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SMS marketing is becoming one of the most effective marketing channels for interesting reasons.
According to statistics from Mobile Monkey, nine out of ten people open their text messages.
With a large percentage of people using their mobile devices for most of the day, this is no surprise.
SMS marketing is an effective way to grab the attention of your customers and establish a connection with them directly.
This guide will cover all you need to know about SMS marketing and how it can be useful for your ecommerce business.
SMS or short messaging service marketing is a marketing channel that involves collecting the phone number of your customers or prospects to send them promotional messages.
As we already highlighted, almost everyone will open their text messages, making it a powerful tool for educating your customers and establishing a connection with them. You can group your customers into segments and create targeted campaigns that take them further down your marketing funnel, ultimately increasing sales.
SMS marketing is effective for various reasons. Here are some benefits of using SMS marketing for your ecommerce business:
As the attention of most people shortens, text messages are certainly a great way to engage with them.
Research shows that 95% of text messages get read within three minutes with an overall open rate of 98%. With these statistics, it is clear that SMS marketing has one of the highest engagement rates. You can take advantage of this to better engage with your customers and prospects and ultimately encourage repeat purchases.
Your customers want to have more personalized experiences and feel like they matter to your brand. With SMS marketing, you can deliver one on one personalized messaging that keeps customers informed about your brand while making them feel valued in the process.
With SMS marketing, you can easily track your results. Just like with emails, you can see who opened your message and when they did. You can couple the insights from your SMS marketing with that of other marketing channels to get a bigger picture of how well your marketing campaigns are performing.
If you’ve never set up an SMS marketing campaign for your ecommerce business, here’s how you can get started:
There are many possibilities with SMS marketing. The first thing you want to do is, to begin with your ecommerce business goal in mind. What do you want to achieve with SMS marketing? For example, your goal could be to reduce the rate of abandoned carts in your ecommerce store. With this goal, you can create text messages that notify your customers when they leave a cart in your store.
With a goal in mind, the next thing to do is choose an SMS marketing software that makes it easy to grow your SMS channel, set up your SMS campaigns, and launch them. There are several SMS marketing software we will look at later in this guide.
After choosing your preferred software, it is time to grow your list of subscribers. There are several ways you can collect SMS subscribers. You can use a form on your website or email. You can also include a checkbox on your form or checkout page that allows people to opt for receiving text messages.
Once you have everything all setup, you can launch your SMS campaign. You want to experiment with different messages, times, and deals as much as you can to find out which strategy is best for your ecommerce store. Follow up by tracking your results to identify areas for improvement.
Let’s look at some SMS marketing strategies to engage with your audience and turn them into loyal customers.
To keep your customers updated on the latest from your brand and increase your engagement, you can send promotional messages.
You can send discounts, coupon codes, and exclusive offers as welcome text to create a good first impression or as an update to existing subscribers to increase your conversion rates. Ensure your offer is something relevant to your customers and stick to using only one call to action.
Transactional messages are typically triggered by a customer’s interaction with your brand or by events within a particular service or application. Think of confirmation texts or order updates.
You can send text messages to your customers and keep them updated on their orders. These messages can indicate when their orders have been shipped or if there is a delay.
Another example of transactional messages is abandoned cart text messages. It will interest you to know that mobile phones have an average cart abandonment rate of 85.65%. You can use text messages to notify your customers when they leave products in their shopping cart and recover lost sales.
Text messages can be a great way to provide support to your customers, especially with more technical or complicated questions. Text messages are more personal and are a great way to make your customers feel understood. Your text messages can contain links to more detailed resources on your website that directly address the concerns of your customer.
Acquiring customers can be difficult and costly. You can take advantage of SMS marketing to remind existing customers to buy from your store again. For example, you can send renewal reminders to get your customers to renew their subscriptions. You can also send text messages with special offers to win back customers who haven’t shopped in your store in a while.
You can increase customer engagement with valuable content using text messages. You can share the link to an article or video that can offer some kind of value to them. For example, if your customer buys jewelry from your store, you can send a text message asking if they like it and send a video on how they can pair it with different outfits. The idea is to send content that provides education, inspiration, or even entertainment. Don’t be afraid to use one or two images, GIFs, memes, etc in your text messages.
Here are some of the best SMS marketing software you can use to set up, launch and manage your SMS campaigns:
Founded in 2012, Klaviyo is both an email and SMS marketing automation platform with a host of features. You can get customer data to help you make more data-driven decisions that improve customer relationships and increase sales. The software has pre-built templates and sign-up forms for easy customization.
With Klaviyo, you can build and deliver personalized experiences via SMS, emails, mobile apps, and more.
Pricing: Free for the first 250 contacts and starts at $35 for 1250 monthly messages with 251-500 contacts.
Omnisend is one of the best SMS marketing software that allows you to send personalized emails and text messages. It comes with marketing automation which enables you to create relevant SMS campaigns. Their web forms also make it easy for you to build contacts. It has a library for events like SMS for birthdays, promotions, cart abandonment, and more.
Omnisend also features multi-store accounts, migration tools, and over 80 integrations to other channels.
Pricing: Free for up to 250 contacts, $16 per month for up to 60 SMS and 500 contacts, and $59 per month for over 3000 SMS and 500 contacts.
Looking for software to create image-based texts? EZ Texting in partnership with Shutterstock allows you to create high-quality image-based texts for your customers. Just like with most sms software, you can automate and schedule texts. It has a template library to help you customize your SMS and MMS.
EZ Texting also has video guides and resources to educate you on some best practices for using text messages in your ecommerce marketing.
Pricing: $20 per month for up to 500 contacts, $60 per month for up to 2000 contacts, $100 per month for up to 50,000 contacts, and $3000 per month for over 50,000 contacts.
ActiveCampaign is an email and SMS marketing tool packed with features that make SMS automation seamless. You can integrate ActiveCampaign with apps like WhatsApp and expand your reach. You can automatically schedule texts at specific times and dates, import contacts and manage your contact list.
ActiveCampaign has over 900 integrations, allowing you to connect the apps and tools you need.
Pricing: Plus - $49 per month, Professional - $149 per month, and custom pricing available.
As an ecommerce business owner, it will be smart to prioritize SMS marketing in your overall marketing strategy. Apart from having an impressive engagement rate, it is also cost-effective and has the ability to drive conversions and boost sales.
You’ve probably already considered selling on Amazon but its way easier than you think.
Call Us Now