Yes, SMS is one of the fastest, easiest ways to reach your leads and customers.

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you already know that.

Maybe you’re already running SMS campaigns for your marketing, support or sales team. Or maybe you’re just getting started with texting for your business.
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Either way, you’re ready to take the next step: Tracking the data to measure how your SMS campaigns are performing.

With the right data, you can instantly see if your SMS messages are giving your business the leads, sales, engagement, and overall ROI that you’re looking for.
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That’s where success metrics come into play. Below, I’ll show you the five essential metrics to track to make sure you’re getting the best returns from every text message you send. 

Track Your SMS Metrics for HubSpot with Salesmsg 

The easiest way to access advanced HubSpot SMS metrics is by using Salesmsg.

With Salesmsg, you get access to a robust analytics platform that automatically tracks everything related to SMS marketing.

For example, every time you send a SMS broadcast, you'll see the total number of messages delivered, plus the number of replies, clicks, conversions, undelivered messages and SMS leads who unsubscribed. You can even track the revenue for each SMS broadcast if you use our conversion tracking inside Salesmsg.

That’s just for SMS broadcasts. Salesmsg’s analytics dashboard also tracks your overall SMS messages, calls, performance, contacts, conversions and your credit usage. For your support team, we even track specific analytics like “time to first response” when answering customer calls or texts inside Salesmsg. 

Salesmsg is designed to integrate seamlessly with your HubSpot account. With Salesmsg and HubSpot working together, you can text back and forth with your HubSpot contacts, send SMS broadcasts to your HubSpot lists, and send out automatic SMS messages through your HubSpot workflows. You can even set up your SMS marketing campaigns from inside your HubSpot account if you like. 

This is all tracked inside Salesmsg, so you can quickly view your SMS marketing metrics and take away actionable insights to improve your campaigns.

With that said, let’s get into the five key metrics that you should always track and monitor if you’re texting your leads and customers.

Delivery Rate: Tracking If Messages Get Delivered

Do your messages actually reach your audience?

It seems simple, but a lot of marketers overlook this. Or even waste time and energy trying to send messages that don’t get delivered. 

Before worrying about any other texting metric, your goal should be that 100% of your text messages get delivered.

At Salesmsg, we designed our texting platform, so your text messages get delivered. For example, we have a feature called enhanced pre-checks that flags and stops any messages from sending that may have deliverability issues.

Salesmsg also has a feature called PhoneCheckr that can tell you in seconds whether your contacts have textable phone numbers or not. That’s important because messages fail when you try to text non-mobile numbers. If you’re a Salesmsg customer, you can enable PhoneCheckr right inside your settings as you see below.

Mobile carriers also reward your business with better SMS deliverability, when you follow their compliance rules. If you have a U.S. business, you must go through this compliance process if you want to text customers from any platform like Salesmsg or any other. The mobile carriers require it. 

Our team also built the necessary compliance requirements right into our Salesmsg platform to make this process as easy as possible for you.

Whether you’re a Salesmsg customer or not, here are a few things you can do to improve your deliverability for your text messages:

• Ensure you’re meeting the latest compliance requirements from mobile carriers. 
• Follow best practices for SMS deliverability.
• Use this free version of our Salesmsg PhoneCheckr to ensure you’re texting only textable numbers. 

Reply Rate: Tracking Responses

It’s estimated that 98% of text messages are read within the first three minutes.

That’s great, but are your leads and customers actually hitting reply and responding to your texts? That’s a much more important metric to track.

Getting responses depends on the type of campaigns you’re sending. There are a lot of factors that’ll influence your response rate like:

• The lifecycle stage of your leads or customers 
• The type of audience you’re messaging
• How often you send out SMS messages
• The type of content you’re sending out

For example, let's say your business is sending out two different texts today.

First, your marketing team is sending a SMS broadcast with a discount coupon to encourage leads to shop for your product. Then your support team is sending an onboarding text to new customers that asks these newbies to respond with a "yes" or "no" if they have questions to answer.

Text #2 invites customers to respond, so this onboarding text will likely have a higher response rate than Text #1. (In contrast, Text #1 will likely have a higher click-through rate, because it urges leads to click to shop. More on that in a moment.)
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Within your Salesmsg analytics dashboard you’ll be able to see the overall reply rate to every message you send. But make sure you don’t only use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness since the content type will also dictate the reply rate.

Click-Through Rate: Tracking Clicks

Similar to a reply rate, your click or click-through rate also tracks how your audience is engaging with each text message. But this time, one engagement = one click.

If you’re sending any SMS messages with a call-to-action link, your click-through rate will tell you exactly which message is working or which is not.

Inside Salesmsg, we have a built-in link shortener that tracks this click-through data for you. Just use our link shortener to replace your URL with a Salesmsg short URLs. Then our Salesmsg platform will automatically track clicks on any SMS broadcast you send. (You also have the option to use your own branding on these short URLs inside Salesmsg.)

