Labor Day Marketing Moment: How to Leverage SMS Marketing for Perfect Promotion

What Is SMS Marketing?

First, SMS marketing is sending text messages to contacts regarding appointments, reminders, alerts, promotions, and offers.

Businesses and organizations, from C corporations to nonprofits, use text marketing as part of their overall marketing plan to reach their audiences quickly and effectively. You might have also heard it referenced as text marketing, mass texting, or bulk texting—but they’re all different terms for the same thing.

What Are Some of the Benefits of Using SMS Marketing for Labor Day Promotions?

We could discuss the benefits of using SMS marketing for Labor Day promotions in length, but here, we’ll keep it short and sweet: SMS marketing has high open rates, allows for more personalized messages, provides trackable results, and is cost-effective.

High Open Rates

SMS messages have a very high open rate of 98%. For context, the average email open rate is around 18%. That’s a whopping 80% difference in whether someone is reading your message or not!

When you’re looking for Labor Day marketing ideas, it’s necessary to incorporate text marketing so that your promotions are more likely to be seen by customers.

Personalized Messages

Now more than ever, consumers want to feel like the ads they see are personal and more relevant to them. Your business can stand out amid the online marketing static by targeting every message to your contacts.

That’s where SMS marketing shines. Each text message can be personalized to each recipient by using customer segmentation features. Group your contacts by demographics, location, purchase history, and preferences to ensure that they’re receiving the right message at the right time. This way, they are more likely to read and engage with your message.

Trackable Results

SMS messages are trackable, so you can see how many people are opening and engaging with your texts and clicking on links. SMS marketing platforms, like EZ Texting, provide powerful SMS analytics and reporting features so that you can see how your Labor Day marketing messages are performing. Learn how click-through rates, bounce rates, and other text marketing terms affect ROI.

Cost Effective

While SMS marketing requires ongoing investment in your chosen SMS marketing provider, keywords, and individual messages, it is a cost-effective way to reach a large audience.

What Are Some of the Best Practices for SMS Marketing for Labor Day Promotions?

Let’s explore some of the best practices for SMS marketing for Labor Day promotions so that your business can enjoy the holiday weekend successfully. Keep your messages short, write for your audience, personalize, and offer a good incentive (aka a deal!).

Keep Your Messages Short

Consumers have short attention spans, so if your message is too long or wordy, chances are that they won’t spend time reading it. Get to the point as quickly as possible and make your message clear.

Plus, SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters, so you’ll need to make sure that your intended message fits into that parameter.

Write for Your Audience

All Labor Day marketing messages need to be written for your intended audience. Are you targeting families doing last-minute back-to-school shopping or homeowners tackling outdoor jobs? Maybe you’re motivating young shoppers to take advantage of your online sale.

Do you see how each of these might be vastly different types of customers? That’s why it’s important to write for the correct audience. Avoid using jargon or technical terms that your customers might not understand or identify with.

Personalize Your Messages

Help your customers to feel seen by personalizing your Labor Day marketing messages. Leverage your customer segmentation tactics to create targeted texts.

For example, try to include the contact’s first name and reference their past purchase behavior or interest. You could also include location-specific information for Labor Day, like “beating the heat” for customers who live in the South.

Offer an Incentive

No Labor Day marketing idea is complete without some sort of incentive for the customer. There’s no use in sending out a mass text if you’re not motivating your contact list to take action. Spur them to look at the online sale, make the offer time-sensitive, remind them of why they should be shopping (school, home-related tasks, etc.), and so on.

Essential SMS Marketing Features for Labor Day

To create the most effective SMS marketing strategy for your Labor Day promotions, you need SMS marketing features that engage your audience and make your team’s communication processes a whole lot easier. Here are the features (all of which can be found on the EZ Texting platform) to incorporate into your marketing game plan.

AI Compose

When you’re churning out Labor Day texts, you need a solution that helps you craft engaging, performance-boosting messages while saving you valuable time. AI Compose is your generative AI assistant in the text-writing department. With this tool, you and your marketing teams can create effective messaging that is tailored to your audience and aligned with your brand voice and tone. Whatever your Labor Day marketing goal for the text blast, AI Compose considers that to produce three targeted messages customized to your needs.

With this useful SMS marketing feature, you can spend less time typing up SMS content and more time thinking about the big picture.

Team Inbox

One way to create more opportunities for engagement over the holiday is incorporating two-way texting, where your contacts can reply to your SMS texts. But with more SMS conversations comes higher effort and output needed from your marketing and customer support teams. That’s where EZ Texting’s Team Inbox can help.

With Team Inbox, your team can collaboratively handle lead generation and customer responses and inquiries, creating a more consistent experience both internally and for your contacts. And when you pair this tool with AI Reply, you can reply to and connect with your audience more quickly while saving your team time. It’s a Labor Day marketing no-brainer.

Text Automation

Engage with customers at the right times with text automation features, like reminder campaigns, triggered messages (for things like abandoned carts or event signups), or scheduled texts.

For example, your business might be running a three-day promotion on one of its products, ending at the end of the Labor Day holiday. You would use text automation features to send reminders about the promotion at different times during the sale, with each message motivating a little more FOMO.

Text automation allows your brand to connect with and nurture customers in a relevant and time-sensitive manner. It also saves your team time by deploying SMS texts. Just create your message once and move on.

