SMS marketing for eCommerce businesses is one of the fastest growing trends in retail.
After all, customers want to use their favorite means of communication, and eCommerce businesses can’t go wrong by listening to their audience. In fact, 90% of leads would prefer to be texted than called and 52% of customers say they prefer texting customer support over their current form of communication.
Besides its obvious popularity, there are many other benefits to SMS marketing for eCommerce businesses. Read on to discover why your business should hop on the bandwagon.
SMS Marketing Benefit #1: Close Sales with Fast Communications
Eighty-three percent of shoppers need some sort of support during their customer journey.
This is an excellent opportunity for eCommerce companies, who can offer convenient assistance while consumers decide whether to make purchases—but email is not a good channel for these kinds of situations. With an average open rate of 20%, a customer response rate of 6%, and a customer response time of around 90 minutes, email simply doesn’t offer the expediency needed to provide real-time assistance. Texts, on the other hand, provide ample opportunities for closing sales.
Offer real-time Q&A sessions. Consumers like to research before they purchase an item, and offering fast question and answer sessions is a sure-fire way to both impress potential customers with your excellent service and provide valuable information. Ensure your customer service agents can answer common questions, such as those about clothing fit or product specifications. To make it easy for consumers to communicate with agents, companies can enable web chat, emailing, or texting options on high-traffic pages.
Emphasize customer support during checkout. For eCommerce businesses, around 77% of online shopping carts are abandoned. One of the best ways to combat this consistent problem is by offering immediate support for any problems or questions customers encounter while checking out. While email would be far too slow for this kind of endeavour, texting offers a fast and convenient way for consumers on the cusp of a purchase to reach out for help. Businesses can either include an SMS widget on the checkout page or use the standard “SMS:” tag (eg, sms:18005555555&body=bodyTextHere) on any part of their website.
SMS Marketing Benefit #2: Message with Willing Recipients
Because customers must opt-in to receive texts according to TCPA regulations, marketers have access to a group of individuals who are ready and willing to receive communications from their brand. By capitalizing on this audience, eCommerce businesses can increase sales.
However, it’s important to offer these upsell opportunities rarely. Recipients must feel that they are receiving real value from these offers in order to stay on your text-enabled list. Worthy upsell opportunity alerts include:
- Flash sale alerts
- New product notifications
- In-stock announcements for popular items
The quickest and most compliant way to enable customers to opt in is setting up a phone number with keyword monitoring. With this configuration, customers text the word “subscribe” and receive an auto-reply confirming their choice to opt in. Then, they can be added to a list or campaign and begin receiving updates.
SMS Marketing Benefit #3: Increase Customer Loyalty
Business text messaging empowers your customer-facing teams to provide fast, reliable, and personalized responses each day, which is especially helpful when it comes to service. When eCommerce businesses implement SMS marketing, the improvement in service quality is almost immediate.
Send real-time order notifications. Whereas emailed order notifications are occasionally lost in inboxes, an astonishing 98% of text messages are opened. When eCommerce customer service teams text SMS notifications, it’s far more likely that customers will be able to stay informed of their product’s progress. And in a time when most customers expect minute-by-minute updates on their package’s product, this kind of constant communication is a must-have.
Automate satisfaction check-ins. After purchases and customer conversations, top customer service teams will reach back out to ensure their customers are satisfied with their results. Business SMS ensures that these check-ins will not be forgotten; with modern business texting platforms, personalized check-ins can be automatically sent to customers after a designated amount of time.
Provide convenient feedback opportunities. Providing your customers with ample opportunities to comment on your services is important. This feedback can help you improve your operations—and make your customers feel like you prioritize their opinions. With business SMS, it’s easy to send a link with a quick net promoter score (NPS) or similar survey. Plus, 19% of people will click a link in an SMS messaging campaign compared to just 4.2% in emails.
SMS Marketing Benefit #4: Improve Internal Operations
eCommerce businesses can use business SMS for more than just customer service. Business SMS is an excellent tool for internal operations as well.
Streamline internal communications. eCommerce managers will find business text messaging platforms especially helpful when it comes to scheduling and team management. If customer service teams run on various schedules, managers can create lists of contacts for certain shifts and send reminders to all of them at once. Internal business texts can be used for holiday reminders, event notifications, training tips, and other important updates.
Manage customer service operations easily. With today’s advanced business texting platforms, customer service teams can easily track and respond to all incoming messages, whether from phone numbers, Facebook Messenger, or any other popularly used apps. They can add private comments on threads to remember important customer conversations, and even schedule follow-up messages to ensure that a client is well taken care of later. For managers, these platforms provide agent statistics that are especially useful during performance analyses.
SMS marketing for eCommerce businesses is a surefire way to streamline operations—for both customers and also your internal teams.
Ready to try business SMS marketing for your eCommerce business? Start your free trial today!
