Text messaging has proven to be the most effective way to reach large numbers of people. To achieve the best results in your text messaging campaign, you need to define your message.

We know that text messaging is the most effective communications medium today, especially for reaching the all-important 18-to-35 age market. Statistics show that the people send 20 times more text messages than tweets every day, and 12 times more than the number of Facebook messages.

That’s up to 6 billion messages per day in the U.S. alone.

What’s more, 98 percent of text messages are opened and read immediately—far more than for tweets, social media messaging or emails.

But to take advantage of this reach, you need to think about the message. How can you make your text messaging campaign effective?

The answer: clarify your text message.

Decide what you want to say

The first step in creating an effective text messaging campaign is to determine your goals — what do you want the readers of your messages to do? This could be to come to an event, answer a survey, visit a website, download a coupon or, ultimately, buy a product.

The next step is to know your audience, and what will motivate them to do the things you’d like. You need to be able to say what’s in it for them.

For example: if you want people to download a coupon that will give your organization valuable information about your audience’s preferences, you need to tell them what they’ll get out of it. This can be as simple as, for instance 20 percent off the price of a valuable product or service. Or it could be some benefit or special program that’s only available for a limited time.

One thing at a time

One of the major temptations a communications professional has to resist is the drive to add messages to a single campaign. While it seems to make sense to mention, for example, your organization’s extended warranty program in a text messaging campaign about a new service, it’s essential to focus. Effective text messaging campaigns have a single message.

Clarify the message

Here’s the trick: state the most important thing you want to say as a single sentence. It’s not easy — but it is effective. After all, if you cannot state your message in a single sentence, you audience cannot understand what you want to say, either.