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SMS Marketing for Ecommerce To Supercharge Your Sales

SMS Marketing for Ecommerce To Supercharge Your Sales

Text messaging marketing has gained popularity recently for a variety of reasons including: being a quick method of connecting with your audience, a high engagement rate, and a higher open rate compared to email, 98% compared to 20% respectively. And since 90% of people read a text message within the first three minutes of receiving it, it’s a highly effective way to communicate with your customers.

Now you may be thinking, “I should ditch email campaigns and go all-in for SMS marketing.” Let’s not go that far just yet. Email is an extremely valuable channel, as marketers, we should look at SMS as another channel. Leveraging both email and SMS will produce the best results.

But first, for those unfamiliar, let’s break it down: what exactly is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing refers to the act of sending promotional materials via text message. If you send a text message to your subscriber list saying, “BOGO only today in store! Come get your savings,” that’s SMS marketing.

Primarily, SMS marketing is a tool you use to communicate offers and other information to existing customers who have permitted you to send them text messages. And that’s key — getting permission to send messages.

Announcement

Getting someone’s number in our days has a new meaning. As soon as this happens, plus the person opts-in to hear from you, SMS becomes a way to connect with your current and potential customers. Unlike email, eCommerce SMS notifications are limited to 160 characters and more immediately delivered, often even with a push notification. For the niche, loyal audiences preferring instant updates at the device (which is being checked more than 58 times per day) SMS advertising can generate a very healthy return.

Particularly as post-purchase support and retention channel, text message marketing is quite efficient. 98 out of 100 text messages are read by the end of a day, mostly within the first three minutes from arrival; and one-third of consumers respond. On top of that, the target audiences of digital commerce businesses are youth and young adults who don’t remember their lives without their phones. Leveraging both SMS and email without sacrificing either generates the best results.

Effective SMS marketing ideas for E-commerce businesses

Marketers sometimes wonder what they can do to improve their KPIs when it is an off-peak period, when there is no loud occasion for sales and drops, when it is pinochle season and such. Below we have picked 12 bright SMS marketing strategy ideas for digital marketing even when it is all quiet around and nothing is going on.

  1. Giving customers the best deals and offers
  2. Notifications about upcoming sales and discounts
  3. Conducting surveys and quizzes to know your customers better
  4. Personalized approach for special customers
  5. Sharing company’s updates and interesting tips

Use SMS for Customer Retention

Bringing in new customers is hard, but losing them is easy (and costly). That’s why you should use the 98% open rates of text messages to reduce customer effort and hold on to customers you worked so hard to acquire.

You can use SMS to send SMS renewal reminders if you offer a subscription service.

Methods For Growing Your SMS Subscribers

  •  Ask your visitors to subscribe to marketing text messages at checkout. If you require a phone number at the beginning of checkout, by asking for consent to send marketing messages, you are likely to gather many phone numbers
  • This option limits the number of people you ask for their phone number to only people who make it to the checkout, thus building an SMS list of high-intention customers.
  • Creates the opportunity to ask  for a phone number through a form, anywhere on your site!
  • This can be done via a pop-up, a banner on the top or bottom of your page, or anywhere else.

That’s it—everything you need to know about e-commerce text marketing in one straightforward guide. The next step is to sign up and try it for yourself.