If you haven’t started developing your mobile strategy, the time is now. People pay attention to texts, almost no one has a landline anymore, and texting makes advocacy easy to achieve. But what are the benefits to devoting resources to growing and learning more about your audiences, and what tactics can you use to achieve this?

Why Grow Your List?

Text messages are the fastest way to reach people and are more likely to be read and responded to more immediately compared to emails, voicemails, and mobile app notifications. Just check out some of these texting stats:

• 99% of all texts are opened
• The average response time for a text is 90 seconds
• CTR for a text is 4x higher than for an email

The bottom line is that while mobile lists sometimes tend to be smaller than typical email lists, mobile users engage at very high levels, and that is worth investing in.

Why Know Your List?

So, you know the benefits of growing your list, but how can better knowing your audience help your program? Well, it turns out, audiences actually expect you to provide at least some kind of personalization within your interactions with them. For example, 24% of people expect to be addressed by their name, and 32% expect you to include their interests and preferences.

Personalization Expectations

Along with providing what your audience expects, getting to know your audience will help you boost your First Party Data strategy. Gathering First Party Data is the most cost-effective way for you to collect data directly from your audience and it will bolster trust within your organization and brand.

Also, as privacy concerns increase, and third party cookies become deprecated across more platforms, now is the time for you to take control of your audiences and establish first party relationships with your subscribers to drive personalization and segmentation.

How to Know AND Grow

Now it’s time to put it all together. You want to grow your audiences and learn more about them, and the best way to do that is to ENGAGE with your audience. Through engagement, you can collect more subscribers, gather permission to communicate with them, and also collect that much needed first party data to further your personalization approach. And the best way to engage with your audience is through PROMOTIONS! Promotions will be a vehicle for you to engage with and educate your audience/community while promoting your cause or brand/organization.

Use Second Street in conjunction with its SMS sister product, Mobile Commons, to interact with and learn more about your mobile audiences. Check out some of the benefits of using promotions within your mobile strategy:

Gather Permission
You can add opt-ins to your engagement campaigns that will allow participants to subscribe to your communications. This allows you to gather explicit consent and grow your lists at the same time!

Easy Integration
You’ll be able to match a Second Street custom field with custom fields in Mobile Commons and sync opt-ins from Second Street to Mobile Commons. You can also easily embed a promotion on any website page or simply send the link – through SMS! (or social media, email, etc) – to promote participation.

Intuitive Features
You’ll have access to an abundance of useful features including:

• Thank You Messages/Emails: You can leave a message for those who participated to provide more information on your cause or link to your donation site.
• Call to Action Text: An area that allows you to describe your cause or the reason for the promotion. You can add text, images, links and more!
  Social Sharing: Craft social sharing text that will appear when participants share the promotion on social media!
• Organizing Leads: Get leads in real time to your email instead of having to manually access the platform periodically to see if you have any new leads.
• Entry Limits: Set a limit on the number of people who can participate if you have only a certain number of volunteer spots or prizes you’re able to deliver.
• Extra Chances for Sharing: If you’re able to provide incentive in the way of prizes, enagle extra chances for participants who share with their friends – both spreading the promotion and your organization’s message!
• Turnkeys: Use pre-made promotions instead of having to create your own from scratch to get up and running even faster!

There are also multiple ways you’ll be able to utilize each promotion type to engage with and gather information from your audience depending upon your goals!

Polls/Surveys

These promotion types are perfect for gathering opinions and priorities from your audience. You can focus on their plans or intentions about a specific issue or collect member information for a specific cause or event.

Ideas:

• Run a survey to collect needed information about a specific event or cause
• Run a poll to gather sentiment about an upcoming senate debate
• Run a poll to gather opinions about a local policy change

Quizzes

Quizzes can be used to educate and inform your audience about your organization’s cause or mission. You can also use them to test your audience’s knowledge about certain issues or candidates.

Ideas:

• Run a quiz to test your audience’s knowledge about voter registration
• Use a quiz to see how much your audience knows about your cause i.e. human trafficking, public health, etc.
• Run a quiz to see how much your audience knows about a specific, timely issue i.e. law changes, candidate views, etc.

Member-Generated Content / Photo/Video Submission

Photo/Video Submission allows you to engage with a targeted audience and gather content straight from your members. This provides you with the ability to repurpose the photos/videos for your own content. You can also include a voting aspect to spur even more engagement!

Ideas:

• Run a Photo Submission promotion to promote support for your organization or a specific cause
• Use Photo Submissions to spotlight certain members of your community or organization
• Run a Video Submission promotion to gather video testimonials for your organization or cause

Overall, engaging with your audience is the best way to drive both list growth and first party data collection. There are endless ways to use promotions to engage with your audience and promote your brand or cause.