What’s the one thing that is always close, is always on, and causes intense anxiety when it goes inexplicably missing? Hint: you speak into it.

We are all well aware that we are obsessed with our phones. Every day, brands take advantage of this dependency to reach their consumers on the device that’s basically a fifth limb.

8.6 Trillion text messages are sent every year on average. That’s over 20 times the number of Tweets and 12 times the number of Facebook messages sent daily. With all the messaging going on, it’s no wonder marketing teams are finding SMS marketing to be an extremely powerful tool.

Here are a couple of rules you should follow to have successful SMS campaigns:

Communicate valuable offerings

Consumers seek valuable offers. Make sure that the SMS you send out creates a hard to resist offer. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask yourself, will this interest them? No audience wants to receive a worthless, pointless offer from a brand that they love.

Start the text with your offer

Text message marketing is built to be to the point. Your audience are busy people, and not getting to the point straight away will turn them off. Just cut right to the chase in order to reach everyone. Placing your offer at the beginning of the message grabs maximum attention.

Keep it exclusive

In order to make the most out of your SMS campaign, make sure that your offer seems to be exclusive to the person receiving it. Make your customers feel as though they are part of something special. If an offer is available to everyone, then it becomes less attractive and urgent. Making a sale via SMS is all about ensuring your feel special and valued.

Include a call to action

A call to action is vital in order to lead the customer into your sales funnel. Keep your call to action clean and simple and easy to follow. Assume that your audience are lazy, but a clever call to action will spring them into action.

Create a sense of urgency

Your audience will take time out of their day if you create enough of a reason for them to. An offer is a viable one only if there is an expiry date associated with it and if it is clearly communicated.

The location is a very important element in your text message that your audience will need to know in order to redeem the offer. State the exact location of your store, even if it is an e-commerce store. Your audience would lose willingness to engage with you as a brand if you grabbed their attention with an offer, without telling them where to go to get it.

State your brand name explicitly

There are different ways to ensure that your audience know where the text is coming from. The sender ID can be used for this purpose, but what your audience is reading is the text itself, so it’s worth signing off with who you are in the body of the text.

SMS campaigns can be hard to get right. While spam in email is something customers are used to ignoring (thanks to spam folders), they aren’t quite as used to it with SMS. That means you want to find the right balance between the content of your message and the time that you send it.