12 Metrics to Measure SMS Marketing Campaign Success

SMS marketing campaign success is measurable and trackable, thanks to the various metrics available. Businesses must track the performance of their text marketing strategies to understand their audience and optimize their campaign fully. It helps them make the most of their budget and focus on the areas that generate the most revenue. Although it may need more excitement of creative brainstorming and execution, analyzing performance from the outset is crucial. This practice lets you pinpoint what resonates and falls flat, empowering you to fine-tune your approach and elevate your marketing efforts to new heights.

Measuring text marketing performance and success requires specific metrics that will provide valuable insights into different aspects of your campaign. For example, the opt-in rate reveals how many people have subscribed to your SMS marketing list.

Let us delve into the 12 essential metrics to measure SMS marketing campaign success as listed below.

Opt-In Rate
Opt-Out Rate (or Churn Rate)
Delivery Rate
Open Rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Conversion Rate
Response Rate
Revenue Generated
Cost Per Conversion
Bounce Rate
Feedback and Complaints
Segmentation Effectiveness

1. Opt-In Rate

The growth rate of your subscriber list, also known as the opt-in rate, measures the increase in subscribers during a campaign. To maximize the effectiveness of your SMS marketing efforts, continuously building an engaged list of subscribers is crucial.

This will help you expand your reach, grow your audience, and stay top of mind. Keep in mind that there will always be people who unsubscribe or lose interest, so it is crucial to monitor the growth rate of your list to ensure it aligns with the needs of your business.

Formula: (New Subscribers / Total Messages Sent) x 100 = Opt-In Rate

2. Opt-Out Rate (or Churn Rate)

Customers often unsubscribe from SMS lists for various reasons. Some may no longer be interested in your brand, while others may have had a negative experience on your site. It could also be due to their message box being spammed or receiving multiple messages.

The unsubscribe rate indicates the number of customers who have opted out of a campaign. A high unsubscribe rate is not a positive sign, and it requires reviewing your campaigns, refining the content, and experimenting with different sending times.

Formula: To calculate the opt-out rate in a campaign, divide the total number of opt-outs by the total number of subscribers at the beginning and then multiply by 100.

3. Delivery Rate

The SMS delivery rate is calculated by dividing the number of messages that successfully reached a subscriber’s phone by the total number of texts sent. A high deliverability rate indicates that your texts are reaching their intended recipients.

Conversely, a low deliverability rate could be attributed to various factors, such as carrier errors, invalid numbers or information, poor SMS Gateway network quality, or triggers from spam filters.

Monitoring your delivery rate can provide valuable insights into the quality of your database. If your delivery rate is low, consider purging invalid contacts to ensure your messages reach a receptive audience. This proactive approach can enhance SMS metrics, bolster your sender reputation, and lead to cost savings.

Formula: Calculate the percentage of delivered texts by dividing the number of delivered texts by the total number of texts sent, then multiply the result by 100.

4. Open Rate

Unlike emails, tracking read and open rates for text messages is technically impossible. However, the read rate for text messages is remarkably high, exceeding 90%. This is because when users open the text function on their phone, they read the entire message before taking action. Moreover, since text marketing messages require consumers to opt-in based on criteria outlined by the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), consumers have a higher level of trust in text messages. Consequently, they read almost all text messages, especially since they are typically concise.

Keeping SMS messages short, concise, and personal in tone is crucial. Research indicates that consumers perceive less than 1% of all texts as SPAM, a notable contrast to email, where consumers estimate that 90% of all received messages are SPAM. This stark disparity makes text messaging an exceptionally effective tool for engaging with your audience.

Formula: (Unique Opens / Total Messages Sent) x 100 = Open Rate

5. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Although this metric holds value, its relevance is limited to messages containing links to web pages. Merely including a link in a message should not mark the journey’s end. It is crucial to consistently monitor the number of clicks your links receive, as it measures the engagement level with your content.

If the links you’re sharing remain unopened, it typically indicates that the content you’re sending isn’t the most relevant for your contacts.

Formula: To determine the SMS click-through rate, divide the number of subscribers who clicked the text message by the total number of subscribers who received it.

6. Conversion Rate

SMS campaigns serve various goals. You may use them to expand your email list, stimulate purchases, or prompt replies.

