How to choose the best SMS marketing service for your political campaign

The right marketing platform and strategy are essential for any company, business, or political campaign. There are SMS marketing services out there that are not geared towards political campaigns, and this can make all the difference in your success as a marketer. Crafting the perfect SMS marketing campaign is so important that in 2020 SMS marketing budgets increased an average of 61%.

Schedule Your Texts

The option to schedule texts is highly important and recommended. Just the same way you can schedule ADs on social media, you want to be able to schedule the time that your texts go out. Timing is key, and you want to be able to send out the right texts at the right time.

You also want to ensure that you are sending them out at practical times. The best part about our platform is that when you use your agents, you aren’t restricted when it comes to time. Morning or night, you can send out messages that work best for your voters and your staff. A lot of SMS opt-in campaigns even ask for voters to specify the best time to text or contact them. If this is something within your accessibility, it may prove beneficial especially when it comes to P2P texting.

The Ability to Choose

Campaign marketing is not one size fits all, which is why you need a customizable SMS marketing service. Whether you need an SMS campaign that is managed by one of our experts, or you prefer to utilize our self-service marketing options, the choice is yours. Right down to the length of your message and the price point that you are trying to stick to. Check out our cost calculator to see what SMS service is the best option for your campaign budget. You can customize the number of leads you will be sending your text to.

With various options and a refillable account, you get to choose just how much you spend and how many texts you send out. Not only that, but you want a marketing service that is 100% transparent. The last thing you want is to sign up in agreement to one price and then have all these “extras” thrown at you.

List Scrubbing

RoboCent offers voter data scrubbing. What is that you ask? This is when we take your voter data and we essentially complete it/perfect it. Perhaps you have some names and numbers on your list but you don’t know if it is a home phone number or a mobile number. Well, you can’t send texts to a home phone, so we scrub it so you know what is what. This service also checks for duplicate or invalid data on your list. In addition, we also append voter data. Which is perfect for any holes you may have in your voter data lists. For example, if you have a name but no contact info, or incorrect/out-of-date contact info.

Real People, Every Time

SMS laws and rules can be tricky, which is why we make it simple. We use real agents, every message, every time. It gets even better because we give you the option to choose between your agents or our agents. Either way, you have a real agent sending out each and every message to your voters. No need to include an “opt-out” option. When you use your own agents, you can even hold conversations with voters, responding to their messages and questions as they come in. How great is that? It is the little things that will make all the difference in your SMS campaign.

What happens if voters want to opt out of receiving your messages though? No problem. Our system is equipped to automatically handle keyword phrases like “opt-out” or “stop.” If a voter sends a keyword like this, then we automatically opt them out. This way you stay compliant with SMS laws and regulations.

Get Voters on the Phone

We live in a very busy world. Some people work 9-5, some work graveyard shifts, others run their own business, etc. Chances are if an individual is busy at work or on the go, they are not going to answer your unknown call that pops up on their cell phone. This can make it very difficult to actually get some one-on-one time with voters. This one-on-one time is important though. This is how campaign workers/volunteers are going to be able to connect with voters, give them your pitch as to why your campaign is the best campaign and why you are the ideal candidate.

With that said, SMS can be a great time to schedule appointments and a designated time to call and chat with specific voters. You can send out a text like:

“Hi Brian, this is Joe from [Insert Campaign Name/Candidate]. I would love to get you on the phone to chat about this upcoming election. When is a good time to talk?”

First off, this message is assumptive, you are assuming that Brian wants to talk with you. You aren’t asking if they want to talk but rather asking for a time to talk. With conversations like this, you want to eliminate a yes/no response because chances are the recipient will respond no. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for Brian to (fingers crossed) respond with a good time to give him a call. P2P is a great tool and perfect for these kinds of personalized messages. This kind of personalization is what your campaign needs.

Data and Response Management

So you sent out messages to your targeted voter list...now what? Well, you want to be able to have easy access to their responses, where you can organize and build statistics based on their responses. So, if you are measuring how many voters are in support of your campaign, you are going to want an SMS platform that organizes and makes all of the responses easily accessible.

From here you can regroup those to who you sent out your initial text to, and build a game plan. For those already in support of you, you might reach out to them for donations next. The individuals who said no that they don’t support you, reach out again and try to find out what is causing this decision. Lastly, for those on the fence, try creating a message campaign that is geared towards educating them and answering any questions that might be causing their uncertainty.

Data management is important so that your team can sort through voters based on various demographics, past support, and more. Knowing exactly who you are texting is very important, and you don’t want a non-supporter to end up in a group of supporters. Organization is key if you want to win the vote!

Templated Messages

What you don’t want P2P agents to be doing is thinking on their feet. While resourcefulness is good, it is even smarter to have well thought out and perfectly crafted messages ready for various voter responses. You want your SMS service to have pre-templated messages ready to send. Not only does this help build a meaningful conversation with voters, allowing agents to quickly answer any questions, but it helps streamline your SMS campaign. The last thing you want is for a conversation with a voter to die because the agent didn’t respond fast enough, or respond properly to the voter's initial response. Plus, having various responses ready for various types of supporters (full support, no support, and on the fence) is a great way to earn voter support/trust.

Easy to Manage Data

Having an easy to use customer management system is key. You and your team want to easily be able to see and find voter data. The last thing you want is voter data all over the place, in your system, our system, in computer files, etc. Instead, you can upload your files and combine them with the voter data files that we provide. No searching or missing information, just seamless data integration.

Easy to Learn

You want a texting platform that is easy to use and easy to train people how to use. This comes in handy especially when you are using volunteers who may or may not be long-term volunteers. When you have volunteers coming in and out of the campaign office, you need to be able to get everyone up to date and quickly.

Get Started Today

With RoboCent we can get your SMS marketing campaign up and running in two hours. That’s what we call easy to learn, quick, and efficient. No matter what stage of the campaign process you are in, we have the platform campaigns need to educate voters, collect volunteers, gather donations, get out the vote, and more. Don’t choose an SMS marketing service that doesn’t check all the boxes, make sure you choose one that is going to do everything you need it to do and then some.