MMS Texts

While SMS texts are highly effective, has your brand tried sending MMS texts? MMS means that you can include images, gifs, videos, and even more characters than an SMS text allows. While these types of texts typically cost more on an SMS marketing platform than SMS texts cost, the return on investment is worth it. In fact, in an EZ Texting survey, 61% of respondents say that they’re more likely to click and purchase a product via text when it’s promoted with an image.

So, whether you’re highlighting a Labor Day sale for the at-home DIYers, students going back to school, or the lucky ones taking vacations, try utilizing MMS texts to engage more customers.

SMS List Growth Tools

While much of your SMS marketing for Labor Day will focus on communicating with current contacts, acquiring new ones is equally as important. After all, the more SMS subscribers you have, the more potential customers you have. With unique SMS keywords, lead generation is made easier — and more engaging.

This simple but powerful text marketing feature allows your company to promote sales or events using a special keyword, which new contacts will text to your dedicated number. Once they text, they’re in! And all with little effort on your end. EZ Texting offers unlimited SMS keywords, and the cost is already wrapped up in each plan.

Another way to grow your subscriber list is through sign-up forms. It’s important to utilize several lead generation methods to ensure that you’re capturing as many leads as possible across multiple touchpoints. Adding digital sign-up forms to your website (both the desktop and mobile versions) makes it easy for consumers who visit your site to sign up for your SMS marketing list. By simply filling out a few information fields (and only taking a couple of seconds out of their day), website visitors will receive a triggered text message inviting them to opt into your contact list. Now, your new audience will receive your Labor Day and future marketing messages.

Contact Upload and Management

Having a quick and seamless way to upload and manage contacts is key. Your SMS marketing platform should have a way to bulk upload a contact list, as this is the fastest way to get contacts into your account. EZ Texting offers an easy bulk-upload method and even a contact list template so that you know which fields are required. As you move through the upload process, you can also segment contacts into specific groups, making it easy to send targeted messages to them in the future.

One of the best parts about EZ Texting’s contact management feature is that if you have keywords set up, when someone texts that keyword to your dedicated number, they are automatically added to your contact list — no upload needed.

What Are Some of the Mistakes to Avoid When SMS Marketing for Labor Day Promotions?

Here are some of the mistakes to avoid when SMS marketing for Labor Day promotions:

• Sending too many messages. With text message marketing, there’s a sweet spot when it comes to the number of messages you send. If your customers feel bombarded by your SMS blast, they’re likely to unsubscribe from your contact list. Aim to send no more than one to two messages per week leading up to Labor Day and one reminder text on the weekend. You can use SMS marketing automation to schedule text messages.
• Not including a CTA. Always include a CTA (call to action) in your Labor Day marketing messages. This is what motivates people to engage with your holiday promotion.
• Not using clear language. With the influx of spam text messages these days, people are on high alert. Don’t let your text blast be considered spammy. Clearly state your business’s name, the offer or promotion, and opt-out instructions. Want to minimize opt outs? Here are nine tips for improving customer SMS engagement.
• Not tracking your results. You should be tracking all SMS marketing campaigns to assess their performance and make sure that they’re meeting your business goals. If they’re not, use your data insights to tweak the strategy.

How Can I Create Effective SMS Marketing Campaigns for Labor Day Promotions?

Check out our helpful list to create effective SMS marketing campaigns for Labor Day promotions.

1. Define Your Goals

Define the goals of your Labor Day SMS campaign before sending out text messages so that you know what you’re measuring. Your goal is probably to boost Labor Day sales—whether online or in-store. However other marketing campaign goals could involve customers registering for an event, donating to a fundraiser, or referring a friend.

2. Target Your Audience

We’ve discussed targeting your audience earlier in this article, but we have to mention it again in this list for creating an effective SMS marketing campaign. Knowing your audience is one of the cornerstones of SMS marketing 101.

For example, for Labor Day real estate marketing, you wouldn’t send open-house text message reminders to clients that you just successfully led through escrow. This would be confusing and a bit off-putting.

Make sure to tailor messages to each customer segment.

3. Create Compelling Content

Once you’ve defined your goals and have your audience in mind, it’s time to craft your message. Your content should be unique to your brand, use your brand’s tone of voice, engage your audience, offer value, and motivate customers to take action.

Learn more tips for optimizing your texts. We even have convenient SMS templates for those writer’s-block moments.

4. Use an SMS Marketing Platform

Choose an SMS marketing platform that makes creating, sending, and tracking your Labor Day marketing texts easy. Not sure where to look? Well, you’re in the right place!

EZ Texting is your all-in-one text marketing solution. From managing contacts and scheduling automated messages to tracking results, we make the SMS marketing process seamless. Plus, plans start as low as $20 per month, so your bottom line will thank you.

5. Test and Optimize Your Campaigns

See how different messages perform by conducting A/B testing, which means sending different messages to two contacts in the same group. This allows you to test which CTA works best, which tone of voice or verbiage is the most engaging, and so on. Once you know the most successful message, you can tailor future messages.

Have a Successful Labor Day Marketing Moment

There’s no need to shout your Labor Day deals from the rooftops — use text marketing instead! Labor Day marketing using SMS is one of the best ways to reach and engage with your audience while boosting sales.

Start your free trial today and see for yourself.