Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
The Top 3 SMS Automations to Set Up
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84 - The SMS rules aren’t the same as the rules for email marketing. We’re here to share the basics and teach you how to set up your introductory flows.
From your very first SMS message in your Welcome Flow to securing the sale in your Abandoned Cart Flow, your SMS strategy will be bulletproof. These three flows will have you generating massive engagement and, more importantly, massive revenue.
Let’s get started!
Today we will be talking about sms and top three SMS automations you have to set up in 2022.
Alissa:Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Email Einstein. Vira and Alissa here we are, two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are super passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world. We specialize in providing a premium full service e commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. Our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. That's what we're all about here at Flowium. In today's episode, let's get it started.
Vira:Let's. Let's talk about some SMS stuff. Yay. At least I feel like we are like slowly but surely converting you in sms Believer. Am I right or am I right?
Alissa:Yeah, it was funny. So we had. So I think we mentioned this on the last episode but by this point in time now Vira and I have actually met in person, which is nice.
Vira:So yes, isn't it crazy?
Alissa:Our two year online dating relationship has come to fruition and now we are official because we met in real life but and in.
Vira:In New York out of all the places, right?
Alissa:Out of all places New York, but. So we were in New York primarily for a leadership conference and one of the things that we were talking about as part of like our company and like where we want to move forward in terms of Flowium is like certain things that we want to focus on expanding and improving for our clients over the course of 2022 and I could not believe that the words came out of my mouth but I actually raised my hand and I was like, I think that we need to maximize and improve our SMS strategies for our client. And everyone was like oh what? And I was Like I don't know who I've become, Who am I? I don't know who I am anymore. But it's true. I am now a believer, which is crazy.
Vira:We all are, honestly. Yeah, it's hard not to when you're seeing those like crazy numbers, right?
Alissa:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Vira:And like even, even if you think about the numbers like briefly when talking about like mobile usage statistic, one thing that we absolutely cannot ignore is like the dominance of mobile phones, right? The smartphones. There are currently 6.4 billion smartphone users worldwide. And honestly this number is so crazy to me considering the global population is like 7.9 billion people. They are currently 6.4 billion smartphone users which means that old people have them, young kids have them, teenagers have them. I don't know, some people have a few phones I guess. But those numbers are crazy. Like I still remember the times. Okay, I sound old but I still remember the time when like we had maybe like five phones in entire school only like the cool kids have them. You know, like when we were kids and this was not the smartphones either. There was like those like bulky Nokia or Nokia, how do you call them phones. I don't know if you guys had them in the US at all. Did you?
Alissa:We did. That was my first phone. The Nokia Brick is what we called it. Yeah, the brick. Nokia Brick.
Vira:My grandma still has it. It's called like 3500 or something. Yeah, like she still has it and it's very like she loves it because the phone is like pretty big and the, the buttons, there are the buttons and they are very big for her to see. So yeah, this is like the good of good old times. Anyways, all those like quick little social media check ins along the day. All this like when we're going to the phone and check the videos, the memes and we are like responding to emails means that Americans spend an average of like 2 hours and 54 minutes on their phone each day. And honestly I think this statistic is probably like outd from 2021. But okay, maybe the average is 254 per day. But my consumption or my usage is like well about that time I'm like three hours, like four hours, four and a half hours on average. So yeah, so the average American will spend nearly a month and a half, 44 days on their phones in 2022. Isn't it crazy? Like you will spend 44 days of your year pretty much on your phone. That's like insane.
Alissa:I don't know, it's a lot it's kind of embarrassing. Like it's crazy, but it's a little y. Yeah, that's aggressive. 44 days out of my year. That's why I got rid of social media, because I'm trying to cut that 44 to like 42. You know.
Vira:That's true. You're still there, Alissa. We know you're watching from the Flowium account. We know, we know that.
Alissa:Everyone knows I'm the Flowium stalker.
Vira:Yeah, that's hilarious. Yeah. So that's probably one of the reasons why SMS marketing performs so well. Right? The brands we know and love, love, they are getting more and more sophisticated with their marketing and more and more brands are using SMS now. And we actually also learned the fun fact that Americans are more likely to ignore the text from the friends and family than the text from brands they care about. How sweet. It is. True that like I know I'm like in that like group. Right. Of people. I would definitely open message from Lululemon over the message from my husband. That's like 100%. That's like true story. Yeah. So people have been spending increasing amount of time on their mobile devices for years and this is exactly what makes the instant messaging such as SMS so powerful and like so effective way of marketing. Especially when you like combine it with email marketing. And that's like our favorite combo ever. Effective SMS marketing as any marketing basically requires a good strategy in place and you can get the return on investment like 10 times higher than with email sometimes. Sometimes. But we do believe in the combination of email plus SMS. And today we will be talking about three very basic but very important flows to set up. SMS flows. SMS plus email flows, I guess to set up in 2022. So Alissa hit us with the first one. That's a very, very important one.
