SMS marketing platforms are innovative tools that help you automate SMS messages to engage your audiences. With such platforms, you will be able to engage, accordingly, potential customers, current shoppers, paying clients, and lost users. So, essentially, an SMS marketing platform or tool is a piece of technology that you can use to conveniently implement your SMS marketing. In this article, we are going to research what is SMS marketing for Shopify and how it works.
You can use it to:
- Nurture your leads;
- Offer promos to get conversions;
- Reintroduce your brand to bouncers;
- Recover cart abandonment, etc.
To understand how they work, we should first define what SMS marketing is.
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is using the 160-character in-phone and in-network written communications service of cellular and smartphones to engage your customers. Essentially, you are talking to them via text. The obvious challenge is the short form of this mode of communication. So in 160 characters, you should be able to deliver an effective marketing message that will have your recipient do what you want.
How Do You Make an Effective SMS Marketing Message?
- Open with an offer – e.g., “Here’s 20% OFF from Tabasco!”
- Talk about the particular situation you have with the recipient. If it is cart abandonment, say that you are giving the 20% offer for when the recipient clicks the link to return to the cart.
- Use scarcity. Tell the recipient that the offer is only for 24 hours and let the FOMO or fear of missing out work its magic.
- Use exclusivity. Tell the recipient that the offer is only for “special” customers and it isn’t available to others – still FOMO.
- Make it personal. If possible, call the recipient by name or at least make sure that you are saying “come back to your cart” for cart abandonment or “for your first purchase” for new engagements.
The thing with making SMS marketing messages is that you have to be creative. But there’s more work to do than that – you need to do behavior tracking and automation so that you can hit the right inbox at the right time. This bulk of work you have to do for correct SMS marketing implementation is what SMS marketing platforms are for. They give you a tool that you can use to manage automation, collect user data, organize everything, and push the messages for you.
How Does an SMS App Work?
First, an SMS marketing platform collects user data and organizes it.
For example, with an SMS marketing tool, you will know how many people are most likely to buy during a Sunday and if they are better reminded with a message on a Friday or another time.
And you will also be able to teach the tool what triggers are supposed to make it take action.
For example, when somebody leaves their cart on your website without proceeding to checkout, the app should be able to know it and queue a reminder message for that person. And the message should arrive in the person’s inbox at an ideal time. The message created comes from the information from user behavior and templated copy that you or the app developer has provided.
What is an ideal time?
For example, people are most likely to shop when they receive their salary. During this time, they will be significantly active on your website. The SMS app should be able to record when a particular shopper is most active during any month. That time will be the most appropriate for sending SMS marketing messages.
How does an app track that?
Your website naturally collects user data, and the app simply organizes them. For example, for an SMS abandonment cart app, the tool will get data on what was put in the cart, match that information with what times and days the person is active shopping on the website, and formulate an appropriate message.
Also, if a person who shops every third Friday of the month added-to-cart two peaches and one apple and then abandoned cart, the following can happen.
- The SMS app will record the items.
- It will find the best average day and time to send a message.
- The SMS app will generate a message using the data and template copy.
The message arriving at, let’s say, 10:30 AM, Friday, should look like this. And that’s 130+ characters only, but enough to get someone interested in coming back to shop for the items. You can go above 160 characters if your budget permits. Just remember that sending SMS messages costs some amount of money.
The good thing about SMS messaging apps is that they are readily available, and you can have them easily integrated with your eCommerce store. For example, if you are using Shopify as your eCommerce platform, there are powerful tools available for you. Check out Winback, the best Shopify Abandoned Cart SMS tool for eCommerce.
