A set of raw numbers won’t particularly help your business improve texting campaigns. Instead, you’ll need to identify patterns in the data and interpret them to show a more holistic picture.
This process, called SMS analytics, helps marketing and operations teams measure the success of their SMS efforts.
In this blog, we’ll discuss everything your business needs to know about SMS analytics. You'll learn its importance, what metrics to track, and best practices.
Jump right to:
- What is SMS analytics?
- 12 SMS metrics to track
- SMS analytics for different use cases
- SMS analytics best practices
<h2 id="What">What is SMS analytics?</h2>
Simply put, SMS analytics is the process of uncovering insights from your tracked texting metrics. Analyzing metrics like open rate, click-through rate, or response rate helps businesses measure the effectiveness of texting campaigns. SMS analytics help businesses make more informed decisions to cut costs, increase sales, and optimize SMS campaigns.
Importance of SMS analytics
SMS analytics can help your business improve many areas of texting communication. For example, you can:
- Boost engagement. Engagement metrics like open or click-through rates can help determine whether a text marketing campaign is resonating with your audience. SMS analytics provide you with the right data-backed insights to align your SMS strategy with consumer preference.
- Improve personalization. By understanding a particular customer’s interactions with your text marketing campaigns, you can increase personalization, tailor messages appropriately, and better understand your customers.
- Uncover the best send time. SMS campaign analytics can help your business find the best time to send your text messages to your customers. This can significantly improve campaign performance for your business.
- Increase ROI. Overall, understanding SMS performance can help you increase your return on investment. It provides your business with real-time data, allowing you to tweak strategies that help you cut overall costs and boost sales.
- Optimize campaign performance easily. SMS marketing analytics give your business insights into which messages are falling flat and which ones are generating more engagement and revenue. You can use these insights to improve your SMS campaigns.
- Forecast and uncover trends. Tracking patterns over time can help your business understand trends and forecast more effectively.
<h2 id="Metrics">12 SMS metrics to track</h2>
Below are some of the most tracked SMS metrics that businesses use to measure texting success.
Delivery rate
This metric provides insight into whether your messages are actually being sent to your recipients. A high delivery rate means more people are receiving your text messages without issue.
Click-through rate
This is the percentage of clicks on a link sent via SMS. It measures what percentage of people clicked the link out of the total number who received your message. If your SMS marketing campaigns contain links, you’ll want to know how often the link is clicked.
How to calculate click-through rate: (Total number of link clicks / Text recipients) x 100.
Conversion rate (CVR)
This metric tracks the percentage of people who act upon your text message. Marketers often use it to understand SMS campaign performance. For example, it can help you understand how many people booked a service or purchased an item after receiving a promotional text.
The calculation for SMS marketing CVR is the following:
Cost per conversion
This metric tracks the amount of money spent per conversion event, such as a sale, sign-up, or booking. It’s expressed as a dollar amount and defines a single conversion. This helps you determine how much you’re spending on each new conversion.
The calculation for SMS CPC is: (Total SMS campaign cost / Number of conversions)
Open rate
The open rate is the percentage of text recipients who opened your text out of the total number of texts delivered. Your SMS open rate can help you determine your engagement rate. Please note that open rate is a metric most SMS platforms don’t track on their own.
Opt-in rate
This is the percentage of people who choose to receive text communication from your business. It can help you refine your SMS keyword strategy and where to collect SMS opt-ins.
Use this calculation: [Number of new subscribers / Total number of people who could opt-in] x 100
Opt-out rate (or unsubscribe rate)
An opt-out rate, also known as an unsubscribe rate, is the percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from a text message campaign. A high unsubscribe rate might indicate that your content is not useful, relevant, or timely.
How to calculate your unsubscribe rate: (Number of unsubscribes / Total number of texts delivered) x 100
Return on investment (ROI)
ROI measures the return or revenue generated from SMS efforts compared to the costs of executing these campaigns. It’s expressed as a percentage and helps determine the overall effectiveness and efficiency of a text message campaign.
How to calculate SMS marketing ROI: [(Amount of sales - What you spent) / Spend ] x 100.
Response rate
Response rate is the percentage of text responses you receive from your contacts. If you send SMS surveys or provide customer support, tracking your response rate helps you better understand engagement.
To calculate response rate: (Number of replies / total texts sent) x 100.
Time to respond
This is a common customer support metric that measures how long it takes for your business to respond to a text message. Because SMS enables rapid back-and-forth communication, customers expect quicker replies using this method. This is a great metric to track specific agent and team performance.
To calculate the average response time, you’ll want to add up the total time it takes to reply to all text tickets and divide that by the number of total tickets
Average response time = Total time taken to reply to text tickets / total number of tickets
Time to resolution
Another popular customer support metric is time to resolution. This is the time it takes for your agents to resolve a ticket. Measuring the duration it takes to close an SMS conversation can help you turn it into a more efficient communication channel for your company.
To calculate the average time-to-resolution, divide the total resolution time by the number of tickets.
Messages sent
This is the total number of messages sent by your organization. This helps you understand how many text messages you send to contacts in any given time period. It can also help you better understand business texting utilization and determine your costs.
Messages received
This refers to the total number of messages received by your organization. This will help you understand how many customers are using SMS as a way to reach your business.
<h2 id="Applications">SMS analytics for different applications</h2>
The metrics that you should track and analyze will differ based on your texting use case and industry. Let’s examine the different uses cases of SMS analytics and which metrics will be most useful for each.
