What’s the performance of call-to-action SMS text messages? We can draw some examples from a campaign launched by the John Edwards for President campaign.

Amy Rubin, the campaign’s Deputy Director for New Media, spoke to techPresident about the results and their observations.

• people who responded to SMS option to “call” a recorded message from John Edwards “… is comparable to our average open rate on national emails and almost twice as much as our average click-thru rate.”
• the number of people who opted to continue on to an operator after listening to the message from John Edwards “…was also slightly higher than our national email click-thru rate.”
• nearly all of the people who listened to the recorded message “… listened to the entire message” - even though it was a little long.
• the unsubscribe rate was higher than normal, “… but not by a significant amount and certainly not high enough to suggest that people consider this spam.”

To close, an observation:

“…This is very promising. The message was probably longer than many would have advised but it shows us that people who want to listen, will listen to the whole thing. As opposed to email, where many people may think they want to read it – because of the subject line – but then quickly realize that they should have just hit delete.

… it may also speak to the fact that people understand that they can always go back and look at an old email anytime but listening to a message from the campaign has more of a one-time chance uniqueness to it - if they hang-up they are not sure how to get back.

… the vast majority of people who connected to our phone banks expressed something you rarely hear when being asked for money – excitement. They were psyched about hearing the message and wanted to tell our volunteers how cool it was to have their phone ring with a call from John Edwards.”

h/t to e.politics