What is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing is a relatively basic concept. It utilizes text messaging to reach customers about ordering and upcoming promotions to further facilitate the customer relationship. This type of marketing can be useful when marketing efforts need to be more focused or targeted. This type of touch point can also be perceived as more personal than other communication channels, making SMS marketing one of the most effective marketing platforms, with open rates as high as 98% and conversion rates hovering around 45%.
Why SMS Marketing?
Currently, 3.5 billion people have smartphones, and by 2021, it is estimated that 54% of total online purchases will be made on a mobile phone. Not only is text-based marketing a direct and effective strategy, but it helps to increase interactions in other marketing channels and adds value to your offerings. Consider boosting open and click-through email rates by creating an SMS call to action for customers to check out what awaits them in their inboxes. Additionally, 66% of consumers say they would pay more for a product or service if a text messaging channel supported it.
With 63% of consumers saying they prefer texting over an email or phone call, it is shocking that 61% of marketers are not using SMS marketing. Spearheading this marketing channel for your business will give you a major advantage over the competition - so what are you waiting for?
So What Tool Should I Be Using?
There are 3 different types of SMS marketing tools you will want to consider for your eCommerce store:
- SMS stand-alone
- Multichannel - Often SMS + Messenger, perhaps even including WhatsApp and other channels.
- Omnichannel—Often, Email, SMS, and other channels are used, and in the case of this article, we are saying that it has to have CRM-type capabilities.
We will review many of the best options available now to help you make the right choice for your business.
The Shortlist of Best SMS Marketing Tools for eCommerce:
Standalone:
Multichannel:
Omnichannel:
SMSBump
Type: SMS Stand-alone
Best for: Starting Stores: Growth Stores can be for enterprise stores but are not specifically an enterprise tool.
SMSBump is designed specifically for Shopify stores and is utilized by over 10,000 businesses. Founded in 2018, it is the largest SMS marketing tool in the Shopify app market. With integrations with Gorgias, ZenDesk, Klaviyo, MailChimp, Slack, and ReCharge, this SMS marketing tool builds on your existing marketing efforts, offers robust features, and is easy to implement.
Features
- Segmentation - can segment by country, price, and time of day
- Automations - abandon the cart and customer reactivation
- Custom flows and campaign scheduling
- A/B Testing
- Opt-Out Lists - help keep track of those who unsubscribed
- Fully TCPA and GDPR compliant
What makes SMSBump different?
Their dynamic abandon cart message populates the exact items in the cart with images and drives the user back to purchase. They also have similar functionality for post-purchase upsells. Yay!
Another crucial feature is the dynamic coupon code, so that you can send unique, time sensitive offers, that drive urgency and increase conversion rate.
They serve nearly the entire world and automatically navigate all compliance issues, so you don’t have to.
Pricing
SMSBump offers a Pay as You Go option, but their basic plan is $19.99/month + $0.0149 per text in the U.S. ($0.07 for a multimedia text).
Attentive
Type: SMS Stand-alone
Best for: Enterprise brands
Attentive is a long-standing player in SMS Marketing. They work with big brands like Coach and Sephora to implement massive SMS marketing campaigns. They invented a patent-pending “two tap” sign-up process (the patent has been highly debated in the space). And they’ve raised over $163 million to grow the company as one of the largest in the space.
Features
- Two-tap sign-ups - easy to opt-in
- Email list building
- Campaigns, triggers, and segmentation - make for more focused marketing
- Integrates with many other apps and can utilize data from SMS to improve other channels
- Perform analytics across channels to measure overall performance
Pricing
They are not transparent about pricing. You must contact them for custom pricing. I’m betting it starts at over $1,000/month.
Postscript
Type: SMS Stand-alone
Best for: Growth-stage eCommerce
Postscript blends the simplicity of a starting tool with the complexity you may need for things like advanced segmentation, integration with your eCommerce helpdesk, and, of course, growing your SMS subscribership.
They are a Y-Combinator company that has raised a seed round and is built specifically for eCommerce.
