After knowing your audience, the most important part of an effective text messaging campaign is having a clear purpose, or measurable goal.

Everyone loves to communicate, but to make the greatest return on your investment in communications technology, you have to have a clear, measurable purpose in mind — a strategic objective, or a goal to achieve.

In fact, your text messaging strategy needs both long-term and short-term, or immediate goals. For example, your long-term goal could be greater market engagement with your company or organization — for example, having a large number of people reading your company’s website or blog, and ultimately buying more of what you sell.

The short-term goal would be to have a specific percentage open a text message and follow the links to your website or blog.

SMART goals

Defining your long-term and short-term objectives sounds simple, but it can be difficult — especially when different departments want different things. You can simplify the process by setting goals that are “SMART”: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timed.

• Specific: “increase sales of product x”
• Measurable: “by y percent”
• Achievable: Is this possible? Increasing sales by 10 percent over six months may seem reasonable, but tripling sales in a month is probably not realistic.
• Relevant: Does this matter to the organization? Increasing the number of clicks on a web page may be achievable, but will it make a difference to the long-term success of the organization?
• Timed: Have a definite end date for the campaign and its goals: “Increase the sales of product x by y percent by the end of the fiscal year.”

With clearly defined objectives, your text messaging campaign can succeed.