SMS Marketing: What Every Shopify Store Should Know

Short Service Message (SMS) Marketing is a permission-based technique that Shopify stores can use to spread their promotional messages. This usually requires the customers to opt-in via a 5 digit code, and a choice to unsubscribe or opt-out at any time.

The goal of SMS marketing is to engage and retain customers, build clientele, and establish a loyalty-based relationship with them and the Shopify store. It’s also an appropriate tactic for promotional messages, and notifying your customers about new products and services.

Despite all sorts of instant messaging apps, about 90% of smartphone users still use SMS as a way to communicate.  Moreover, most of the customers of Shopify sites are millennials, and 60% of them use texting as the primary mode of communication. Sending an average of 130 texts every day, millennials prefer this form of communication over email.

SMS Marketing creates a stronger engagement and communication channel with Shopify customers. Texting has nearly a hundred percent open rates, and ninety percent of them are within three minutes –as opposed to the merely thirty percent open rates for emails.

This is primarily because texting someone feels a lot more personal, and authentic. SMS marketing erases the initial feel of doubt and unfamiliarity associated with Shopify businesses, and communicates with customers more efficiently.

Additionally, texting reduces customer service calls by 20%, and take much less drafting time as well. Plus, SMS marketing does not require an omnipresent support staff, and customers are always in reach via their phones.

Another thing that is increasingly common among Shopify customers is the phenomenon of Shopping Cart Abandonment. This is when visitors drop by your site, add things to their cart and never check out. According to studies on a thousand Shopify customers, these make up for more than fifty percent of people, and that is an incredible portion of revenue that can be tapped into by reaching out via SMS.

Conclusively, all of this will lead to the following advantages to your Shopify store

• Increase traffic because buyers will be more likely to engage with you

• Stop customers from abandoning their shopping carts

• Receive genuine feedback

• Save monetary risks associated with customer support systems

• Ten times more effective than a phone call, and four times more efficient than an email.

• Automate customer conversations via a Chatbox

Texting compliances vary for every country. However, as long as your company remains within the spheres of anti-spamming laws and use permission by the customers via opt-in requirements, you can utilize these kinds for marketing purposes.

There are three kinds of texting with customers, with that in mind.

• Audience broadcast

• Personalized event notifications

• One on one conversations

The first thing that you need to do when you start with SMS Marketing campaign is outline your objectives. Ask yourself if you are looking for promoting a product or a service, or if you simply want feedback. What you write in your SMS to be forwarded to your customer list depends on your answers to these questions.

When sending such SMS marketing messages, you have to identify your business and get a brand name with the Sender ID if that’s possible. This creates that sense of familiarity that really engages the customers, and retains them.

Moving on to writing the content of your message, make sure that you keep it short and crisp. SMS should not take up passages, or turn into essays. Plus, a smaller word count keeps them more targeted, which means better results from the campaign. For example, instead of sending a generic campaign to your entire clientele list just for the sake of it, sending certain messages to a targeted category of your clients would be a more lucrative strategy.

Be mindful of the time when you forward your messages, and the timezone of your customers. When done inappropriately, it can either be intrusive or have the exact opposite effect of retaining customers.

For example, no one wants to be reading through promotional material during the peak traffic hours, or when they are about to go to sleep; stay respectful. Also, just FYI, Mondays are known to be the worst performance hours for SMS marketing, so that’s a strict no-no.