefix.
Keep Messages Short #
One of the biggest drivers of spam triggers are the length, and keywords of messages. I’ll talk about keywords next, but the longer the message is, the more likely it is that your message contains spam triggering keywords.
As far as length, a single SMS message has a maximum character limit of 160 characters. If you exceed that, you will both be charged for 2 messages, but also will likely trigger spam filters and not get your message delivered.
We all want to be able to tell the story of who we are, why we are contacting the contact, and how we want them to respond, and it is difficult to do so in under 160 characters. However, text message marketing is different. All you want is the contact to respond, and only then should you tell them the Who, What, Where, When, Why. Therefore your text messages should only have enough information to get the contact to respond, positively or negatively.
Avoid Spam Message Trigger Keywords #
There are a lot of words that can trigger SPAM filters. They may not always trigger the filters, and it will also depend on the previous spam signals (how close the phone number are, how long is the message etc)
Some of these words include:
FREE, Cash, Sale, Offer.
As you can see, it can be difficult to get the contact to respond to you without using these words. The trick again is just get them to respond to you. “Hey do you own 123 Main st?” Then you can have a conversation about who you are and what you would like.
