Four ways to become an SMS copywriting stud

SMS promotions work because they provide a one-on-one dialogue with customers. It is the most targeted and personalised means of communicating, yet also the most challenging, since it forces you to squeeze the core message of your campaign into a mere 160 characters.

With SMS marketing campaigns you don’t have the luxury of leading up to anything; writing for mobile in this format means distilling down web copy even further than before. SMS demands that you get straight to the point (unless, of course, you incur additional campaign costs and send multipart SMSs). So, how does one pack an effective sales message into the shortest possible form?

Regardless of your chosen media, the content that you deliver is vital to your success

With such strict copy limitations, marketers are forced to think very clearly about how to phrase their message. In the SMS format, if your message is not absolutely clear, your goal will not be achieved. It’s important to realise that the aim is not merely for an SMS to be seen. The copy must be communicative and convincing enough for the message to be understood, remembered and acted upon. The whole point of using text messages to pitch to your customers is to present them with text that gets your message across quickly.

Strong SMS copy leads with benefits and validates with features

Writing potent SMS copy can hinge on making the distinction between features and benefits. Features are the things about your product: that it has 200 hour battery life, contains 10 essential vitamins, has won five awards, and so on.

Benefits are inherently about the customer – the things he or she will get if they buy your product. So when you talk about benefits, you’re talking about how the prospect will lose weight, install shelves with ease, make money, save money or be able to vacuum red wine straight off the carpet. Benefits are about the underlying needs that the customer wants to satisfy. However you iterate it, the benefits you push in your SMS copy will always need to tap directly into consumers’ desires.

Create short copy that will grab your prospect by the throat

Thankfully our culture of personal SMS use has lent us some help in the form of generally accepted abbreviations. So use legitimate ways to shorten words; punctuation use – such as apostrophes to form contractions – is the best tool in your box. Punctuation helps create emphasis and clarity in your message. Commas, colons or dashes are also useful with squeezing a sentence to its minimum while still retaining the relationship between the component parts that make it meaningful.

For further semantic guidelines on writing compelling SMSs, study the training resources and best practices from international mobile marketing service providers.

Once your SMS has succeeded in hooking the interest of a prospect, you need an effective way of converting them by funnelling readers deeper into your offer

It’s not easy to add phone numbers, website addresses and other crucial information into a 160-character SMS. You won’t be able to add images, video files or any other multimedia content either. And you won’t get direct feedback via mobile survey forms.

Bulk SMS campaigns can be costly to maintain for extended periods or for bounce-back enquiries, so to keep costs down for dealing with readers who are looking for more information and a more complex multimedia experience; use a service that gives you a link in the SMS to a mobile page with more information and visuals. So once again, it’s even more crucial to write compelling SMS copy — that gets them to click through on the link inside the SMS. Make them curious, promise them a benefit once they click on the link, for instance that they are going to get a special offer in form of a mobile coupon or that they can add their details to a mobile competition.