If you’re not texting your customers, you should be.
Short message service (SMS) messaging is an incredibly effective channel for marketing and customer support, and more than half of consumers say they want to receive promotions and service reminders via SMS.
Despite this customer demand, only 20 percent of companies actually communicate with their customers through SMS—so what’s holding brands back?
Too often, marketing teams are pressed for time and tight on budget, so they don’t think they have the necessary resources to kick off an effective SMS strategy. What they don’t realize is that there are plenty of incredibly powerful text message tools that can make SMS marketing a breeze. Plus, an effective SMS strategy will greatly improve your customer experience, save your team time, and lead to direct sales to justify your costs.
To help you unlock these benefits, let’s explore a few reasons why you should start texting your customers, what types of messages you should send, and some of the best features to look for in an SMS marketing tool.
How can your brand benefit from integrating SMS in marketing?
Unlike other customer communication channels like email and social media, SMS marketing is a deeply personal channel. This means that brands run a higher risk of seeming invasive—but the potential benefits make for a great reward if you’re careful.
Armed with the right information, it’s easy to see why you should create an SMS marketing strategy. Let’s look at just a few SMS marketing benefits.
eText messages are incredibly effective for sales and marketing
Let’s start with the basics: most of your customers have mobile phones, and they constantly use them throughout the day. Nearly all U.S. adults own a mobile phone and these adults read and respond to 95 percent of their messages within just three minutes.
SMS marketing is one of the most reliable ways to reach your customer almost immediately. After all, do your customers read every email you send within three minutes? What about your social media posts? Not likely.
Not only do customers read their messages quickly, but text messages have a 19 percent average click-through rate, meaning that almost one in every five customers will click a link in your text. If you text 200 customers about a sale, for example, then about 40 will likely visit your site and possibly make a purchase.
Texting improves the customer experience
Because SMS marketing is so effective, you need to use it sparingly. As the saying goes: with great power comes great responsibility.
Every text message you send needs a clear purpose and must provide actual value to your customer. Sorry public relations team, but that means the new executive hire isn’t something to text about. If you reach out too often or with irrelevant messages, you’ll likely lose your text subscribers (and loyal shoppers).
SMS marketing can encompass a variety of message types to encourage your customers to make a purchase—and SMS can turn that purchasing experience from ‘meh’ to ‘amazing.’
These are just a few examples of popular text messages you can send to your customers and ways that they improve the customer experience:
- Appointment reminders and confirmations: Text your customers about upcoming appointments, and give them the opportunity to reschedule if needed. Customers appreciate the reminder, and this will save your team from last-minute cancellations and no-shows. Include all the relevant appointment details in the text including date, time, and location so your customer has everything they need.
- Back-in-stock alerts: Is one of your bestselling items back in stock (and sure to sell out again)? Let your customers know through text! It’s disappointing when an item keeps selling out, and your customers will want the most notice possible that the item is available again.
- Coupons and deals: Send customers coupons and deals that are exclusive to text subscribers. Not only do these deals delight your customer—who doesn’t love a discount?—you can also track the redemption of these codes to see how many sales resulted directly from your text messages.
- Flash sales: Flash sales can create a sense of urgency and excitement, and texting is an efficient way to let customers know exactly when a sale starts. Like with your coupons and deals, you track click-throughs on your flash sale text messages or code redemptions to measure your sales.
- Rewards program updates: Your most loyal customers will join your rewards program, and you can use text messages to enhance the program experience. Send texts to let your customers know their reward program status, discounts or benefits they can use, or points they can get when they make another purchase. These messages all ensure they get the most value from being a member.
- Shipping and delivery notifications: Your customers eagerly—or impatiently—await for their orders to arrive. Text messages can let them know when their order has shipped and been delivered, helping to alleviate some of the anxiety of waiting for an order. And if anything goes wrong with the delivery, you can even use texts to handle customer service needs (as long as you enable 1-to-1 texting, which we explain below).