Using a Salesmsg short link also helps with deliverability. It cuts down on your character count for each text message, without being an obvious short link like a Bitly or TinyURL, which mobile carriers can flag as spam texts.

Conversion Rate:  Tracking Revenue

Click-through and reply rates track your engagement. However, engagement alone doesn’t mean you’re getting an ROI with your SMS marketing.

Conversion tracking lets you assign a monetary value to conversion events. For example, you can assign certain actions a revenue value and then see how much your recent SMS campaign generated.

You can also measure and track lead generation events, number of meetings booked, and much more.

Setting this up is easy, all you need to do is add a little bit of Salesmsg tracking code to your website, similar to UTM parameters in Google Analytics, and you’re all set.

Once you’re set up, you can view this revenue data directly inside your Salesmsg analytics dashboard. Over time, you’ll build a deep understanding of the types of essential messaging and campaigns that your company should be sending. 

Remember that not every message you send will generate an instant ROI.

Some messages are used to deepen the relationship with your subscribers, add pure value, move them through your funnel, or qualify them for your sales team.

Opt-out Rate: Tracking Your Audience

Just like with email, you always must give your SMS leads a chance to opt-out to be in full compliance with the mobile carrier’s rules.

Some companies make it more challenging to opt-out. That’s not a good idea. It not only annoys their audience, but also runs the risk of fines and other compliance-related issues.  

Have you ever had a gym membership that seemed impossible to cancel? Not only did trying to cancel cost you money, time, and energy, but it made you seriously dislike that gym. If you ever wanted to join a gym again, you’d go anywhere else besides there. 

People opt out for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. Some leads or customers might not want to receive texts right now, but that doesn’t mean they’re done with your business.

When you send messages with Salesmsg, your leads can opt-out easily by texting Stop, Cancel, Stopall, End, Quit, or Unsubscribe. You also have the option to manually unsubscribe someone from your list if they request it.

You can track the unsubscribes on every SMS broadcast from inside the Salesmsg analytics dashboard.

Beyond offering easy opt-outs, monitoring your unsubscribe rate after sending messages is also important. By analyzing this data, you might find that a particular message style leads to higher opt-outs or that your users prefer a certain message frequency.

Finally, don’t view opt-outs as bad. After all, it’s better to have a subscriber list full of actual customers than leads who will never take action or buy what you're offering.

How to Track Metrics in HubSpot SMS

The best way to track these metrics inside your HubSpot account is with the Salesmsg integration. Without Salesmsg, you can only access very bare-bones SMS analytics data inside HubSpot.

With Salesmsg connected to your HubSpot account, you can access detailed reports covering every aspect of your SMS messages and campaigns as a whole. Whenever you send a text marketing campaign you’ll be able to view all data instantly.

You’ll be able to see things like:

• Total views, clicks, and opt-outs per broadcast
• Total breakdown on how your links are performing
• Message delivery rate, error rate, and spam rate
• And much more

Then, you can use the unique insights you’ve uncovered from all this customer feedback to improve messages for your marketing, support or sales team.

Conclusion: Optimizing SMS with Data

Running text campaigns without regularly checking your data is like driving on a cross-country road trip without GPS. You might reach your destination, but why rely on guesswork when you don’t have to?

By integrating data into your SMS marketing, you’ll know which types of messages convert, how often your leads like to get texts, what kind of call to action gets clicks, how much revenue your messages are generating, and so much more.

Plus, the longer you track and optimize, the better your campaigns will get.

Over time, with data and feedback, you’ll instinctively know which messages will get the results that lead to happy customers and more revenue. That kind of success starts with the right analytics and data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is delivery rate important for SMS?

Your delivery rate will show you any code red issues you need to fix that stop your texts from reaching your customers. Chances are, if you’re having deliverability issues, you need to focus on SMS compliance, the quality of your contact list, or the content of your messages. 

How can I improve my SMS response rate?

The best way to improve your response rate is by asking your prospects to answer a question. When it comes to getting your users to take action, you want to spell it out completely. Don’t assume your users will know what to do next. If you want them to reply with a yes or no, or give their feedback, then tell them.

What is the typical opt-out rate in SMS campaigns?

Opt-out rates usually range from 0-1.5%. If your opt-out rate is too high, you run the risk of being flagged by the carriers. To fix this, you might need to change up your message content, your frequency, or even lead generation sources. Once again, your SMS analytics data will show you what messages your target audience enjoys receiving and what leads to unsubscribes. 

Can HubSpot track conversions from SMS campaigns?

HubSpot offers basic SMS tracking data. To get robust and actionable insights on your SMS marketing, you’ll want to use the Salesmsg and HubSpot integration. This gives you access to advanced conversion tracking data while still being able to send messages to your HubSpot list.

‍I’m interested in using Salesmsg to send my SMS. Can I get a demo?

Yes, absolutely. Our in-house experts can give you a live demo of Salesmsg, and show you how to best use our texting-and-calling platform for your specific business. That includes an overview of how to use all our built-in data to optimize all your SMS campaigns. Go right here to book a live demo.