Evaluating your conversion rates is crucial to ensure your text messages contribute towards achieving these objectives. Calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of contacts who took action by the total number of contacts your campaign reached.

Formula: The formula to calculate the SMS conversion rate is as follows: divide the number of subscribers who completed the desired action by the total number of subscribers who received the text message.

To drive conversions or actions on your website, utilize a unique UTM or tracking code. This code enables you to measure your conversion rate accurately.

Simplify the process using tools like Google UTM Builder and their extensions to add custom UTMs to your campaign links. Implementing this code lets you easily track whether a purchase originated from your campaign link. It’s as simple as that!

7. Response Rate

Next, this metric will help you audit your team’s efficiency. Since texts are often read hastily, your customers have come to expect prompt responses. To achieve peak performance, strive to answer customer messages as soon as they arrive.

Aim to respond to text messages within an hour and make it a priority never to leave a text unread for more than 24 hours. Calculating your average monthly response time is crucial for maintaining accountability and ensuring the best customer service experience.

Furthermore, assessing response time provides a valuable means of evaluating whether you send texts at the most opportune moments for your users. Through some experimentation, you will gather sufficient data to ascertain the optimal timing for delivering your messages!

Formula: To calculate the response rate, divide the number of subscribers who responded to a text by the total number of subscribers who received it, then multiply by 100.

8. Revenue Generated

The return on investment (ROI) quantifies the profitability and revenue generated by your text message campaigns with the associated costs. To compute this metric, subtract the total expenses of sending texts from the overall revenue generated by your SMS program.

A high return on investment (ROI) indicates that your text messages effectively drive sales. In contrast, a low ROI suggests exploring alternative marketing channels or refining your message content. To enhance your ROI, prioritize delivering valuable content and promotions that deeply resonate with your target audience. Additionally, consider experimenting with various promotional channels, such as email marketing or social media ads, to expand the reach of your text message list.

Formula: To calculate the ROI for your text message campaign, divide the total revenue generated by the cost of your campaign, then multiply by 100.

9. Cost Per Conversion

Customer acquisition cost refers to the expenditure incurred in acquiring a customer. A high acquisition cost can indicate various issues, such as incorrect customer segmentation and targeting. Focusing on the wrong customers impacts your business and escalates the customer acquisition cost.

Understanding the cost of acquiring each subscriber is crucial for your marketing team to prioritize SMS marketing within your overall marketing strategy effectively.

For instance, this year, SMS marketing accounted for only 20% of your digital marketing budget. By demonstrating to your leadership team that the acquisition cost through SMS is lower than other marketing tactics, you can secure a more significant budget allocation for SMS marketing next year, solidifying its importance and effectiveness.

Formula: To calculate the cost per conversion, divide your campaign’s total cost by the number of conversions it generated. This metric is crucial for monitoring and optimizing your marketing budget.

10. Bounce Rate

The SMS delivery rate, also known as the deliverability rate, is a crucial metric that measures the percentage of text marketing messages successfully reaching recipients. It plays a significant role in determining the performance of your campaign, impacting key metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, and overall ROI.

Understanding your SMS deliverability rate helps you identify areas for improvement and ensures you allocate resources effectively by avoiding SMS marketing platforms and messaging services that fail to deliver messages efficiently.

Formula: To calculate the SMS delivery rate, divide the number of delivered texts by the total number of texts sent and multiply the result by 100 to obtain the percentage.

11. Feedback and Complaints

Feedback and complaints are an integral part of the customer journey, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns. Ensuring your business maintains an open line for feedback can significantly improve the quality of your services and enhance customer satisfaction. To measure this metric, quantify and categorize the feedback received from your customers into positive, neutral, and negative feedback.

Success in this metric means effectively addressing your customers’ concerns, leading to improved customer relationships, brand loyalty, and repeat business.

Tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk can help you manage customer feedback effectively, ensuring no complaint or suggestion goes unnoticed.

Formula: There is no specific formula for measuring feedback and complaints, but monitoring the number of complaints and the issues raised frequently is crucial.