Alissa:So basic. I love the basic. So where is it from? I don't know. I don't know. It's just like, I guess it's just kind of making fun of people who overuse the word basic. Not that we like of people but it's like an imitation of like a. So basic, that kind of thing. I don't know who, whatever. Anyways, flow number one is the welcome flow. Now I can't stop laughing because I know.
Vira:You're the host. I just turned off my mic, Alissa, honestly, she's like, I'm done.
Alissa:I can laugh quietly now. Okay, sorry everybody. Flow number one, the welcome flow. So in a welcome flow, usually the SMS messages that you send out, those give you a sort of way to make A more immediate impact on your brand new subscribers. Which is cool, right? Because email is good and all. But how often is it that people are actually opting into your list, your email list specifically via desktop? Probably not very often. Whereas on, they're doing it via mobile and then you're going into your mailbox or your inbox through your mobile device and it just, it complicates things. Whereas when someone is opting in for sms, they're doing it on their phone and they immediately get the text message. And actually a lot of laptops or like other devices, you know, other computer devices are also receiving texts. So like I have all my text messages linked to my laptop, so I see everything immediately. But also I'm a freak about notifications, so there's that. But on average most text messages that are being received, they're looked at within 90 seconds. Which if he's not texting you back, it's because he's not that into you. Just a reminder for all you ladies out there who need to hear that. But in comparison, only 20% of emails are viewed or only 20% of emails viewed are actually opened within 90 minutes to 3 hours. So just think about that. That time is cut into like an eighth of the time compared to what the time that people are viewing emails. So you're getting like immediate messaging and almost an immediate view or immediate response from the consumer. So it's cool because it's a direct connection to your consumers. And the cool thing about the shorter timeframe means that you're catching people like almost instantly when they're actually interested. So for example, like one of the things that we' talked about in the past is like you send an abandoned cart email, like 2 to 4 hours is usually the delay from when they abandoned the cart to now. And a lot of the time the reason why people abandon their card is because they lost interest, right? Or not even that they lost interest, but something else came up, they got distracted, whatever it was. Whereas with text messaging, like there's no room for all that time to go by, so they forget about you. Like it's happening immediately. So you're catching these new potential customers interests like, like right off the bat. So, and the cool thing is, is because you're catching people immediately when they're interested, they're more likely to convert, right? Because we all know that a person is more likely to convert the day that they know about you. And then they're more likely to convert the second time when they know about you too, after that first immediate purchase. So everything's really quick, everything's immediate. So best practice for SMS marketing is just making sure that you're keeping the sending time frame for messages between 9am and 8pm, usually, unless you're into that kind of thing, receiving a text message at like 3:00am, saying like, yo, are you awake? Or like, hey, what's up? Is not really welcome. Whether it's from a guy that you like or a girl that you like or whoever that you like, or a brand that you're interested in. Like, it's just not a good look. So you want to make sure that you're keeping those sending time frames within business hours. And we put that in quotes, right, like business hours, just to make sure that you're keeping it like kind of professional and like not pretending like you're BFFs with these people because you're really not. So you want to make sure that you're not walking on that fine line between like, hey, I've got your number, or like, hey, I'm being a total intruder on your phone and Texting you at 3 o' clock in the morning. But the only time we make an exception for this is the first message or the welcome flow. And why? Because if someone is on your website at 2am and then you send them a text message at 2.01am, unless you have like narcolepsy, it's unlikely that you've subscribed and then immediately fall asleep. Like that person is likely to see your text and they're in the middle of performing that action of showing interest. So it's important for you to show interest back. And the first message, it's really important that you're concise. So the key to a successful welcome flow, you have to just have a very clear call to action. Do you want them to buy from you? Do you want them to use a discount you gave them, do you want them to follow you on social media? Or do you want to send them to your blog? Do you want them to do something else? Make sure that it's really straight, short to the point. Especially because it's text, right? You don't have like all the bandwidth that you would normally have in an email, so it's got to be shortened to the point. You can also lead with a simple welcome message that introduces your brand or and then include a discount code later on within the context of the welcome flow, the SMS welcome flow. It really all just depends on your strategy and that's something that you have to think about because a lot of your SMS strategy is related to the way that your customers are using their phones, right? So if you're dealing with an older demographic, it's unlikely that they would have the same kind of finesse with their technology as like a 20 something year old would. Towards the end of your SMS welcome flow, if a subscriber still hasn't converted you, you always have an option to increase the discount that you've given them initially if that's part of your strategy as a final incentive so that they can purchase before they leave the welcome series. And the other thing is just to remember, and this is where like my like small doubtful part of me is like, oh no, like SMS is so intense. Just make sure that you don't overload SMS subscribers with sms. Because getting a daily text message from a brand, like, I love my husband to death, but I don't even want that from my husband. So I definitely don't want that from a brand. And it doesn't matter how much they love you. Like a daily text message is just way, way, way, way too much. And you have to remember SMS is a super personal communication channel and you've got to respect that. Like this can't be your one and only communication channel with your customers. It's an option for them to opt into if they want to, but once they've opted in, don't abuse that channel. Don't send any more than two to six text messages per month in most cases. And also make sure that that initial welcome flow is up to four messages because usually when you're overdoing it, you' More that welcome series is way too long or you're bombarding people with like 10 messages. Plus in a month, people are going to opt out and then you lose your opportunity for that instantaneous connection with them. So that is some info around your welcome flow.
