In recent years, many ecommerce brands have started using SMS marketing as their communication channel.
“But this is too old-school,” - you may say.
We get it.
But what if we told you that 58% of consumers said that SMS messages are the most effective way for businesses to reach them quickly?
In this episode, we're talking about:
Bonus: popup template designed to collect phone numbers. Feel free to steal it for your website!
Prefer reading the text version of this episode? Here it is.
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
In recent years, many ecommerce brands have started using SMS marketing as their communication channel.
“But this is too old-school,” - you may say.
We get it.
But what if we told you that 58% of consumers said that SMS messages are the most effective way for businesses to reach them quickly?
In this episode, we're talking about:
Bonus: popup template designed to collect phone numbers. Feel free to steal it for your website!
Prefer reading the text version of this episode? Here it is.
Create beautiful email signup forms, coupon boxes, and pop-up surveys for your store with Getsitecontrol.
Hi,
You’re listening to Getsitecontrol Insider, a monthly podcast where we talk about ways to grow an ecommerce business. The topic of today’s episode is SMS marketing.
Stay tuned to find out why this old-school method of communication is back and how you can start using it in your store.
If you had to choose one option to communicate with your customers, what would you say?
Most likely, you’d say “email marketing” and “social media,” but what about “SMS marketing”? Yes, we’re talking about the old-school method of text communication we all used back in the day before smartphones were a thing.
In recent years, many ecommerce stores have started using SMS marketing to engage with their customers and increase their sales. Why? Because it works.
But let’s take a step back and have a look at the numbers.
Even though SMS may seem like an odd communication channel, it’s actually more personal and less crowded than other channels.
A study done by Zipwhip found that 58% of consumers considered SMS messages as the most effective way for businesses to reach them quickly.
When it comes to the biggest benefit of SMS marketing, more than 60% of marketers participating in the research named the speed of delivery.
And that aligns with the responses from consumers! 60% have indicated reading a text message within 5 minutes of receiving it, while 85% said they preferred to receive an SMS to a voice call or an email.
Besides all these stats, there are many clear ways your ecommerce store can benefit from SMS marketing:
SMS marketing might seem intimidating when you first hear about it, but it’s as easy as running an email marketing campaign. Here is how you can launch an SMS marketing strategy for your store within 5 simple steps.
Step 1. Define the campaign
Before getting started with SMS marketing, it’s good to have an idea of what types of campaigns you’re planning to use it for.
Here are some of the most common SMS campaign examples:
Although one-off campaigns can work whenever there’s a specific reason for it, Zipwhip’s study found that 48% of respondents said the most valuable text messages they received from a business were status updates, while 29% mentioned discounts.
If you run a brick-and-mortar store, you can also send messages to attract recipients to come and visit it with a special coupon!
Step 2. Collect phone numbers throughout the customer journey (and stay compliant)
Before you can start using SMS marketing, you need to collect your customers’ phone numbers along with permission to send them SMS messages.
This step works much like the process of building an email list, and as such, it requires you to stay compliant with the many laws that govern each country. In the case of the US, your business must respect the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA). Among many provisions, this law stipulates that companies need to:
To stay compliant with TCPA, recipients must acknowledge and agree to your privacy policy, explaining in detail how your business will communicate with them, why you are doing so, and what your messages will be about. You must also make it easy for your subscribers to opt-out of your messages at any time.
With that point covered, you can start building your SMS list, and the first suggestion to consider is to use website popups. Adding a popup to a website is easy, and it requires no coding knowledge. Check the description to this episode to find a couple of popup templates designed to collect phone numbers on a website.
Once the popup is on your website, all you need is to integrate it with your SMS marketing app (more on that in a moment), so that new phone numbers go straight to the database.
Thanks to their versatility and pervasiveness, popups provide the same benefits as they do in your email list-building efforts: the setup is a complete no-brainer, and you have full control of when and how the popup will appear on your website. For example, you can use welcome popups, exit-intent popups, offer discount codes in exchange for a phone number, and so on.
Another place you should consider for collecting your customers’ phone numbers is the checkout page. It makes perfect sense if you’re offering delivery status updates via sms.
Finally, you can create a shareable online form and send it to your social media followers or email subscribers. To sweeten the deal for them, you can ask them to select what type of messages they want to sign up for — promotions, company news, or feedback requests.
Step 3. Choose your SMS marketing service provider
To start sending SMS marketing campaigns, you need to sign up for an SMS marketing service provider. These services will allow you to create SMS messages, track the results of your SMS campaigns, and more. The most popular SMS marketing services you can use are:
Any of these services will let you deliver your SMS campaigns to the customers no matter where they are. You can also expand your SMS messages to MMS, WhatsApp, and more apps using their APIs and integrations.
The costs these platforms charge you per message typically sit around one to five cents per text message. However, this data may vary depending on the provider, their pricing plans, and the number of messages you send per month.
Step 4. Write the text message
Your text messages will depend on the campaign you chose in the first step. To give you an idea of how you should approach writing an SMS that performs well, let’s go through some practical tips.
To start, you should make sure your SMS messages are personal. That means using the customer’s name when possible or any other attribute they have given you voluntarily. This is especially important if you send a highly personalized campaign, like a birthday or loyalty campaign.
Next, as with any marketing message, your SMS messages must provide a clear value to the customer. However, since you have very limited number of characters this time, makes sure to focus on that value using as few words as possible.
Another important thing is, for most campaigns, you must allow the recipient to unsubscribe. As we mentioned earlier, compliance with the laws in which your business operates is crucial to keep your campaigns running for the long run.
Finally, your message must include a call to action that will direct customers to your ecommerce store – for example, a product page or a sales page.
To implement that, include a shortened link in your call to action and make sure to add tracking to it to measure your campaign’s performance – which is the last, fifth step of the journey.
Every SMS marketing software provider offers analytics capabilities, much like their email marketing counterparts. Some of the metrics you want to keep an eye on include:
Essentially, SMS marketing shares most metrics with an email marketing, except the open rate, which is nearly impossible to measure not due to the lack of cookies.
To extract the most amount of data, integrate your SMS marketing provider with your web analytics software, such as Google Analytics. It offers a custom conversion tracking feature that will allow you to track how many people purchased due to clicking on your SMS message.
SMS marketing is a great way to connect with customers and increase your sales. And if you’re in ecommerce, it’s worth trying.
Follow these 5 easy steps to create messages that will resonate with your audience and drive them back to your ecommerce store. Then measure your campaign’s success using analytics to see how you can optimize it next time.
And that’s all for today.
Thank you for listening,
Until next time!