Text messages are a private, two-way channel
Customers don’t just want you to text them. They want to text you back, too.
Nearly 60 percent of consumers want to reply to text messages from brands, and this provides an opportunity for your team to answer questions, receive feedback, and address your customer needs privately. If customers don’t have another space to vent their frustrations or seek support, they’ll likely turn to social media—potentially voicing concerns publicly—or step into your customer service queue, which takes more of your team’s time.
As your team receives text messages from customers, note which questions they ask or the types of support they commonly seek. Then, you can create targeted content to address these needs, such as help articles, blog posts, or scripts for your customer success representatives to resolve your customers’ needs.
SMS results are easy to measure
Being an effective marketer requires you to measure and track the performance of your campaigns to judge whether the ROI is worth it. Luckily, most text message tools have built-in features that make it easy to measure your results. Even if you don’t have these tools at your disposal, you can manually track SMS KPIs like:
- Delivery rate: How many customers received your text message?
- Click-through rate: Did customers click on a link in your message?
- Conversion rate: What percentage of customers made a purchase because of your text message?
- Earnings per message: How much money did you earn divided by the number of texts you sent?
- Unsubscribe rate: How many customers have opted out of receiving text messages? If your unsubscribe rate is going in the wrong direction, you should refine your approach.
SMS marketing frees up your team
It’s clear that sending customers text messages can drive sales and address all kinds of customer needs. Plus, every question or need handled through text is one less customer waiting in your call queue or desperately searching for your company’s support email.
A successful SMS strategy will empower your customers to get support and answer questions more easily than before. This should save your team time that would have otherwise been spent addressing these needs, giving you time back to focus on other priorities, and keeping your service reps from burning out.
Growing your SMS subscriber list
Are you ready to unlock these SMS marketing benefits? We’re almost there, but you’ll need to get your list ready, first!
Even if you have access to your customers’ phone numbers, you’ll need their explicit permission to receive text messages from your brand. You’ll need to get customers to opt in—just as you do with your email marketing—before you text them. Or else, you could find yourself in some serious legal trouble.
Grow your text subscriber list by promoting your new SMS program via your existing channels. Encourage your customers to sign up through email, social media posts, Instagram posts, and as they complete a purchase on your site. Be clear about how text messages can make their experience better and detail what types of messages you will send (and how often).
It may take some time to build your SMS list, and that’s okay! Use your smaller customer list to test messages and experiment with your platform before you need to send hundreds or thousands of texts.
The 12 best SMS marketing tools and must-have features
Starting your SMS marketing can be an incredibly easy lift if you have the right text message tools to help. Below, we share a handful of great SMS marketing tool features along with potential options to help you find the best one for your team.
But first: what should your team prepare before looking for a text message tool? There are a few questions you’ll want to ask your team as you review the below options so you can streamline your search:
- How big is our anticipated text messaging list?
- Where do we need to send text messages to? (And to how many countries)?
- What features are essential? What features are just nice-to-haves?
- Do we use an email marketing platform that we want our SMS marketing tool to integrate with?
- How would we like to measure our SMS marketing results?
With the answers to these questions in hand, check out these 10 must-have features for sending text messages to customers
Automated messages
The best SMS tools will include automation capabilities that make the entire process as simple as possible for your team and your customers. Look for solutions that automate messages throughout your customer journey, such as ones that can automatically send messages regarding cart abandonment, new loyalty member sign-up, and shipment updates. Bonus points if your solution can integrate with your email marketing solution so all your messages are expertly timed. ActiveCampaign and Omnisend are two robust solutions that we recommend you explore if your SMS marketing is part of a deeper customer outreach strategy.
AI-powered text writing
Artificial intelligence has helped make countless marketing tasks faster and easier to do, and that includes writing your customer text messages! Some advanced SMS tools even have the ability to draft messages for you.
A quick word of caution here: artificial intelligence can be helpful for creating marketing copy, but you’ll always want a human on your team to review the content and add your brand’s unique voice and personality. Your customers can usually tell if a message was written by a robot.
