The emails in the mailbox sit unopened for months. Sometimes, the offer emails are even get sent directly to the ‘Promotions’ tab or Spam.
In contrast, SMS marketing campaigns are read 98%. This makes SMS an extremely effective marketing channel for retail business owners to reach customers and prospects.
78% of the consumers prefer SMS communication which is why texting is the perfect medium for sharing time-sensitive promotions and alerts.
If you’re into the retail business and new to SMS marketing, we’ve got you covered. In this blog let’s discuss the benefits and best practices of SMS for the retail industry.
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is a way to send marketing campaigns or promotional messages to your customers using text messages. Retailers use SMS marketing to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and other business alerts.
Unlike email, the messages are short and are limited to 160 characters. SMS campaigns appear on your subscribers’ smartphones as soon as they are sent. Based on the user’s mobile phone settings, they will get notified as soon as your message is delivered.
What are the best practices of SMS Marketing for Retail:
Ask for consent: SMS marketing is permission-based just like Email. Only with the valid Opt-ins, you are allowed to send SMS Marketing campaigns to customers. You need to respect the local laws and follow the regional regulatory body guidelines to learn about SMS marketing.
We can suggest you use emails, social media, the store, websites to collect Opt-ins from customers.
Sender IDs/Shortcodes- Unique and Brand Friendly: Sender IDs and Shortcodes are alphanumeric and numeric in nature. They are specifically made for commercial use and mass mobile communications and it’s mandatory to have them if you want to set up business communication. These numbers have to be unique and brand-friendly because your retail SMS Marketing communication will come from this number.
Deliver locally: Choose an SMS marketing platform that allows you to grow and scale your mobile marketing strategy. If you sell internationally or plan to, look for an SMS service provider with a large carrier network like MOBtexting that caters to global and localized numbers.
Get a platform that has a local time zone feature. This way, you can deliver messages at the right time in the right time zone.
Track your SMS performance metrics: If there’s no ROI, investing time and money into a new marketing channel isn’t worth it. It’s important to keep track of the SMS campaign performance. Most SMS platforms have a dashboard where you can track metrics and learn which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. So SMS platforms like MOBtexting have an analytics dashboard where you can easily track metrics and learn which campaigns are working and which ones are not.
This way, you can optimize and improve with each new campaign you send.
The KPIs to consider are open rate, the click-through rate on smart links(CTR).
Aligning SMS marketing and email campaigns: Erin Lopez, e-commerce growth strategist says “SMS can be used to help you amplify your all marketing campaigns”. Align messaging with your email strategy, but be sure to adapt it for text messages. You can also curate text-message-specific campaigns that only SMS subscribers will receive.
This approach can encourage people to opt-in if they know they’ll get exclusive offers that email subscribers won’t receive. If people know that they’ll get exclusive offers for SMS subscribers, it will encourage them to opt-in for the same.
Keep it short and simple: The content of your SMS campaigns should be easily understandable. If you’re redirecting someone from their SMS app, you should be trying to convert a purchase.
Get straight to the point in your text messages. You can test different formats to see what works best for your audience, but be specific. For example, do they respond well when you include their first name? Do your customers like emojis?
The benefits of SMS marketing for retailers:
SMS performance metrics are higher than email marketing: Email marketing has an average of 20% open rates. It’s not bad but SMS open rates can be astonishingly higher by 98%. The SMS Marketing average CTR is 19% and for email marketing, it is 2.5%.
Increased customer engagement leads to increased sales. For this reason, it’s worth testing SMS marketing for your retail business. With this data, we can conclude that SMS has the potential to increase customer engagement which is directly proportional to the increase in sales.
Meet your customers where they are and increase engagement: Use SMS marketing to meet reach your customer where they’re spending a huge chunk of their time. On their phones. You know what? Implementing SMS marketing for your retail business is a breeze. You can boost engagement by reaching your customers quickly and conveniently where they’re already spending a lot of their time.
SMS marketing can increase sales: Consumers who get SMS marketing messages are 40% more likely to convert than those who don’t. says MobileMonkey.
The same study affirms that SMS engagement rates are six to eight times higher than retailers normally achieve via email marketing.
Campaign creation is quick and easy: SMS marketing campaigns are usually short and concise and don’t involve the creative techniques that you need for email marketing. So it’s easier to plan and schedule SMS as well as test and iterate quickly based on previous campaign results.
You can test different messaging formats to see what your audience responds to best as it doesn’t cost you a fortune. For example, emojis may work for some retailers, while others see an increase in unsubscribes after using emojis. The key is to test and learn from each campaign and improvise on a regular basis.
Data-driven insights help you personalize and perfect your messaging: Campaign data helps you understand when and how to engage with your customers. SMS marketing provides actionable insights to help you develop your strategy.
Campaign data is useful in determining how to segment your customers based on their interests and behaviour. Segmentation is helpful to send unique, personalized messages.
Get in touch with us today to launch you’re first Retail SMS Marketing Campaign. Call +91 9019 120 120 for sales enquires or drop an email to sales@webrevenant.com.