They integrate with many of the well-known eCommerce/Shopify tools that you will need to execute good SMS list growth:
And their native mobile pop-up growth tool is pretty slick for maximizing your mobile conversion rate to SMS subscriber:
And they aren't the only tool to do this, but it is very important that your SMS tool is able to manipulate the checkout page to ask for a text notification opt-in, as this is where you will get a good majority of your new SMS audience:
Features
- List building and automation
- Segmentation utilizing Shopify data
- Campaigns, flows, integrations, triggers, and segmentation
- Automation of compliance
- Opt-in checkout integration
- Mobile-friendly opt-in growth tool
- A/B Testing
- Two-tap sign-ups - easy to opt-in
- GDPR, TCPA and CTIA-compliant
- Personalization
Pricing
It starts at $25/month, which gets you 2500 messages (equal to $.01/message), and it gets cheaper per message as you increase in volume.
Octane AI
Type: Multichannel
Best for: Mid-market brands wanting to connect on SMS and Messenger
Octane is a Messenger and SMS marketing platform built for eCommerce stores, currently dedicated completely to integrating with Shopify and Shopify Plus. This fast-paced startup was founded in 2017, has over 1500 customers, and regularly adds new features. Octane’s integrations with Facebook messenger, Klayvio, and Yotpo (to name a few) and their use of AI to offer special features, like their comment-response bot that turns commenters into subscribers; this multichannel marketing option is a good for those who want to utilize email and SMS together.
Features
- Website pop-ups to gain subscribers via Facebook Messenger and SMS
- Abandon cart messaging
- Answer custom questions on Facebook chat utilizing Octane AI
- Conversational Facebook Ads
What makes Octane different?
Octane has great functionality, including a comment-response bot that allows anyone commenting on your posts to opt-in to Messenger.
They do both Messenger and SMS well, allowing for better cross-channel communication.
They currently claim to have the most eCommerce-specific flows of any Messenger platform, including abandonment carts, browse abandonment, welcome series, winbacks, post-purchase flows, and anything else you want to build.
They use artificial intelligence to identify common questions and propose answers, which makes for a scalable conversational marketing strategy and mitigates many customer service inquiries.
They have advanced analytics for tracking revenue from Messenger and SMS campaigns.
Within the Octane platform, you can create sponsored message campaigns for anyone engaging with your Facebook page and automatically tie them to your existing flows.
When should you use Octane?
The good thing with Octane is that you can start with the plug-and-play version and revisit it when you have more time to build robust functionality.
This means that any and every store should have some Messenger marketing strategy, especially if you advertise on Facebook.
As your store grows and traffic grows, the channel becomes more powerful, and you will appreciate the retention tools and customer service opportunities—that is, the ability to communicate with your customers one-on-one at scale.
Pricing
To utilize their SMS Marketing, you must get their PRO plan, which is $209/month plus $0.02 per message.
Privy
Type: Multichannel
Best for: Conversion Rate Optimization and Abandoned Cart Integrations
Privy is an eCommerce-focused pop-up building tool turned into a full-fledged conversion rate optimization platform that helps increase your on-site email (and Messenger and SMS) capture and conversion rate with easy-to-design drag-and-drop form collectors that work across all browser types—desktop, tablet, mobile, etc. With over 300,000 customers, Privy is an excellent tool for growing customer lists and intelligently segmenting customers, and it has been shown to have great conversion rates in pop-up apps.
Features
- Dynamic Shopify coupon integration
- Abandon cart retargeting across email and SMS (and integrates with Messenger tools for Messenger)
- Targeted pop-ups to intelligently grow SMS lists
What makes Privy different?
A couple stand out. They have an immense number of integrations, which means they will most likely work with your existing tech stack.
They now have email automation functionality, which could substitute for a tool like Klaviyo, at least for some components of your marketing automation.
Their segmentation components are super powerful. They can dynamically segment users and serve them the right type of offer based on whether they’ve purchased before, what pages they visit, the size of their cart, the products in their cart, or user input, like if they tell you they have a cat or dog. It’s so cool.
When should you use Privy?
A pop-up builder should be used at all stages of your business. You should have something basic set up from day 1. But most specifically, with Privy, you would go with them over more generic tools when you really care about on-site conversion rate, testing multiple creatives and offers, and driving the growth of your store.
Also, as traffic grows, even at the 10,000+ visitors/month mark, you will really need a tool like Privy to get more granular with your segmentation and targeting.
Pricing
Privy is very generous and offers all its main features on its free plan. So, if you are just getting started and your site is getting 5000 views or less, it is a good place to start.
Pricing starts at $10/month for SMS marketing.