12. Segmentation Effectiveness

Segmentation effectiveness measures how well your SMS marketing strategies are targeted. It involves dividing your customer base into segments based on specific criteria like demographics, buying behavior, and preferences, then tailoring your messages to each group.

Tools like HubSpot and MailChimp can assist in segmenting your customer base effectively and tracking the performance of each segment.

If you’re successful in segmentation, you’ll deliver more personalized and relevant content to your customers, leading to higher engagement rates, better customer satisfaction, and an improved ROI.

Formula: Segmentation effectiveness can be evaluated by calculating each segment’s response rate, conversion rate, or other relevant metric.

Why Measure Your Marketing Success?

Measuring your marketing success, specifically in SMS marketing campaigns, is crucial for understanding their effectiveness and making data-driven decisions to improve future campaigns. Businesses can track the performance of their campaigns through these critical SMS metrics, identifying what works and what doesn’t.

Measuring your SMS performance gives you insights into key factors such as delivery, open, and conversion rates. These provide a quantifiable overview of your campaign’s impact, enabling you to gauge if you’re hitting your desired objectives, reaching the right target audience, and, ultimately, generating a satisfactory return on investment.

Moreover, monitoring SMS metrics helps identify potential issues early on. For instance, a high bounce rate could indicate problems with your contact list, while a low click-through rate might suggest your call-to-action needs to be more engaging. By identifying these issues, you can make necessary adjustments to your campaigns in real-time.

How to Track SMS Campaigns?

Tracking your SMS campaigns is made simple with various tools and technologies available today.

Using a Dedicated SMS Marketing Platform

One of the most effective ways to track SMS campaigns is by using a dedicated SMS marketing platform like SendinBlue, SimpleTexting, or TextMagic. These platforms provide in-depth analytics that can help keep track of all the key metrics you need.

Setting up tracking on these platforms usually involves the following steps:

Create an account on your chosen SMS marketing platform.
Import your contact list to the platform.
Craft your SMS message and set up your campaign.
Once your campaign is live, you can monitor it in real-time through the platform’s dashboard.

Using UTM Parameters

Another way to track your SMS campaigns is by adding UTM parameters to the URLs in your text messages. UTM parameters are tags you add to a URL that provides additional information about the traffic that comes to your website from your SMS campaign.

To set up UTM tracking in your SMS campaigns:

Generate a UTM-enabled URL using a tool like Google’s URL builder. This URL will contain additional information like the traffic source (in this case, it would be ‘SMS’), the medium, and the specific campaign.
Insert this UTM-enabled URL into your SMS message.
Once the campaign is live, use Google Analytics or a similar tool to analyze the data from these URLs.

Remember, tracking your SMS campaigns aims to gain insights that can help you optimize your future campaigns, thus ensuring that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.

What are the Benefits of Tracking your SMS Marketing Campaign?

Tracking your SMS marketing campaign offers several key benefits that can significantly enhance your overall marketing strategy’s effectiveness:

Increased Efficiency – By tracking your SMS marketing campaigns, you can understand what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most effective strategies and improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
Improved Decision Making – The data collected from tracking your campaigns can provide valuable insights that inform your marketing decisions, leading to more effective strategies and improved results.
Enhanced Customer Engagement – Tracking allows you to understand your customers better, which can lead to more personalized and relevant campaigns that drive higher engagement.
Cost-Effective – When you identify and eliminate ineffective marketing strategies, tracking your SMS campaigns can make your marketing efforts more cost-effective.
Improved ROI – With the ability to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, you can optimize your strategies to improve your return on investment (ROI).
Better Understanding of Customer Behavior – Tracking your campaigns can provide valuable insights into your customers’ behavior, such as their preferences, habits, and response patterns, enabling you to tailor your marketing strategies to their needs.
Greater Competitive Advantage – The insights gained from tracking your campaigns can give you a competitive edge, allowing you to outperform your competitors in the market.

What Tools Do You Need to Track and Calculate the Metrics of Your SMS Campaign?

