SMS Affiliate Marketing 101: Driving Customers Home Through SMS

Oleksandr Rohovnin

Content Marketer

11 minute read

As an affiliate marketer, you must be looking for ways to diversify your marketing strategies so you can generate more customers and sell them at a higher price. If so, SMS affiliate marketing might be an overlooked gem that will help you take your pay-per-call game to the next level.

SMS messages might not be the most intuitive strategy for affiliate marketing, but this only means you can beat the competition in such an elaborate way. Don’t get me wrong, though: SMS messages are incredibly effective, offering a 98% open rate on average, which surpasses any other existing marketing channels by miles, including email.

With a well-thought-out SMS affiliate marketing strategy, you can:

• Ensure personal communication with customers
• Reach subscribers when they are prone to making a purchase
• Grow your affiliate marketing revenues and learn more about your customers

SMS marketing is quite simple to integrate into your existing affiliate marketing strategy, opening new revenue streams and ensuring omnichannel experiences for your audience.

Source: GIPHY

Read on to learn everything you need to know about SMS affiliate marketing, including how to coordinate it with your other affiliate marketing avenues.

Download your free email deliverability guide to synergize email and SMS marketing.

How SMS Affiliate Marketing Works

SMS affiliate marketing isn’t different from any other form of affiliate marketing, except that it involves two extra parties: an SMS gateway or service provider and a mobile network operator, both having an impact on the success of your campaigns.

SMS Affiliate Marketing Roles

A reliable service provider and mobile network operator guarantee that all SMS messages are delivered without delay. I recommend reading this SMS deliverability guide to anyone who needs to improve their deliverability rates.

At its core, SMS affiliate marketing is the same good old affiliate marketing: affiliates promote products in exchange for a commission. However, it differs from content, email, SEO, and social media affiliate marketing.

Here’s how SMS affiliate marketing stands against other forms of affiliate marketing:

Here are some examples from popular niches:

One feature that unites all these examples is the opt-out, which is crucial to keeping your SMS list clean and letting customers unsubscribe if they want to.

There are many more features and SMS strategies to follow, though.

Read on to learn how to drive traffic to your affiliate links in SMS messages.

SMS Marketing Strategy Under the Microscope: How To Acquire Customers in 7 Steps

Whether you use P2P or A2P SMS messaging, it’s not enough to deliver your SMS to the inbox – you need clicks and purchases. For that, the first step is creating an SMS marketing strategy, ven if you already run other affiliate campaigns and assume you know what to do.

Below are 7 steps to creating a profitable SMS marketing strategy.

Step 1 – Identify Your Target Buyers

If you’re using other digital affiliate marketing channels – website, blog, social media, etc. – you can get a head start in identifying your target buyers (and especially so if you’re already running affiliate tracking software). Since you already know a lot about your customers, you only need to determine which of them are a good fit for marketing SMS messages.

SMS messaging has several key differences you might want to consider:

• Short messages: You only have 160 characters for the GSM 7-bit encoding standard and 70 characters for the Unicode encoding to make it work unless you want to split your message into several parts and pay for each one.
• Immediate response: Many SMS recipients either engage immediately or don’t engage at all, so you should be ready for the contact right after blasting your campaigns.
• Compliance: SMS correspondence is subject to strict regulation compliance, so you must abide by local and international rules.

For example, time-sensitive shoppers looking for limited-time offers and flash sales are a great audience for SMS marketing, whereas B2B clients are among the worst. But then again, you can make an educated guess if you have the right software in place.

Step 2 – Identify Your Unique Selling Proposition

Once you know the needs and wants of your recipients, you can create a unique selling proposition for them or rework the one you’re using for other acquisition channels. Remember, though, that there are only 160 symbols at your disposal.

Here are some marketing SMS examples:

• Finance: Hi George, Get 5% cashback with the U.S.-leading SavvyBank credit card. Apply now and get $50 on top [affiliate link]. Reply STOP to opt out.
• Insurance: Hi Michael, Join the 100,000 insureds to secure your family’s future with tailored life insurance from EternityLife: [affiliate link]. Reply STOP to opt out.

It may not be possible to fit in all the advantages of your offer, so choose the ones that separate you from other businesses. Consider the creative materials your advertisers or affiliate networks provide – they might know better how to convert their traffic.

