SMS Text Message Marketing Automation for Ecommerce

Transcript

Hi Claus here, eCommerce business coach. In this video, I want to talk about SMS text message marketing for e-commerce.

Now SMS text messaging stands for short messaging service.

Everyone knows that e-commerce can be used as a strategy that allows businesses to send messages to customers via text so not a real new technology been around for ages. Sort of people have forgotten that this is a very good way to connect with people. SMS differs from email in the case that the messages are very short a limit of 160 characters or you have to split it into more SMS messages and they immediately are delivered.

A huge advantage on that side compared to email.

Now the good thing is that the average person checks their phone approximately 47 times a day and they will open text message messages within 15 minutes of receiving it.

So that's completely different what you experience with emails where the opening rate is much much much lower and people try to just ignore them because there's so much spam going on.

Matter of fact 90% of SMS are read within three minutes. So this is a very direct way to communicate with your prospects or customers

I said 98% of text messages are opened very quickly and read and it takes normally 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text on average.

Pretty much the fastest way to communicate with the customer.

So as I already said 98% opening rate. If you're looking at emails you might see a good opening rate that is between 20 and 30 percent.

If you have a customer order confirmation email that might see 50 to 60% but your average marketing email usually would not have more than 20 to 25% if it's a good subject line and the segmentation was good. That you're mailing the right custom at the right time.

The click-through rates if you include a call to action into an SMS can be 35 percent and higher. That's much much higher than what you see it for instance in email marketing.

And you have an average response rate of 45% which is also much higher than email marketing.

SMS text marketing as the highest return on investment of all marketing channels.

You can expect at least 25x more likely you have a return of investment or ad spend of more than two thousand percent.

So what you see below is an example from my store and you can see I spent 214 u.s dollars on SMS tax marketing and I made a total revenue from these campaigns of 11

thousand us dollars. So that gave me a return on investment of five thousand three hundred percent which is not bad.

Sms marketing is great for three main things you wanna increase your brand awareness, and bring yourself back in front of the customer, you want to boost the engagement with the customer, and finally and probably the most important point you want to generate more sales.

Now here a couple of examples where you can use SMS marketing for.

First of all, you can use it in addition to your email card abandonment. So basically you would create a sequence of card abandonment SMS text messages and email messages you should stagger them means you should not send them out in the same moment.

You send out the email card abandonment notification five minutes for the first time after people have abandoned the card and then maybe half an hour later you send an SMS an hour later you send an email and maybe three hours later you send another SMS

So just stagger it that people get at different times different messages or messages through different channels is from you.

You can use it as the for your order confirmation in your store and for shipping updates in your store which can be completely automated within different systems on the market.

You don't need to do anything manual there. You can use it for post-purchase upsells or cross cells which very few people do.

Something you should consider to try out you can use it for your welcome offers or welcome sequences if you have lapsed customers who haven't, for instance, opened an email for 30 days 60 days 90 days.

You can try to reactivate them with a win-back campaign via SMS. Obviously, you can use SMS for special time-sensitive offers that you say special for our SMS subscriber exclusively and only valid for 24 hours, You can use it for new product launches or early access to products which works quite well.

You use it for holiday and seasonal offers like Christmas, Easter, and any other kind of holiday.

You can create a member or VIP level so you're sending out special offers to your SMS subscriber list for instance if somebody has reached a purchase of $200 or $500 on your store or has bought more than three times you just move them up to a VIP level and offer them special offers through SMS

You can use it for a birthday campaign when you know the birthday of your customer and one thing that works quite well is for educational campaigns

You give them little bits and pieces of educational content on your site.

All of that used in combination will increase communication and trust-building with your customer.

Now here are some examples of flows or automation that you will find in SMS bump. That's the app that I use in my store and there is a lot of flows already in a library so you don't have to create them from scratch.

You can just use the ones that are in there there's many more than in there than you see here but it just gives you an idea of what is possible.

If you're familiar um with a visual editor like you have it in Klaviyo and other systems to build flows you can do that in SMS bump and other SMS marketing tools also by now.

As you can see that it's drag and drop where you build your flow your automation and you can take what you have in your for instance view or account
and then just replicate that in your SMS with a delay different delay and then you're good to go.

How do you grow your list best you can use your obviously a subscription form on your store on your site.

That can be either a pop-up a floating widget which I use you see that on the right side of it can be a form so you just ask people to sign up for your SMS list.

One thing you need to build an SMS list from scratch you cannot just take the phone numbers that you have from your existing clients.

For legal matters, they need to agree. I will come to that in a minute.

All of these tools pop-ups floating widgets embedded forms you can use to collect their phone number. Then you can use keywords that would be SMS keywords so people send a keyword to a specific number to subscribe.

You would give out in your marketing material the keyword that they have to subscribe to your number and then they will be signed up on your list.

Then you can try to convert your email subscribers into SMS subscribers so send them an email campaign and say if they want to join your VIP SMS club and get special offers then they should either send a keyword to a number or go to your site and sign up through the form.

You basically would use your existing customers and then just try to get them on the other list. Also, you can use shareable subscribe links. That would be basically a link that goes to a subscription page where people can sign up immediately.

And then you have integrations a lot of Shopify apps have SMS sign up features already. For instance for an exit pop-up like Wheelio there you can choose if you want to collect the email or the phone number a review app like Jotpo you can do this obvious email marketing my automation was Klaviyo you can do this while Klaviyo has by now its SMS feature in there.

You can find more SMS Marketing Tips in this blog post of mobilemonkey.com.