Close to 50 percent of the respondents of a study on phone use reported spending five to six hours on their phones every day, excluding work-related use. Another 22 percent of respondents said they spent around three to four hours a day on their phones.
That is a lot of time, and it points to one of the main benefits of SMS marketing: SMS allows you to reach people directly where they spend a lot of their days.
This direct connection to your audience is just one of the benefits SMS marketing holds. Read on to find out why SMS should be part of your ecommerce marketing plan.
10+ Benefits SMS Marketing Brings Ecommerce Businesses
1. Interested recipients
If you follow all SMS marketing rules and regulations, your SMS subscribers are people who’ve actively signed up for your list, letting you know they want to hear from you. They will have taken out their phone to scan your QR code or to text you the sign-up keyword—both actions that require quite a bit of effort—or they will have actively clicked a checkbox on your website, granting you permission to text them.
This means that people on your SMS list are highly interested in receiving updates from you.
2. Increased customer engagement
Because people on your SMS list tend to be highly interested in your brand, they’re also more likely to engage with it. They’ll reply to your call for questions, let you know which products they’re most interested in, and click your links.
After all, it’s very easy to engage with an SMS. While replying to an email can sometimes feel like a big thing, we’re so used to replying to text messages that most of us think nothing of it. This type of interaction is marketing gold for your ecommerce business, as it allows you to get insights directly from your customers.
3. Highly visible
Engagement with SMS marketing is high not only because the people on your list really want to hear from you but also because most—if not all—of your SMS subscribers will get all of your text messages. There is no such thing as a spam folder in someone’s SMS inbox.
On top of that, people may not look at every email they receive—but the sound of a new text message still induces curiosity. It’s not usual for someone to read a new SMS the moment they receive it. It’s another one of those SMS benefits that can’t be ignored.
Lastly, subscribers don’t even need to be connected to the internet to receive your messages. While they do need to be online to click on links you send them, they can receive and read your SMS at any time.
4. Personal feel
While you might get emails from your family or friends, chances are higher that the people close to you send a text message when they want to reach you. That makes the SMS inbox a place associated with personal connections—and you get to be part of that.
As a brand, you can increase that personal feel by using your recipients’ first names when you text them and by crafting your text messages in a conversational tone, rather than a succession of concise but cold marketing phrases.
You can also use data on their purchasing behavior or demographics to send them customized recommendations.
5. Easy to create
Coming up with compelling text for your SMS program isn’t always easy, but the actual creation of ecommerce SMS marketing messages is so much easier than that of promotional emails.
There is no need to code or build fancy templates, no need to shoot dazzling product images, and no need to worry about things like fonts and colors. Text messages are simple and don’t require a lot of bells and whistles to be effective.
6. Speedy delivery
Because SMS messages are so easy to create, they allow you to reach your subscribers quickly when needed. While you can set up automated messages for when products go out of stock, come back in stock, or get discounted, for example, there might be times when you want to react to current events and get your message to your subscribers in a timely manner.
One of the biggest SMS marketing benefits is how fast and direct it is. When you really need to, SMS allows you to reach your audience in an instant.
7. Cost-effective lead generation
Another benefit of SMS marketing is that it’s highly cost-effective, especially when compared to more traditional forms of advertising such as placing newspaper and magazine ads, running TV commercials, and putting up billboards.
Pricing depends on the SMS platform you use, but you can easily send hundreds of text messages for less than $30.
Even when we look at online marketing strategies, SMS is budget-friendly. While you will need to test what works for your audience, you’re unlikely to waste a lot of money running SMS campaigns if you know your audience. The same can’t be said of Facebook ad campaigns, for example.
8. Trackable results
If you’re still worried about the costs of SMS marketing, know that SMS campaigns are highly trackable. When running a campaign, you can track:
- How many people you’ve sent it to
- How many people it’s been delivered to
- How many people have clicked on your link
- How many people have replied
- How many people have unsubscribed
The good trackability of SMS marketing allows you not only to measure results, but also your ROI.
9. Good conversion rates
As mentioned before, SMS marketing is permission-based. So, all of your messages land in the inboxes of people who want to hear from you. By sending to such a highly interested audience, your messages are more likely to convert into sales.
10. Improved loyalty program access
Not everyone is fond of installing dozens of apps on their phones. With SMS marketing, you give customers the chance to access their loyalty account through a simple link in a text message. This removes the friction of having to open a specific app and increases the chance that people will actually redeem loyalty benefits on their phones.
11. Larger audience
If your target customers are the kind of people who don’t spend time on social media and prefer being outdoors over being online, SMS marketing is a great way to reach them. In fact, SMS marketing allows you to contact a wide range of people you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.
It’s not just about connecting with people offline, either. If your customers are tech-savvy, they might use an ad blocker when using the Internet, and they probably have a separate email address to catch all of the emails they’re subscribed to. SMS is the only channel that allows you to send them promotional messages that are virtually guaranteed to get seen.
12. Easy opt-out
To opt out of your SMS list, a subscriber simply hits reply and sends you a keyword—usually “STOP.” That may seem like a bad thing, but it’s not. Subscribers who aren’t interested in your brand won’t engage with it either, diminishing the quality of your list and negatively affecting the ROI of your SMS marketing campaigns.
Thanks to the easy opt-out SMS provides, people can unsubscribe before getting frustrated, leaving with a neutral, if not positive impression of your brand.
13. Complements other marketing strategies
Is your Facebook post barely getting seen? Send the same message via SMS to your subscribers.
Is your sale coming to an end? Let your customers know via email and SMS so they don’t miss out.
Do you need someone to confirm their order details? Remind them via SMS.
Because they reach subscribers directly in their pockets or purses, text messages are great for giving your other marketing campaigns an extra push. And because they come through a different channel than where people see your Facebook ads, emails, and Instagram posts, they can complement the messages sent via those channels nicely.
It especially pays off to create a cohesive SMS and email marketing strategy where you use SMS for the short, direct updates, and email for a more visually appealing experience that provides more context.
Don’t Ignore the Benefits SMS Marketing Provides
The benefits SMS marketing holds for ecommerce businesses are plentiful. More and more brands are including SMS marketing into their overall marketing strategy, and so are your competitors.
At MailCharts, we collect, analyze, and organize the SMS marketing campaigns of hundreds of ecommerce brands. Sign up today and see how other brands are using SMS to increase their revenue. Dive into real-life SMS campaigns and use them as inspiration to get started with your own.