Vira:You're welcome.
Alissa:Yes, you're welcome for this welcome flow.
Vira:Another one of our basic flows is post purchase flow. Yay. So basic. But seriously though, basic. That so basic. Oh gosh, I wonder how many people will opt out of our podcast after this episode.
Alissa:Seriously, please don't opt out. We love all of you. We love all of you. Don't opt out.
Vira:Please, please, please don't. Please don't. The post purchase flow. Yay. Once you have that first time buyer as a customer or customer as a buyer or whatever, once you have that person converted and become your customer, your next logical goal would be to upgrade them to a repeat customer or even to your product subs. And the sooner the better and your best bet here is to do that through a well thought post purchase sequence. And guys, you wouldn't believe how many brands are ignoring that very important stage of their relationship with the customer that post purchase, I don't know, post wedding or if you compare it to the. To the relationship. Right? Unfortunately yeah, this flow can be often overlooked as opportunities to further engage with your customer and actually build the trust and keep building the relationship. And we already mentioned it a few times in this episode and in previous episodes. We do love a good combination of SMS plus email. We do believe in like leveraging that powerful SMS plus email combo. In fact, fun fact that there are the stats that show that purchase rate of campaigns using three or more marketing channels is 287% higher than single channel campaigns. So when you're using SMS plus email your chances are growing or increasing or improving or whatever you say. I really like how this website campaign monitor defines the SMS+email combo. So basically you can think of email marketing as a tool to build relationship and then you can think about the SMS as the way to actually secure the commitment and seal the deal. Don't make a popular rookie mistake. I've seen that mistake so many times from like different brand. When they are trying to leverage both SMS and email they are like repeating the copy of the campaign word by word. That's a bad idea. It doesn't mean like when you're using SMS plus email it it doesn't mean copying campaigns word by word. These two channels are, they are to compliment each other. Let's go back to the post purchase example. Right? For example you are building the post purchase sequence and the perfect tool here would be to use the text to cross sell once of your products. Right? Once someone buys from you, you know what they are interested in. If someone buys say a pair of like cycling shorts, chances are they are interested in cycling and you can like sell them the cycling T shir or whatever. You can take the advantage of that post purchase information and provide even more relevant product recommendations to your customers. So what you can do, you can send initial offer as an SMS for the faster and higher open rate to maximize that high intent shopping moment. And then you can follow up with email or and that's actually something that we do all the time. You can do the vice versa. You can start with an email with a big nice email explaining the benefits of the product. Explaining like what this product is good for. Maybe you can add good old before and afters or I guess for shorts. It's a bad idea but you can repurpose some of the content right from your previous purchasers or something. So create this like big informational campaign around the product and then if the person haven't purchased then you can follow up with a message. So that's with an SMS message that's like a perfect, perfect combo. Replenishment reminders can also be built into your post purchase flow and SMS are really great to like prompt those like renewals and grow your subscription program even if you have fun. But even if you don't offer any like subscription services or like subscription or memberships to your customers, you can still like remind to replenish those like consumable products that have like reasonably short lifespan. Right. So a recent study by. I don't know how to pronounce this company by list track. Yeah, list track. Yeah. I found that replenishment campaigns have actually one of the highest click to open rates of any email marketing at 53.6%. So I mean open rates are not very relevant to SMS because as we know SMS sometimes can get like as high as like 98% but it can tell you something about this like entire concept of replenishment. Right. If emails get the open rates of 53.6, it means that yes, this content is really, really relevant to your customers. So the success of this types of messages is like very easy to explain. In fact it goes out to relatively small and very engaged group. Right. And this messages, they are always very timely and very relevant and you're like literally sending them to the customers that actually want to hear from you. Right. So yeah, go and experiment with SMS plus email but don't be that like annoying brand. Maximum 2 to 6 messages per month is what we recommend and that includes the campaigns and everything. So be careful, don't be like too, too aggressive with SMS because it's still more like private than email, if you know what I mean. So just like follow up with some like cut reminders or something like that. But you don't need to copy your entire email flow and do the exact same themes but with sms. Some people are doing that, some brands are doing that.
