SMS Marketing Tutorial | HubSpot Marketing Hub

The average person spends about five to six hours on their phone every day. And during that time, if we're not scrolling through social media or our favorite websites, we're probably texting. In 2023, 15 million texts were sent per minute and 70% of people opened a new text message within five minutes of receiving it. Needless to say, this channel offers a lot of opportunity for businesses looking to reach high intent audiences no matter where they're located. And thankfully, with HubSpot's SMS add on, it's never been easier to create these SMS messages and reach your audience in way. Here's how it works. So as mentioned, the SMS tool comes with a bit of a prerequisite checklist that you want to make sure that you've completed before diving in and creating using the tool. So the first is that you need to make sure that you have the Add on enabled in your HubSpot account. Then from there you need to make sure that you've registered your business to have a phone number with the mobile carriers. This is actually a process that you can do in HubSpot and we've tried to make it as streamlined as possible. But you definitely need a phone number to send SMS messages from. So definitely requisite number two and then number three is that you actually have to start obtaining the explicit consent of your audience members that you plan to send these messages to. It's actually illegal in most countries to directly message someone's personal number from your business if they haven't explicitly given you permission to do so. So you want to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success, whether that's on your website, in your social campaigns, email campaigns, or even in store to get people excited and signing up to communicate with you in this channel. But once you have all three of those steps in place, you can start creating and crafting these messages in HubSpot. To do so in your HubSP account, navigate to your marketing drop down menu and then select sms. This will take you into your SMS tool. Now the layout of this tool is going to feel very familiar. On the left hand side you have the Manage tab and this is going to show you the drafts, anything that you have scheduled, and the messages that you've already sent. You also have an archived area if you need to make sure that you're not deleting past drafts, but you want to make sure that they're kind of clean and out of the way. You also have this analyze area which is going to give you that high level overview of what's working and what's not, the overall performance of this as a channel and how people are reacting. So it's a great way to, especially on a quarterly basis, sort of review how well this is working for your different audience segments and what may not be resonating as much as you think about your various campaigns. Before diving into the tool, I also recommend checking out this Compare Messages area, especially after you've started to experiment with different messaging strategies or different tones, working with different audience segments to see how they react to this channel, because you can use this area to Compare up to 10, 10 different SMS messages against each other. So rather than AB testing, you can almost think about this as like multivariant testing because you're able to see a preview of each of your messages as well as a breakdown of how they performed against each other to start to get a sense of like what's really working and why that might be versus what's not really resonating with your audience. But let's say we're rearing to go. We want to create that new campaign, that new message to do so in the top right click Create Message. Then we're going to start with our internal name. This is going to just tell our teams what the spec message was. So maybe we're excited and we're creating something for our spring campaign. We could name it something that regardless of the exact name you choose, just try to keep it consistent. So it's really obvious for any of your teammates coming into this tool what they're looking at when they see specific names. Once you've done creating an internal SMS name down here, click Create Message and this is going to take you into the editor should feel pretty familiar, especially if you've reviewed the email tool. There's a couple differences here that are worth calling out though. Unlike email, you actually need to be even more succinct when it comes to your SMS messages, so it's a best practice to keep it under 300 characters. Now, the reason that is is SMS messages actually have a character limit. So once you start going over the limit, it starts sending your message as multiple messages, which just decreases the engagement in your messages over time. So here you want to be super succinct, super punchy with your copy and once you're feeling really good with the copy and the preview and how everything's looking, you can then navigate to the Settings tab. And this is going to make sure all of your defaults are feeling correct. So your internal name's correct, the default language is correct, and Then if you're associating this with a larger promotional efforts in one of your campaigns, you can actually associate this SMS message with that using the campaign dropdown. Then using the sending tab, we can get into some of the good stuff. So here you can definitely schedule this for later. That's a really popular option, especially if it's associated with the campaign. But you can choose to send out your SMS immediately if you know that this is a promotion that has to go out as quickly as possible. Maybe it's a time sensitive campaign that you're reacting to. If you are scheduling for later, it's kind of a best practice to think about this in terms of, yes, your recipient's time zones, but also the Persona. So whether you're B2B or B2C, you may want to consider starting on weekdays between working hours to get a sense of how your Personas are reacting to this kind of outreach and messaging. That said, your business is unique, your product is unique, and your Personas are unique. So you can definitely consider experimenting on time and when you're sending it on specific days to find out what res resonates best for your audience. Now, speaking of recipients, that brings us to the recipients area. And the send to dropdown is going to let you select a list of the folks that you want to send this specific SMS to. Now you also have this option of the don't send to list area. Now this is going to be particularly important if you have various segments that you're nurturing with slightly different content or promotional offers, because it's essentially going to explicitly make sure that they do not receive this specific campaign. Again, as you have certain audiences that you're nurturing using different campaigns, this becomes more and more important. Now we need to make sure that this message renders the way that we're expecting to. So another great practice to consider is the send test message area. This allows you to send this text message to your team or even to yourself, just to make sure that everything, whether that's your words or your emojis or whatever you're sending to your audiences is actually rendering as expected. Like email, it's just a best practice to make sure everything's firing as expected before you send it to your entire audience. Now, once everything is looking good and feeling good, you can then go to this review and schedule area if you have this message designated to be sent. Now this is going to allow you to immediately send this message to your audiences. Or in the case of this message, it's going to allow us to Schedule it for later by clicking Schedule Message now. Throughout this tutorial, you may have seen this little widget and thought, jory, what is this and why is it about to save my life? This is for my professional and enterprise users. And peanut butter me jelly. This is a shortcut to the HubSpot collaboration tools. And when I tell you this is going to make you more efficient, I mean it. So HubSpot's collaboration tools facilitate efficient teamwork, allowing teams to more easily communicate, coordinate tasks and collaborate in real time. This is because you can create comments and comment mention people on the fly, and even assign tasks to make sure that your team knows what they need to be doing, what they need to be reviewing, and how they can help make sure that your promotion goes out on time. So by streamlining processes and promoting this seamless collaboration, these tools are really designed to help teams effectively work together to achieve better results. You even have access to a quick marketing calendar so everyone stays on the same page, all without interrupting your day to day workflow. That's working smarter, not harder. Have you subscribed to our YouTube channel yet? We have a ton of tutorials just like this one that cover best practices, technical tips and more. Just be sure to hit that subscribe button. Trust me, you won't want to miss the amazing content we have coming your way. I'm Jori from HubSpot and thanks for watching.