Read also: How To Build Affiliate Marketing Content That Ranks

Step 3 – Choose the Right SMS Affiliate Program

When integrating an SMS marketing strategy, you can either continue with your current affiliate program or – if none of your programs fit – search for one tailored to your needs.

Here are the features to look for in an SMS-focused affiliate program:

• Creative materials: SMS templates that have proven effective for other affiliates might help you understand what customers your advertisers need.
• Tracking and reporting:Tracking SMS messages is different from monitoring website, email, and social media users, so it’s essential to have SMS-focused tracking and reporting technologies.
• Compliance:Examine what traffic, SMS, and niches your affiliate program allows and whether it complies with national and international regulations.

Other than that, the affiliate program must provide good rewards, convenient payment methods, and a long cookie duration period so you can benefit from delayed sales.

Step 4 – Develop SMS Sequences for Each Target Group

Having a unique selling proposition at hand and knowing the limits of your affiliate program, you can develop a series of nurturing SMS that drive your subscribers to a conversion. You might not be able to do that with your first SMS, so SMS sequences are necessary for sustainable lead acquisition.

Here’s an example of an SMS sequence for auto insurance:

Step 5 – Optimize Your SMS Campaigns for Maximum Engagement

SMS advertising spending is constantly growing, so you have to compete with brands that know how to drive sales with text messages. To win in this tough game, try and ensure maximum engagement with practices:

Step 6 – Automate Your SMS Affiliate Marketing

Tracking, analyzing, and optimizing SMS campaigns is impossible without dedicated software, especially if you generate traffic from different sources. For serious affiliates, it’s more convenient to have a complete SMS solution that integrates with website, email, and social media tracking and analytics products (and it’s even better if it all comes in one software suite).

I’m talking about E-Delivery, an SMS and email marketing software that covers text messages from top to bottom and coordinates with other Phonexa performance marketing products.

Here’s what E-Delivery is about:

• Granular segmentation: You know where your customers come from, how they interact with SMS messages, and who of them converts and when. You can divide a vast customer base into micro-segments and create tailored messages for them.
• Advanced reporting: The campaign, delivery, recipient, and geolocation summaries enable real-time and strategic updates so you can adjust underperforming campaigns on time and double down on the profitable ones.
• A/B testing: Through A/B tests, you can see how different SMS campaigns perform, up to six templates simultaneously.

E-Delivery allows you to create effective SMS messages in minutes and send them to the right customer at the right time without effort. This is especially valuable for larger teams that benefit from affiliate marketing automation and a uniform work environment.

Step 7 – Coordinate SMS Affiliate Marketing with Other Affiliate Marketing Avenues

The final step in your SMS marketing strategy is to coordinate your text campaigns with other marketing channels.

And this is where E-Delivery shines.

• First, E-Delivery synergizes with Opt-Intel, a suppression list management solution that helps keep your SMS list clean and active
• Second, E-Delivery integrates with six other Phonexa products for web and call lead management.

Many aspiring affiliates fail to realize that different marketing campaigns should work as a symphony rather than isolated endeavors. To create such a symphony, you need a free data flow within a comprehensive affiliate marketing ecosystem.

This is exactly what Phonexa is—a complete affiliate marketing ecosystem that unites everything you need for affiliate and regular marketing under one roof. Phonexa closes gaps and loopholes and allows you to get the most out of your campaigns.

Here are the eight proprietary solutions you get at one price (online price calculator):

Get your all-in-one affiliate marketing automation suite now, or book a demo to learn more about Phonexa.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best SMS marketing strategies for affiliate marketing?

The best lead acquisition strategies for SMS affiliate marketing are drip sequences and triggered messages. It’s all about sending the right message to the right recipient at the right time.

What are the best ways to get SMS traffic?

You can drive SMS traffic from your website, blog, social media, webinars, and any other sources that allow you to collect phone numbers. To convert these customers, you have to nurture them with quality, well-timed SMS messages.

How do you get traffic to your affiliate links in SMS messages?

To drive traffic to affiliate links in SMS messages, you need to send your SMS at the right time to a high-intent recipient, personalize the content, and include a clear and persuasive call to action.

How do you choose an affiliate program for SMS marketing?

When choosing an affiliate program for SMS marketing, pay attention to the payout size and structure, creative materials, software, restrictions, and whether the program is known to be successful for SMS campaigns.

Tailored SMS programs might be more effective than generic ones. For example, if you only drive customers through SMS messages, you may need a dedicated bulk SMS affiliate program.