Alissa:Yeah, that's rough. That's like a big no go. Don't do that ever.
Vira:Yeah, please don't go. Your, your second very basic but very important flow post.
Alissa:So basic. I love it. I love the idea of the replenishment reminders. I think it's super smart. There are some platforms out there that will do that for you if you're able to find a way to get that set up on your own. If you have a product that people can buy on like this, it's so straightforward and it's really, really smart. It's a great way to go about it.
Vira:So I love it. Yeah. Especially if you, like, know that information, if you know, like, how long that product will last. And remember, Lisa, we talked about that, I think a few podcasts ago. I don't remember when you have the customers who return like three or four times, like more than two times, you have pretty much, like, the data and you can even create some, like, custom flow around it. Predictive analytics, I guess.
Alissa:The predictive analytics in Klaviyo. Yeah. Gosh, I wonder if we could use that with sms. I would imagine so.
Vira:Yeah. I pretty much like my understanding. I've only been working with SMS for, like, less than a year, maybe like six months or so. My understanding is that you can pretty much do whatever you. You do with emails, like in Klaviyo. I don't know about the other platforms, but in Klaviyo you can do the same thing with. With SMS as with emails. You can do, like, a lot of segmentation. You can do a lot of, like, upsells and stuff like that.
Alissa:Predictive analytics is a very, very interesting thing to test. Gosh, I would imagine that would have a very high success rate. Interesting lots for us to think about and optimize and strategize and plan for the year 2022. Yeah, that's a great one.
Vira:Cool.
Alissa:Okay. And last but not least, third and final is the abandoned cart flow, which I already kind of teased at the start, but whatever. And that's also kind of a basic flow. Still basic, but it's a good one. It's a real good one because this is where we think see most of the revenue coming from for our clients. Yeah. And some people call the abandoned cart SMS flow, the crown jewel of email and SMS marketing, which I would agree. I like that. I think of Crown Jewel and I immediately think of the movie Vira. Tell me you've seen this movie, the Princess Diaries with Anne Hathaway.
Vira:Of course I have.
Alissa:Oh, my gosh. I think of Crown Jewel and I think of that. I think of the song like Genovea. Genovea.
Vira:Oh, Genovia.
Alissa:Just in case you guys were questioning if I had a bad voice. Bad singing voice. I have a horrific singing voice. So now that we're all in the clear on that. Okay, so, abandoned cart flow. So just a quick recap of how this works, which I'm sure you Guys all know, but just in case we have some newbies listening. So when you're on a website, you're browsing, whether it's on your phone or your laptop or whatever device it is, you start adding some items to your clothes cart, you start the checkout process. So you plug in your email, you plug in your shipping info, whatever it is, and then you get distracted and you leave the site without actually making a purchase. Then magically, somehow, the magical e commerce fairies sprinkle an email into your inbox or a text into your phone about an hour or two hours later, reminding you that you should finish purchasing what's in your cart or else the items will sell out. And so then you go back and you check out and you think, how on earth did these magical fairies know that I place these items in my cart? It's the magic of e commerce, ladies and gentlemen. So obviously we know abandoned car emails and SMS are not new, which is why we say so basic. So the concept is very simple, obviously when applying abandoned cart to sms. But what we want to talk about today or develop further in that idea or concept is that these messages are so crucial to boosting your SMS ROI. 75% of online shopping carts are abandoned by shoppers prior to clicking that place my order button. And on average one third of them can actually be recovered because they actually reengage high intent shoppers.
Vira:So that's crazy.
