The answer to this question really depends on your business and how often your customers expect to hear from you.  A night club may send out a weekly campaign about event images, whereas a restaurant may only want to send out a message when they have new specials or new items. This really fluctuates based on your business and your clientele.  A good rule of thumb is to make sure that every message contains relevant information that your customer will be excited about.  Below are some key points discussed with business owners this last month in helping them get the most out of text message marketing:

1. Be sure to send our regular messages to your customers to keep in contact and create top-of-mind awareness when they think about where to go or where to shop.  See our Ideas that Drive section every month for monthly tips and ideas.
2. When sending out weekly messages, be careful not to send the same promotion on the same day so that you train your customers to only come in on that day.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to send out a text and see the response within the hour of customers coming in!  The challenge with one business owner that I spoke with is that they were sending out a buy-one-get-one free every week and that day became their only busy day of the week.If you are looking at sending out a weekly promotion or want to drive some extra traffic every week, perhaps follow what we did with one of our oil change vendors and set up an algorithm to only send out to 300-500 messages every week.  This will help you not only get that boost of traffic, but also randomize where a contact gets the message so that they don’t just wait for that special.  Any of our account pros can help you set this up!
3. Run your weekly specials for more than a month.  Time and time again, I talk with a business owner that come up with great specials and want to send out a text every week for these.  The only challenge is they only want to run them for two or three weeks.  In speaking with them, they realized that by the time the customers knew the promotions, they had discontinued them.
4. Use a reminder texts to let your customers know when a promotion ends or if you are ending those weekly specials.  These are great, as I couldn’t tell you how many times I get a text and think, “Oh, I have to make sure I go in there this week,” just to realize the week after that I forgot.  Send a reminder two or three days before a promotion ends to get that last little boost!

We realize that every business is different and what works well for one business might not work with another.  The key point is to reach out to your customers often and remind them why it is that they love your business and want to come back!

[FURTHER READING: Why are customers opting out of SMS Marketing?]

Feel free to reach out to one of our account pros for more great tips and some ideas specific to your industry!