By Sommer Burbank
With adults spending 3+ hours on their phones per day, it is clear that if e-commerce businesses want to reach customers where they spend most of their time, they should be focusing some of their marketing efforts on mobile-first channels like SMS marketing.
Although SMS subscribers are quick to opt in and more than likely to open and engage with your content, they can just as quickly opt out and leave you on read or unopened. Here is where strategy comes in to save the day (and your potential customers). Continue reading for tips on launching successful SMS campaigns and optimizing your SMS strategy to increase e-commerce conversions.
Tips for Launching Your SMS Marketing Campaign
- Know your audience: Just like an email marketing or paid ads campaign, you need to keep your consumers interested in and engaged with your content. Know exactly what content your audience is looking for and how often they want to receive that content. Sending boring, irrelevant and/or incessant content will result in sending meaningless texts that are ignored.
- Be transparent with your subscribers: Send your audience the exact information you promised with a frequency that is consistent with what they are expecting. Subscribers are likely to opt out if they feel you are misusing their contact information or not meeting their expectations.
- Streamline your SMS scheduling: Monitor how often you are pushing out SMS content and consider the content you are sending to your audiences. Only send the most important content via text if you are concerned about the effectiveness of a specific campaign. Text respondents often unsubscribe from brands that send SMS alerts too frequently, especially if they are receiving alerts from multiple brands at a time.
4 Strategies to Increase E-Commerce Conversions
Engage customers with straightforward, personalized content
You only have 160 characters to make your SMS shine in the eyes of your ideal consumer. The more focused, concise and relevant the copy, the more likely it will generate a sale. Customers engage best with messaging that speaks to their needs. Be sure to refer to them by their name and include content that genuinely capture their attention. You can manage which content is sent to which consumer by segmenting your contacts into lists based on different characteristics and tailoring your SMS campaigns to those specific audiences.
Use a marketing platform to set up SMS automations
Automatically send SMS messages in response to a customer performing a specific action on your e-commerce site, such as visiting a specific page, abandoning a cart or completing a purchase.
By setting up automations, you can use SMS to send customers shortened links to a specific product page or directly to a cart they abandoned, which will minimize the effort required for the customer to take that action and help you reach visitors when their intent to purchase is highest.
Send discount codes over SMS
Sending subscribers discount codes over SMS can increase your open rates and turn prospective customers onto your brand. Use codes to thank customers for their loyalty, incentivize cart abandoners to complete their purchases and more.
Complement your SMS campaigns with additional marketing channels
Whether you complement your SMS strategy with a marketing email or paid social ad, one of the most powerful ways to increase e-commerce conversions is to optimize marketing campaigns across multiple channels. After using emails and other mediums to visually showcase your products to your customers, use SMS to encourage interested or engaged customers to complete a sale with a 10% discount and a direct link to a relevant product page.
A high SMS marketing conversion rate—whether you calculate it by comparing your overall conversion rate before and after launching an SMS marketing campaign, or by calculating the percentage of SMS messages in a campaign that resulted in a sale—can send you on your way to long-term e-commerce growth, especially coupled with complementary marketing strategies such as email marketing. If you're just starting out building email campaigns, check out our resources on segmenting your email audiences and email frequency!
Although SMS marketing isn't dead, it can be difficult to master without the right best practices in mind. Use these tips to launch your text-based strategy, and let us know your results!
