From makeup product drop promos to spa appointment reminders, SMS is dominating the beauty industry. After all, it’s an instant way to communicate with mobile-orientated masses.
With Black Friday coming, there’s a chance to level up. Backed by an industry-leading platform and team of SMS experts, your beauty brand can boost engagement and team efficiency (almost instantly). Here, we list the top tools and tips to help you do just that.
Schedule messages before Black Friday
One simple way to get ahead of the game on Black Friday is to actually send your message ahead of Black Friday.
This doesn’t have to be a real-time offer – you can pre-empt the promotions you’ll be offering on Black Friday so your customers can plan their beauty product purchases. The scheduling tool makes this happen. Queue your messages in advance to work around your schedule, and the optimised time of your audience.
Here’s a great example of a teaser message, where a spa/beauty brand builds up the Black Friday hype and gets on the recipient’s radar, allowing them to prepare for what’s coming:
From: GalSpa
Hey Sarah, Amy here from Gal’s Spa. it’s not Black Friday yet, which means I won’t tell you all about the sitewide 50% discount we’re giving to loyal customers like you this Friday when you use the code OOPS21. Ooooops. Did I just give it away? Don’t tell the boss 😫
Scheduled for: Monday 21st Nov @ 1pm
Top scheduling tip: Think about the timing
As you can see, this campaign is scheduled for the Monday preceding Black Friday at 1pm. In this scenario, the buyer persona is a 30-year-old young professional woman. She likes quality skincare products, but is wary of balancing this with a multitude of financial commitments. At 1pm, she’s likely on her lunchbreak, and especially on Monday, looking for something to look forward to.
The time and date you choose to send is entirely dependent on your audience and the times they’re likely to be more receptive to different types of messages.
Create clear call to actions with trackable links
Despite being the most important aspect of a campaign, call to actions all too easily become afterthoughts in messaging. This is where you can really stand out versus your competitors and ensure your CTA aligns with the objective.
Looking to generate more leads? Lure recipients in with a sign-up offer and link them through to a sign-up form to future offers. Want to increase brand awareness on Black Friday? Push your target audience towards a promotion on your core beauty products.
That’s the content part. Now here’s the clever tool that helps analyse – and drive – engagement towards your call to action. The ‘track URL’ tool shortens and tracks the link you include in your campaign for a concise and trackable call to action. Within your account, you can view ‘click reports’ for who has and hasn’t interacted with your campaign – allowing you to refine your campaigns and even send a follow-up message to those yet to click.
From: MakeIt
Black Friday is such a Draaaaaag. Kill time with this whats-ur-fave-look quiz and we’ll make your day with FREE Lighten up Hun Highlighter: sms.makeit.co.uk/123ASBCD
Going one step further, your track URL can be transformed into a branded version with FireText’s help. This is what we call a vanity URL, which adds a layer of brand familiarity and trust to the trackable link you’re including in your campaign.
Offer codes for in-person incentives
In-store purchases are often essential to skincare, beauty and wellness campaigns, with some preferring to try out products IRL. This is where a keyword on 82228 and an auto response could come in handy. For example, here’s a an Instagram promoting a keyword campaign:
This is super effective for encouraging even more sales on or around Black Friday. You can also set up an auto response featuring the exclusive discount code. So when someone texts the keyword ‘BLUSH’ to the shortcode 82228, they will receive a follow-up message such as:
Hey, it’s Anna from Blushy. Thanks for choosing to blush with us – your BF code is BLUSH24GET. Offer ends Fri 26th Nov, 11:59am.
Manage Black Friday customer support with message ‘throttling’
Let’s skip forward. You’ve created your campaign, you’re happy with the content and you’re confident it’s going to support your Black Friday goals. In fact, you’re ready to send out.
At this point, it’s important to think about the post-sales support of campaigns too. Even if you’ve created the most memorable campaign, attentive customer support is just as impactful. This where our ‘throttling’ feature will really come into play for bulk beauty campaigns. This tool allows you to send out your campaigns in batches, with your chosen time intervals in between.
That way, whether you have one person or an army in charge of customer support, they can put their resources answering any questions customer have, troubleshooting and giving them a good experience for the long term. Your success can then extend beyond Black Friday.
Let’s talk about Black Friday…
Don’t miss the Black Friday beauty boat – get in touch with one of our lovely SMS experts for advice on how to optimise your beauty and wellness campaigns.