Text Message Copy Testing – We Finally Did It

(If you haven’t read our initial article on A/B testing, you should check it out before coming back here.)

In the past we’ve written about how important the concept of continuous innovation is to the technology business. Other industries may have the luxury of resting on yesterday’s solutions, but the technology sector moves too fast to ever have that attitude and succeed.

Most of the time, at FranchiseHelp, this means that we’re tweaking, optimizing, tinkering, and nudging. Every day, there’s a new thing that we want to try. It usually doesn’t take a lot of time/effort, but it’s important to keeping the business moving forward.

However, occasionally we feel compelled to take some pretty big swings. I’m talking about truly changing the way that leads are generated for franchises for the rest of time. Yesterday the world worked one way, and today it works differently kind of stuff. Well last Tuesday was one of those days.

If you’re an avid follower of FranchiseHelp’s LGRC, you’ll know how much we love text messages. We’re convinced that they are the singular most effective way to get a hold of potential franchisees. Since then, we’ve written a few articles about our findings. You can find them here:

• What We’ve Learned Sending 6,636 Text Messages in the Past 4 Months
• “Call Me” Has Turned to “Text Me” for Franchisees
• Call Verification: Here’s exactly how we do it (for now)

(You should especially check out the “Call Me / Text Me” article, as it sent shockwaves through the franchisor community.)

Anyways, back to Tuesday. One of the questions we’ve always battled is how to apply the A/B testing philosophy to text messages. Why is it that I could test the copy on our website but had no shot at ever doing it in texts? We discussed it for a better part of a year and about four months ago, we began building the technology from scratch!Finally in the middle of September we were ready to launch our first ever text message copy A/B test.

To go along with the message we had used all along (“Control”), we wrote three additional messages that got a similar idea across while using different actual words (“V1”, “V2” and “V3”). Last Tuesday, thanks to one of our marketing team member’s incredible attention to detail, we got the results:

Yes. You’re reading that correctly. Two of the new messages got people to respond over120% more effectively than our original message. 120% improvement! Needless to say, spirits were high last Tuesday night. (I think we finally left the office around 11PM!)

There are all sorts of important things to take away from the invention of this new capability, and I’m sure we’ll unpack them here over the course of the next few months. But there are few points I just have to make now:

1. It’s our clients who really inspire us to innovate. It may be cliché to say that necessity is the mother of invention, but this entire initiative was born of a goal to generate more leads without lowering our lead quality. We put our heads together and decided that we were going to have to put in A LOT of work to make that happen. And we are glad to do it! If you ever have an idea that you’ve wanted to run by someone, you must let us know.
2. If you’re not working on the big stuff, you’ll never move the needle. It is an absolute truism that almost everyone we come across in the franchise world is very busy. We never seem to hear, “Oh I’ve got plenty of time on my hands.” And the reason everyone is so busy is because we’re all executing on a myriad of different tasks that make up our job descriptions. And all that is fine and good, but it doesn’t move the needle on company growth. I challenge everyone to think about the things that will matter the most to making your respective companies more valuable, and try putting some of those items on your agenda.
3. Text message copy texting is no longer the future (and that’s downright frustrating.) One of the things we look forward to most at FranchiseHelp is the next thing. And for so long, text message copy testing has been the future. We’ve worked long and hard to make a pipe dream become a reality. But now that it’s here, we have to move on to the next thing. We can only pat ourselves on the back so long, as we are compelled to move on to something else that will make FranchiseHelp more valuable. And who knows that that next thing will be?

If you’re interested in hearing more about how FranchiseHelp generates leads for franchises all over the country, let us know!