Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
Email Einstein Ingenious eCommerce Email Marketing by Flowium
5 SMS Marketing Tactics to Try This Month!
107 - In this episode, Vira will share 5 actionable tips that will help you to bring your SMS marketing to the next level.
You’ll Learn
- What are the maximum characters for SMS?
- How to make your SMS more exclusive?
- When is the best time to send an SMS?
- How to personalize your offers?
- Why is it important to take a conversational approach in SMS?
Hello. Hello everyone and welcome to Email Einstein by Flowium. I'm your host, Vira Sadlak. I'm an email marketer at an agency called Flowium. And we are very passionate about email marketing. Obviously, 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. And here on this podcast we share our insights with you. We share our email marketing tips and tried and true strategies. We are all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. And that's what we will be talking about today on this podcast. Today's podcast will be a bit different. Usually we record this like longer kind of sessions, but today it's going to be short and sweet and to the point and we will be talking about tried and true SMS marketing strategies that you can honestly try implementing like right away after this podcast. So I want to give you five actionable tips today, five actionable strategies that you can try today to bring your SMS marketing to like next level. And you guys, we already discussed it. You may like sms, you may not like sms, but you cannot deny that it's freaking powerful that SMS is here to stay. And I mean with open rates like 98% plus, you know that this is a powerful tool if you know how to use it correctly. So here are our tried and true five strategies. So number one tip number one and it's very, very important, don't go over 160 characters. 160 characters is an important number for you to rem when you're doing sms. It can basically redefine the language of SMS quite literally because you need to remember that 160 is a max and that's including your opt out language. Mobile networks will break your SMS into like smaller SMS or like smaller messages. If you go over 160 characters, some would not even like deliver. They will refuse to carry long text and the slicing can be very like inconsistent. So try to fit in the 160 characters or less. That's very, very important. And yes, when you're ascending MMs, you have more characters, but still I would recommend you to stay under that like 160 characters limit to make sure that your SMS will be delivered in full. You don't want to, you don't want to deliver the first part of the message and then the second part, get lost or something. You don't want that to happen. It's very important to stay under 160 characters. So that's your tip number one, stay under 160 characters, ideally less. And that must include your opt out language. So. So the message itself is usually around like 100 characters I'd say. Anyways, that's what we do internally at Flowium. Tip number two, that's going to be a quick podcast, right? I love how actionable and quick these tips are. Tip number two, have SMS only exclusives. Well, SMS is normally a channel that is reserved primarily for friends and family. And if someone gave you their SMS information or their mobile, it means if they want to accept your email marketing from you, that's like a huge, huge stamp of approval and appreciation to you as a brand. So that's, that's big one. If you got someone's mobile number, good for you, you're doing something right. But remember when people are giving you their mobile number they expect some sort of like exclusivity, right? In exchange for their mobile number information. And that's something that you can certainly do. You can first of all deliver exclusive SMS only offers. That's what we with our clients anyways. You promise them to give them early access to the sales, SMS only sales and stuff like that just to, to make sure that they feel special because in a way they are your VIPs. They gave you a huge stamp of approval, they are your VIPs. Right? But also something that we've been practicing quite a lot with our clients is that we are given an exclusive behind the scenes look with this SMSs. So you can do something like the video from the factory or maybe you can do the message from the found or maybe you can introduce them to your team. Exclusivity and behind the scenes looks. They tap into idea that customer is an insider, that your SMS customer is an insider. And it help you to build that unique relationship with the brand. So tip number two again have SMS only exclusives. That's super important. Tip number three, send SMS on weekdays only. And that's something that, I mean a lot of brands are struggling with the send time. Everyone wants to know that like magic time, when is the best time to send the message? And listen, there is no magical number or magical formula I can give you to make sure that you are delivering the message on the best time possible because this number is very or like this time is very unique to each brand specifically. But there are few things that you cannot do. Well, sending the SMS in the middle of the night is off limits just because SMS is a very personal mean of communication. Right. And you don't want to exhaust your customers with this like random promotions in the middle of the night. So be careful with that. I wouldn't send SMS on weekend per se unless it's like some sort of like a big promotion that is happening that you need to specifically talk to them on, on weekend. I would stay away from