Built-in text message compliance
There are text message laws that every business needs to follow, and these concerns vary depending on where your company operates and where your customers are based. While it’s important for all of your SMS marketers to understand these laws, it’s understandably tricky to digest all of this information and remember it during day-to-day work.
When assessing potential tools for SMS marketing, ask about any built-in features that ensure compliance. Many providers have in-depth articles about text message laws and they should be able to quickly identify how their solution protects your brand from making a costly (but entirely avoidable) mistake. For starters, Textedly explicitly states that it has Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and mobile carrier compliance.
SMS marketing examples and inspiration
The line between SMS and email marketing is blurring, but that doesn’t mean you should copy and paste your last email as a text campaign. The fastest way to optimize your SMS marketing strategy is to stay ahead of the latest text message trends and ways that brands engage customers through text across their journey.
Here, we can help—MailCharts has a database of more than 33,000 text messages from brands like GrubHub, Sephora, Bass Pro Shops, Staples, and more for needs like cart abandonment, flash sales, and customer opt-in. You can effortlessly review, sort, and save example text messages to help your team create amazing messages faster than ever. Learn more about how MailCharts can help your team boost the success of its SMS and email marketing by creating a free account.
Link tracking and analytics
Justifying the cost of your text tool requires you to know how effective it is for driving sales or improving the customer experience. Ask your potential SMS solution provider to explain what kind of analytics are provided, such as link tracking or if a message was viewed.
These are core elements of many SMS tools, but the depth of analytics will vary from provider to provider.
Multimedia messaging service (MMS) capabilities
Standard text messages are enough to get your message across, but images, audio, and video can all bring your message to life and reinforce your brand identity. Plus, MMS messages can support 10x the amount of characters as SMS, giving you more space to send a detailed message when needed.
Solutions like Birdeye and SlickText both offer MMS capabilities, as will most of the other SMS marketing tools we mention through this post.
Integrations with other marketing and sales tools or channels
The out-of-the-box features of most SMS marketing tools are often sufficient to manage just your customer texts—but you need that information to integrate with your other marketing and sales tools or channels.
When searching for a texting tool, ask about the available integrations and how the product will fit within your team’s existing workflow. Ecommerce brands built on Shopify, for example, will want to review Postscript because it was built for Shopify brands and integrates with tools like Swym, Prive, and Triple Whale. Other features to look for include programmable messaging and conversation APIs.
Message scheduling
It’s rare that you’ll be sending your customer text messages in real-time. Often, you’ll want to plan your outreach and schedule messages to send at the best time for your subscriber. Find out how many messages you can pre-schedule and how far in advance to decide if a potential SMS tool will meet your team’s needs.
Text-to-buy
You want to make the shopping experience as simple as possible for your customers. So why not allow them to make purchases directly through text message?
Some SMS tools enable customers to buy your products directly through text. For example, you may send a message about an item they left in their cart and offer a $5 discount if they want to make the purchase through text message. We expect more brands to offer text-to-buy to their customers, and solutions like Attentive offer this capability.
Two-way SMS messaging
Reaching your customers through text is one thing. But can they respond to your texts with questions or comments?
Your SMS strategy should include two-way text messaging (or 1-to-1 messaging) so that you can make full use of the channel and provide your customers with a convenient way to reach out to your brand instead of needing to wait in a customer service queue or search your site for help.
Marketers often mentionfor its two-way SMS texting capabilities (among other features), and you’ll likely find this feature in most texting tools.
Try our inspiration tool for SMS marketing
Remember that every text you send to a customer can strengthen their relationship with you, or cause them to shop elsewhere. It’s important to thoroughly plan and test your SMS strategy to maximize the benefits for your customers and your team.
To help you kickstart your SMS strategy and reach your customers with the right message, try MailCharts for free and access data from hundreds of ecommerce brands about how they use SMS marketing to promote their stores.