Customer support
SMS is an efficient support channel when appropriately executed due to its widespread availability, speed, and convenience. To ensure it’s a value-add for your company, here are some of the core SMS metrics to track and analyze.
- Time to respond. Customers expect quick replies to their issues and problems. Maintaining a low time to respond is critical to the success of a support team. Track this metric to analyze how your team performs on this over time.
- Time to resolution. Another core metric for support teams is how long it takes to resolve an issue. Tracking time to resolution can help identify areas for improvement.
- Number of inbound messages. This metric helps businesses understand ticket volume trends. Analyze this SMS metric to better understand how often people reach out to your SMS support channel, so you can ensure proper staffing.
- Contacts waiting. This is the number of contacts waiting in the queue for a reply. You always want to keep this number low, as it typically means you’re also keeping time to respond to a minimum.
- Average number of messages to resolution. Another metric that can help you uncover messaging efficiencies, is tracking how many messages are exchanged until a resolution is reached. This can help you identify how to solve issues in a more efficient way.
B2B sales
Many sales teams utilize SMS in their communication with leads to speed up the process and make scheduling more efficient. Let’s take a look at some top metrics to track and analyze in hopes of improving sales SMS outreach.
- Time to first contact. The faster a salesperson replies to inbound leads, the more likely those leads are to choose your company. That makes measuring time to first contact a particularly important metric to track. The lower this metric is, the more likely it is that you can close more deals.
- Response rate. This metric is useful for sales teams as it can indicate how leads engage with you via SMS. You can use this to better inform your strategy over time.
- Lead conversion rate. You want to understand how many leads convert to paying customers. This can help you understand how best to engage with your contacts.
- Average sales cycle length. In B2B industries, the sales cycle is lengthier. SMS is a rapid two-way communication channel. As a result, you should measure your average sales cycle and if text messaging is contributing to any decrease.
D2C marketing
When it comes to direct-to-consumer SMS marketing, there are a few key metrics that businesses should monitor. Here are the top metrics to consider.
- Click-through rate. CTR is a critical success metric for marketing teams as it helps you understand how many people are engaging with the marketing messages you send them.
- Conversion rate. You’ll want to track your conversion rate from SMS as it will help you determine the performance of your campaign. Conversion rate helps you track how many people signed up, purchased, or booked your services.
- Cost per conversion. To get a sense of how cost-effective your SMS marketing strategy is, cost per conversion will help you get there. Understanding a specific dollar amount per lead helps you understand the value of any marketing channel.
- ROI. This is a gold standard marketing metric, which helps you determine overall revenue compared to expenses. A strong ROI means profit and a successful marketing campaign.
- Unsubscribe rate. Keep your unsubscribe rate in check. If you have a high unsubscribe rate for any given campaign, it may show you that the content was not particularly helpful or relevant. It may also be time to clean up your SMS list.
Operations and logistics
There are many use cases for texting in operations and logistics, from sharing timely updates with field workers to coordinating supply orders and sharing delivery notifications.
When it comes to operations and logistics use cases, here are some SMS metrics worth tracking.
- Delivery rate. You’ll want to make sure your delivery notification messages are sent successfully. Keep the message delivery rate in mind to ensure your texts and automations are firing correctly.
- Time to respond. Sometimes your field workers will have pressing questions. Ensure they’re able to do their best work with timely replies. Keep this metric in mind to improve operations.
- Messages sent. This is an SMS metric you’ll want to understand to see how often your team reaches out via SMS to improve operations.
<h2 id="Best">SMS analytics best practices</h2>
This section will walk through some best practices to ensure you’re getting the best data-driven insights.
- Define key metrics. You want to ensure you’re tracking the metrics and data that will help you meet your objectives. For example, if you want to boost ROI, you can look at optimizing things like click-through rate and message deliverability.
- Pick the right business texting platform. One of the best ways to ensure your business is tracking data properly and uncovering insights over time is to pick the right SMS platform. Each platform tracks different metrics.
For example, an SMS marketing platform will likely have some internal link-tracking tools, while a customer service SMS platform will have data about response time. Ensure you pick the right platform for your needs. - Add visuals. One of the best ways to see trends in data is to visualize them using charts and graphs. Visuals will help you tell a story and explain the data to key stakeholders.
- Integrate your tools. Once you pick an SMS platform, make sure you integrate it with other tools like your CRM system, scheduling software, or other communication tools. This will help you gain a more holistic data picture and tie metrics to specific users.
- Utilize other tracking tools. Other platforms can help you track specific SMS metrics. For example, Google Analytics can help you measure the performance of links in your SMS campaigns. However, please note that link shorteners are banned in business texting.
- Monitor metrics continuously. This will help you understand your data and uncover patterns, ensuring the best data-informed decisions.
- Establish benchmarks and goals. Once you start tracking your metrics continuously to understand trends, you can get a sense of your benchmarks and set improvement goals.
Harness the right texting insights with Textline
Do you want to start analyzing texting performance but don’t know where to start? Choose Textline as your SMS platform and you’ll have the tools you need to start tracking and analyzing powerful metrics from day one.
Textline features built-in metrics and insights so you can view trends by day, agent, team, department, and more.
Interested in trying the platform first? You can do so for free for 14 days. Claim your free Textline trial here.
