5 Highly Useful SMS Marketing Strategies for E-commerce

SMS marketing is still one of the top priorities for online businesses, especially e-commerce platforms. SMS being one of the most convenient, cost-effective and fastest ways to reach a majority of the audience still tops the list of marketing in a wide range of industries including e-commerce. 

You often notice innumerable messages on your inbox regarding the latest sales, discounts, ongoing offers or new arrivals from the e-commerce marketplaces you shopped before or browsed through. And the interesting fact is, not all of these messages get your equal attention, right?

Sometimes you click directly on the link shared with you and shop your favourite product right away while most of the time you block those instantly or simply ignore them! And that’s why SMS marketing is tricky! And in this blog we will list out the top 5 highly useful SMS marketing strategies for e-commerce. So, let’s start!

Top 5 SMS Marketing Strategies for E-commerce

1. Build an Impactful Audience List

Now, what’s an impactful audience list? Definitely it means the potential audience who are more likely to make your SMS marketing campaign a huge success! And there are simple tips to build such list before you start triggering SMS –

• First thing first- you need the consent of your customers or audience that they are ready to receive the promotional messages. You can simply keep checkboxes on your website or app pages during their sign up or check out. Always keep opt in and opt out options as well so that whenever your customers feel like, they can take the necessary actions.

• Recognize your audiences- A single e-commerce store can have multiple types of subscribers or customers based on their age, gender, other demographics, personal preferences etc. For instance, sending new dress updates to a male customer will make no sense or notifying about sports shoes to someone who is not into it won’t be fruitful. Simply create and segregate your audience lists and send relevant SMS to each of such lists.

• Update your audience lists on a timely basis so that it reflects their current preferences, market trends, purchase patterns and requirements.

• Don’t forget to take timely feedback from your customers!

2. An Impressive Welcome Message- that’s the Way to Start!

Instead of sending promotional SMS straight away, send a welcome message to every customer as soon as they sign up on your app or website. Send catchy one or two liners along with the glimpses of exclusive offers awaiting for them.

You can opt for a notification engine that offers predefined templates to make your task easier! 

Also Read: The Difference between Marketing Email and Transactional Email

3. Special Add-ons on Special Occasions

New Year, Christmas, Arrival of new season, customer birthdays, sign up anniversaries, crossing a threshold amount of shopping- every occasion counts when it comes to SMS marketing as customers are more likely to shop what is most relevant for them. And these types of promotions can be super helpful in inspiring impulsive buying!

4. Personalization – a Secret to Higher CTOR!

So, you must have noticed it several times that you have run multiple bulk SMS campaigns, but the result was not as expected. And if you analyze those campaigns, most probably you will find that most of those campaigns were non-personalized. Now, let’s think from the customers’ perspective – how many general promotional SMS with ‘dear customer’ you open and read? Very less, maybe none! But when some SMS addresses you with your name to get started with, it instantly drives your attention. Similarly, personalized bulk messages are more likely to be opened, read and clicked by the customers, no wonder that the CTOR for such SMS is more than twice than the non-personalized ones!

5. Keep in Touch in the Most Innovative Ways

‘Out of sight, out of mind’- it is very much applicable to your e-commerce business too! Once you start getting disconnected from your customers, not only they can forget about your brand but the place can be taken by any of your competitors!

Try dropping SMS on a timely basis such as-

• Daily or weekly messages containing some inspiring and relevant quotes
• Highlights of the week
• Best-selling products of the month
• Some tips on trending fashion or related to your products

Etc.

Wrapping Up,

As soon as you chalk out your SMS marketing plan, start looking for the best tool matching your criteria. Because no matter how much expertise you have, you will need automated tools to implement such strategies. And one important tip to follow – always go for a single sophisticated tool that can help you trigger multi-channel notifications, not only SMS. Because sooner or later you will need that.

Muvi notification engine Konviare lets you trigger, manage and edit multi-channel event-based notifications from a single dashboard without coding or testing! Furthermore, it lets you personalize bulk notifications, create and edit audience lists and analyze previous campaigns.

Take a 14-day free trial and get 100 notifications completely free (no credit card needed)!