To accurately monitor the performance of your SMS marketing campaigns, it is crucial to utilize the best SMS marketing tools for data collection, analysis, and visualization. Here are some widely employed tools that can assist you in this endeavor:

SMS Marketing Platforms: JookSMS offers built-in analytics for tracking your campaign’s performance.
Google’s URL Builder: This tool allows you to create UTM-enabled URLs for your SMS messages, providing information about the traffic coming to your website from your SMS campaign.
Google Analytics: This is an excellent tool for analyzing the data generated from your UTM-enabled URLs, providing detailed insights into your campaign’s performance.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Tools like Hubspot or Salesforce can help you manage your customer data, allowing you to segment your audience effectively and track the metrics of each customer segment.
Feedback Management Tools: Tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk can help manage and analyze customer feedback, helping you better understand their preferences and concerns.

Every business has its distinct requirements, and to gain a deeper understanding of their preferences and concerns, it’s essential to tailor your SMS marketing campaign accordingly. Choose tools that align seamlessly with your business objectives and budget, ensuring the best possible outcome.

How do Companies Create Successful SMS Marketing Campaigns to Meet the Success Metrics?

Companies can establish benchmarks and adopt best practices to develop highly successful SMS marketing campaigns that meet and surpass their success metrics. Benchmarking provides valuable context to your SMS performance data, enabling effortless analysis and optimizing your marketing budget for maximum impact. Here are some best practices to ensure your business meets your success metrics.

Establish a measurement plan – To ensure practical goal setting and measurement, it is prudent to establish a systematic tracking schedule. Whether weekly, monthly, or per-campaign, this schedule allows for performance evaluation against benchmarks. Doing so can identify patterns within specific customer segments, products, or other variables influencing campaign performance.
Choose Metrics and Set Goals – After establishing your measurement plan, take the time to jot down your goals for your SMS marketing campaign. Setting clear objectives will align your metrics with your business goals, enabling you to understand better what you’re excelling at and areas that require improvement. While most businesses use SMS to generate sales, it’s important to note that it can also support other objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, educating and entertaining subscribers, driving more website traffic, generating leads, and improving webinar registrations. Then, you can select appropriate metrics to provide insights into your progress toward achieving them. This will help you gauge how close you reach your desired outcomes.
Monitor Campaigns – To evaluate the effectiveness of your SMS campaigns, gather the mentioned metrics from previous campaigns. Input them into a spreadsheet and connect them with a data visualization tool like Databox. This will enable you to analyze average delivery, interaction, and conversion rates. The insights gained from this analysis can serve as benchmarks for future campaigns, allowing your company to measure its performance and make informed decisions.
Set Averages -After gathering all your data, compute the average metrics for your campaigns. Sum up the values for each metric and divide it by the total number of campaigns sent during that period. Let’s illustrate this with an example: if you send three campaigns with interaction rates of 35%, 26%, and 39%, respectively, the average interaction rate would be calculated as (35 + 26 + 39) / 3, resulting in an average of 33.33%.
Identify Data Patterns – Tracking key metrics allows you to leverage your data and gain insights into what resonates with your audience. By identifying patterns, you can determine which campaigns perform better, what messages drive purchases, and what your delivery rates indicate. For instance, if you’re wondering which call to action (CTA) is most effective, analyze campaigns with high conversion or interaction rates and compare their CTAs for similarities. The findings will inspire fresh ideas for your next campaign.

What are the Benefits of Knowing SMS Marketing Glossary?

Understanding the SMS Marketing Glossary is vital for marketers to monitor, track, and optimize their SMS campaigns effectively. Some of the benefits include:

Clear Communication: Knowing and using industry-specific terminology allows for precise communication with team members and other stakeholders, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Improved Analysis: With a comprehensive understanding of SMS marketing terms, you can analyze your campaigns more accurately, identify areas that require improvement, and make data-driven decisions.
Stay Up-to-date: The SMS marketing industry is constantly evolving, and having a solid grasp of the glossary keeps you informed of new trends and best practices.
Better ROI: By understanding the metrics and terminology used in SMS marketing, businesses can create more effective campaigns, leading to better returns on investment.
Stay Ahead of Competitors: Knowing the SMS marketing glossary puts your business ahead of competitors who may need to become more familiar with industry-specific terminology, allowing you to take advantage of new opportunities and stand out in the market.

Investing time and effort into understanding the SMS marketing glossary can significantly benefit your business by optimizing your campaigns, improving communication, and ultimately driving better results.