Jumper
Type: Multichannel
Best for: Conversational Commerce
Jumper.ai is a chat tool at the forefront of conversational and social commerce. It enables brands to connect with their customers right where they want to chat: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, Google RCS, iMessage—any conversation platform you can think of. Customers can also go to your website so you can sell through chat. Customers can get personalized advice, ask questions, request a demo, and, tada, pay for products within the chat box.
Features
- Multi-channel conversation and flow integrations
- Social and live chat selling tools
- Integration with Adlingo for $150k/month+ ad buyers
- Customer service ticket mitigation tools
Pricing
They do have a free plan, but this shouldn’t really be used as a free tool; you can invest and want to try it out, or if you can’t afford it, you probably want to start with a simpler solution. They start at $200/month. Their enterprise plan, which is super powerful, starts at $2000/month, requiring a 6-month minimum contract.
Klaviyo
Type: Omnichannel
Best for: Email Marketing and SMS together
Klaviyo has been the eCommerce email marketing service provider market leader for quite some time. They have a robust CRM, great templates, and recently launched SMS capabilities. However, their SMS capabilities are new, and many features are still being developed.
Features
- Gender detection
- Email marketing
- CRM
- Consent Management
- MMS at no additional cost
Pricing
For their SMS marketing feature, they charge based on usage, starting at $.0665/message. You would only use them in conjunction with using them as your email service provider, starting at free up to 250 contacts, then $20/month and going up from there. One thing to note is that since they bill email on contacts, they don’t have any monthly fees for SMS, just the cost per message.
Omnisend
Type: Omni-channel
Best for: All-in-one platform
Omnisend was founded in 2014, serves over 50,000 customers, and has been built from the ground up to serve omnichannel marketers (hopefully, that is all marketers at this point). This automation platform, which we highlight for its SMS marketing, also serves via email, push notifications, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, pop-ups, segmentation, and dynamic Facebook and Google ad integrations. This makes it a truly all-in-one marketing automation solution.
Features
- Email Marketing
- CRM
- Omni-channel Templates and sequences
- Facebook Messenger
- Integrate SMS messages with other platforms, reducing cost and redundant messages to customers
What makes Omnisend different?
Certainly, the reason to go with Omnisend is when you want to simplify an omnichannel marketing strategy, especially if you’re a solo head of marketing, but really for a marketing team of any size.
When should you use Omnisend?
Omnisend’s strength comes in when you have enough resources to utilize all of the channel tools to their fullest. This doesn’t mean you need a full-fledged team. Omnisend makes the execution much easier than the alternative piecemeal solution. Still, you should at least have a dedicated in-house marketer who has experience with marketing automation, can write good copy for each channel, and think strategically about merging the channels into a cohesive customer journey.
Pricing
Since this tool can satisfy many of your company’s marketing needs, it has robust tiered pricing. To utilize SMS marketing, you must sign up for the Standard plan, which is $16/month.
Next Steps
After choosing the right SMS Marketing tool for you, you will integrate it into your site, and you need to start opting in new users to the platform.
PLEASE, OH, PLEASE NOTE: Just because you have a list of phone numbers doesn’t mean you have a list of opted-in SMS marketing users. Texting over 50 non-opted-in users at one time could result in massive fines. That being said, and I do not advise this, I’ve seen people send text messages asking people to respond yes to opt in. I prefer to email them asking them to opt in, which is a great way to seed the list.
From there, you will look to add growth tools to your site, perhaps a pop-up that collects phone numbers (either instead or on top of email). The checkout checkbox is extremely powerful, as is any tool that shows up on the thank you page just after the user has purchased. This is a great way to get them to opt in for order and shipping notifications while simultaneously getting them opted in for your next promotional campaign.
Over time, you will grow your list and truly feel the power and revenue behind this channel. Be sure to integrate your customer service platform and have support agents standing by when you send out a blast, as there are sure to be multiple inquiries coming back at you, and it is very important to respond and engage with these prospective customers.
Consider integrating a referral and loyalty program into SMS by sending each user a custom link and letting them know how many loyalty points they have and how to get more.
Abandoned carts will always be SMS’s biggest revenue driver, but repeat purchase campaigns are also valuable.
Once you’ve got this setup, I’d say your SMS strategy is at least up to what I consider minimum viable for eCommerce today. Continue to optimize campaigns, test new messaging, incorporate emojis and GIFs, and have fun with it. And for the love of Pete, be human with your messages—you do not want spam responses!
.png)