sending the SMS after 8 pm and, and I would stay away from sending SMS at night and like on the weekends as well. Is there a day of the week in which SMS recipients are particularly happy to hear from you? Not really. And while we didn't see like a big difference, generally speaking Mondays are slow. So I would say Mondays are probably like the worst time to send your SMS promotion. But also Tuesdays are like so. So I would say that Thursday, Wednesday were the best days days for me and we saw the biggest click through rate averages on this day. So I'd say like midday Tuesday to Thursday would be your best bets. Stay away from weekends, stay away from times after 8pm so here you have your tip number three, send SMS on weekdays only. Now tip number four, make your SMS conversational. So with engagement rates as high as 98% SMS is, it's probably like one of the most essential tool for digital marketing marketeers these days. So you do want to make it more conversational than for example email. If you're using Klaviyo definitely enable two way communication and make sure to respond to those like messages where people like inquire about like specific specifics of your promotion or they just want to talk to like a real person. Yes, you can do the automations sort of like a messenger kind of bot if you will. So this, this automations will help you to make this SMS process more conversational but also you can have a real person answering to those messages like once a day you can go to your like klaviyo or whatever platform you're using and if there are any like SMSs that were not responded to because they were like quite unique or something like that, you can make the real person, you're maybe like some specialist from your team to respond to those messages to make it even more valuable. So that's tip number four last tab that I would give you guys and this is probably like the most important one is the personalization. Personalize offer personalize your SMS experience in general. And when I say personalization I don't just mean using the name in the SMS message even though it's super super important. So if you are not using a name please go ahead and test it out. Use the name it bring higher click through rates when when people are seeing that you are addressing them directly, not just like as a mess, as a mass customer, but you're addressing them personally, right? When I say personalization I mean do personalized offers do segment your list based on the product they have viewed based on their products that they purchased in the past to do cross sells, do up sales based on their previous purchasing behav or best on their next purchases that are coming. Just remember that basically everything that you can do with segments with emails, you can do the same with sms. And that's like a mistake that a lot of marketers are doing when they first start sending sms. Even if your list is small, you can still slice it quite a bit because not everyone on your list are. Not everyone have the same needs, have the same interests and stuff like that. Everything that you can do with email list you can do with SMS as well. No matter how big or small your sms, no matter what returns you are getting right away, believe me, if you will be slicing your email or slicing your SMS list into smaller segments, it will bring you bigger, bigger returns over time. So here you have it. Five tested and true strategies that we recommend using to all of our clients that we are using with all of our clients in fact and try them today and you will see big, big return with this amazing channel that is called SMS marketing. So let me quickly revise them all again. Just remind you this five tips so you can start using them today. Number one, don't go over 160 characters. Ideally stay under, I'd say 140 characters. Very important. Tip number one. Tip number two, have SMS only exclusives. Don't forget to give your customers exclusive behind the scene look exclus of sales and promotion because these are your VIP people. These are people who are giving you a huge stamp of approval. You don't want to disappoint them. Tip number three, send SMS on weekdays only. Weekends are off limits. That cute personal SMS in the middle of the night is off limits. Send SMS on weekdays only and during that window of 8:00am to 8:00pm. Tip number four, make SMS conversational. Because this is the, this is a more personal means of conversation than say SMS people do kind of expect it to be conversational, right? So make it conversational. And last but not least is make it personalize it. Basically make it more personal with personalization in SMS and with personalized offer. Don't be afraid of segmenting, segmenting your, your SMS list, no matter how big or small it is. There you have it. Five tips. Go and test it. Test them out today. I'm sure you will. You will like them and you will see a big results. So thank you for listening to this podcast, you guys. I hope you enjoy that it was short, sweet and to the point. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with people who you think might be interested in it. And yeah, and next week we will be talking with one very exciting guest. I don't want to spoil anything to you, but we will be talking about personalization and improving your average order value. So come back next Tuesday and you don't want to miss that. You don't want to miss that. Honestly, the guests are, the guests are super good. You've been using this, the Shopify app yourself, I'm sure. So definitely come back next Tuesday. As always, thank you for listening and we hope to see you here next week.