Alissa:What does that all mean? Email marketing is obviously a more mature marketing channel than sms, but SMS abandoned cart flows are very awesome and very effective. Again, like we've talked about throughout the course of this podcast episode, time is of the essence. So a text message is really perfect for that because we're going to get that instant communication and then that instant viewing from the customer. So what you need to do is you need to have a strategy that really focuses on both email and sms. Emails are obviously much more socially accepted, as I've always argued in the past. So you'll probably have a much larger email audience than what your SMS audience will look like with abandoned cart text messages. Specifically, they can actually be sent as single auto reminders. So like a single message just to remind. Or you can actually integrate them into to a slightly more complex abandoned cart strategy which basically combines your SMS reminders with recovery emails and that will retarget yields. So the retargeting that you're doing there will basically give you much better results because you're combining two into one. So you're getting two for the price of one, and then the Likelihood of recovery is much higher roi, much higher revenue. You get the point. All your eyeballs are turning into dollar bills as I'm talking.
Vira:I know.
Alissa:So, so I know it sounds a little advanced, but honestly, combining the two is really, really straightforward. You can do both in one flow. And the nice thing is when you use a platform like Klaviyo, that's an omnichannel platform, it simplifies the process significantly. Like, significantly. So no matter how you're sending that abandoned cart messaging, whether it's SMS or email, you need to make sure that you are always including a link to the person's cart, an image of the most expensive item in their cart. Usually we reserve that for email, but it is possible for you to do that through M. MMS messaging as well, which is the multimedia send. Is that what the S stands for? What does MSMS even stand for?
Vira:Maybe like media mess, whatever.
Alissa:Short message service. So what is mms?
Vira:Multimedia multimessaging service. Multimedia messaging.
Alissa:Wow. There you go, people. We're talking about this thing that we don't even know what it stands for.
Vira:Yeah, nice.
Alissa:So you can send an image of the most expensive item in their cart using mms, which now we know means multimedia messaging service. And then also making sure that you're always including a sense of urgency. So you don't want to leave these carts abandoned for like, three weeks. It's more like, hey, Susan. Actually, I can't say Susan, because we actually have a copywriter named Susan on our team. Hey, Susan, what's up? But like, hey, Billy Joe. If there's a Billy Joe out there, this one's for you. But, hey, Billy Joe, your cart, it's here and it's waiting for you, and you have 48 hours to get it before we put everything back on the virtual shelves. And then you can't get it anymore. So you want to add that urgency in there too, because then it helps convert your customers a lot quicker. On the fact that you're using sms, which, again, is more instant communication with your customers. It gets the viewing a lot quicker. You'll be in a good place. So that is number three, your SMS abandoned cart flow, which is so basic, but the revenue that you'll be receiving from it is not basic at all.
Vira:I can promise, not basic at all. You'd be surprised, you guys, with all of those numbers. Wow. I love. I love seeing them. Like, as soon as I add the SMS to my email plus SMS strategy, those numbers are growing like crazy. Love seeing that. Okay, so there you have it you guys welcome flow post purchase flow and abandonment card flow. Obviously you can do so much more, so much more with sms. Pretty much you can do everything you're doing with emails you can do with SMS as well. But obviously don't over do because Remember about that 4 to 6 SMS campaigns or cents per month. It's very, very important. And thank you so much for listening you guys. It's. It's so fun to be talking to you every, every week here. Don't forget to subscribe. If you're not our subscriber yet, don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, with your e commerce friends. And if you leave us a review and if you go to flowium.com/socks if you leave us a review, screenshot your review and send us towards flowium.com/socks we will sen your very own very nice pair of volume socks. And they are not just random pair of socks. They are really, really good. They're quality of that socks. I'm like obsessed with my socks. I need a pair of new ones soon. So I will go ahead and leave myself a review. Yay. No I won't. But still you guys. And if you are interested in getting some more advice on how to like establish a solid email marketing strategy for your e commerce store, go to flowium.com/contact or if you have any question questions honestly to us or about us, I don't know. Let's connect. Let's connect. And thank you so much for listening.
Alissa:Hit us up. And next week as always make sure that you come back because next week we are going to be talking about content ideas for email campaigns for March 2022, which is always a good one. I love these content podcast episodes that we do because they're fun and they're like so straightforward but they give fun ideas and we always laugh a lot because we don't laugh enough here on this podcast. So it'll be a bl. Make sure that you join us next week. Vira's like Alissa, what are you on today?
Vira:Yay, it's Friday.
Alissa:It's Friday. Here's what I'm on today.
Vira:Three days.
Alissa:I know, I know, I know. Thank you guys so much and we'll see you next week.
Vira:Thank you. Bye.
