Retailers Can Use SMS Marketing For More Than Just Coupons
Discount codes, limited time sales, special exclusive pricing…you may have seen, or used, all of these in a text message campaign. For retailers, it is the most obvious and direct use of SMS marketing. It works and it’s cost effective. But are there other ways you can put your SMS channel to work for you? Yes, there are. Let’s take a look at three of them.
Your Order Is On The Way!
Who doesn’t like to get messages like that? Whether it is a simple order confirmation, or a shipping confirmation, everyone likes to know their order was received and successfully processed. A simple message like that can help reduce calls to customer service to check on order status, and ultimately improve customer relations while potentially saving you money.
I Think You Forgot Something...
Abandoned shopping carts are the bane of online retailers. It depends who you ask, but abandonment rates average between 60-70% industry wide. If you can recover even a small percentage of those sales, then your profits will skyrocket. To do this, you’d need to integrate your shopping cart or back end with an SMS service (or have some very detail oriented staff to do it all manually). You’d also need rules to define at what point in the shopping cart process a text message would be triggered. If someone quit at the last screen, perhaps they had a problem but really wanted the buy. Offer them another chance or offer to help. Someone who just put stuff in their cart but didn’t go any farther in the process might just be window shopping. A text reminder would be annoying and unhelpful to them.
Come Back! It's Here For You.
Some retailers offer the option to receive email notification when an out of stock item is back in the store. Adding the option for someone to request a text message instead offers yet another way to bring visitors back into your store. And given the personal nature of text messages, if someone provides their mobile number to receive updates they must really want the item. Hopefully a text message from you will help complete the sale in your store before they buy it somewhere else.
These are three great ways that SMS marketing helps you to keep in touch with your customers. But before you dive in, just remember to ensure you have them properly opted in for these messages. And always offer a way to opt out in each text message. If you do that, SMS messaging can make for very happy retailers and customers.
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Marketing messages, whether in print or electronic have many parts to them. In the beginning there’s the hook that entices someone to continue reading, and near the end is the call to action. That’s where you make it clear what you want someone to do after reading the message. There are many parts in between these two, but these are, arguably, the two most important.
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