What if you could guide customers from product discovery to purchase with the ease and speed of sending a text? With Yotpo SMS & Email, you can. The platform that brought you Click-to-Buy, a breakthrough feature that allows brands to share links to personalized shopping carts via SMS, is further revolutionizing mobile commerce with technology that makes text messages even more shoppable — no more searching, click-throughs, or detailed inputs required — so your customers can buy faster and your sales can grow.
Introducing Text-to-Buy from Yotpo SMS & Email and Shop Pay, powered by Shopify, a superior mobile checkout experience where consumers can choose and pay for their favorite products through a quick exchange of texts. It’s a better way to buy, designed with mobile-first consumers in mind.
The challenges of the consumer path to purchase on mobile
eCommerce brands know how critical a positive mobile presence is to engage modern consumers, and most have already taken steps to achieve the optimal mobile experience: making websites and shopping carts mobile-friendly; optimizing for faster load times; launching mobile apps and social storefronts with built-in shopping capabilities; and marketing via push notifications and SMS. But despite all of these advancements, the path to purchase on mobile remains complex.
There are still too many barriers to purchase, points of friction that demand time, attention, and action from the consumer who may drop off, abandoning their cart or browsing session without following through. And with ongoing market and privacy changes sending customer acquisition costs skyrocketing, losing them on that path to purchase is even more painful.
Let’s explore what that path often looks like today, from start to finish:
Upgrading from “Add to cart” to “Text to buy”
The previous path to purchase is lengthy, chaotic, and leaves too much risk for lost revenue. Nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, and Retail Dive reports that consumers’ attention spans have dropped from 12 to eight seconds on average. For the highest chance of success, the journey from discovery to purchase therefore needs to be faster than they can lose interest.
Let’s explore what the new, expedited path to purchase will look like when consumers can shop by text:
Rather than involving a multitude of steps and actions, Text-to-Buy condenses the path to purchase into one, effortless message exchange, capturing attention instantly and allowing orders to be placed as fast as responding to a text.
Shoppable SMS: How does Text-to-Buy work?
With Shop Pay built natively into the user interface, Text-to-Buy will enable mobile consumers to buy from brands in seamless interactions. As the #1 accelerated checkout in the U.S. on Shopify, Shop Pay allows consumers to securely save their email address, credit card, shipping, and billing information, which Shopify merchants will soon be able to offer as an expedited checkout option in Text-to-Buy campaigns. Through the Text-to-Buy functionality, customers can confirm these details and place their order without ever having to leave their messages. You simply send your text and your customer will text you back to begin checkout.
Shopify Checkout is fast, intuitive, and simple. With Shop Pay, merchants get a 4x faster checkout experience and an 11% higher conversion than other accelerated checkouts. Not only that, Shop Pay is trusted by over 100 million shoppers, with up to 85% of users turned repeat buyers, making it a game-changing addition to SMS marketing programs.
Shop Pay is the best way to check out across the web and in social commerce. We’re excited to now bring the same seamless payments to power text-to-buy solutions together with Yotpo. — Carl Rivera, VP of Product & Head of Shop at Shopify
Text-to-Buy vs. Click-to-Buy: What’s the difference?
Yotpo SMS & Email’s Text-to-Buy and exclusive Click-to-Buy feature are both huge technological milestones for mobile commerce, redesigning the modern way to communicate (texting) into a modern way to shop. eCommerce brands can use them both, in tandem, to create even more powerful, expedited checkout experiences for mobile-first consumers.
Text-to-Buy is the best fit for customers who use Shop Pay, as the order details you need to complete their transaction will already be securely stored for use. Click-to-Buy can provide the same convenient and personalized experience via SMS as Text-to-Buy — but by directing to a curated cart instead, it offers more flexibility for customers who are not on Shop Pay, as well as for brands looking to bring together multiple product offerings and increase cart value.
If a customer texts to buy but hasn’t set up Shop Pay yet, they will receive a link to do so as well as an alternative link to access the shopping cart, so they can choose which way they prefer to complete the transaction. Similarly, if a customer is located in a country where they can’t reply to SMS marketing messages, the Text-to-Buy instructions will be replaced with a Click-to-Buy link. So no matter what your customer’s situation is, you can give them the ability to buy right in the message thread, or click through to check out, streamlining the purchase process with both features working together.
We’re already seeing the impact that this faster path to purchase can have on your marketing. Click-to-Buy campaigns, for example, are seeing 60x ROI or more. Direct-to-consumer skincare brand, Barefaced, has even seen as high as 119x ROI with SMS marketing messages that take the subscriber directly to checkout.
Texting your way to success
Big-box retailers like Walmart and the Home Depot have slowly been expanding shopping capabilities into conversational channels, such as through voice shopping and text-to-shop tools that allow customers to communicate naturally about what they want, when they want it, wherever they are. Yotpo SMS & Email’s Text-to-Buy now brings this convenient and conversational shopping experience to eCommerce, fundamentally changing mobile checkout and giving your brand the power to:
- Accelerate the path to purchase: By eliminating the majority of steps between product discovery and point of sale, you can solve for drop-offs in the buyer journey, reduce cart abandonment, and increase conversion rates.
- Retain more customers: Ongoing privacy changes are making it increasingly expensive to acquire customers, but offering convenience can be your solution to keeping them happy and engaged. Most consumers (76%) say convenience is a key priority in selecting a retailer, and responding to a text is as convenient as shopping gets.
- Encourage impulse buying: Predict which product(s) your customer will love before they do, then share it with them via SMS. Just as social commerce has enabled brands to target an already engaged audience, Text-to-Buy gives you the power to meet customers where they already are, sparking immediate interest and getting them to purchase then and there.
- Foster stronger customer relationships: Texting is personal, native behavior for today’s consumers. As a result, your Text-to-Buy campaigns can feel less like promotions and more like genuine interactions with your brand to build and sustain relationships.
We’re on a mission to empower brands to expedite the path to purchase with innovative mobile shopping experiences. With Yotpo’s Text-to-Buy, customers can shop for their favorite products without ever leaving their texts. When you can simply reply to buy, it’s the most frictionless shopping experience yet. — Omer Bar Joseph, GM, Yotpo SMS & Email
Get to know your customers to drive greater impact
Text-to-shop tools are unmatched for their ability to drive customers to checkout with greater speed and less friction, but it’s not enough to just make mobile shopping fast and easy. For maximum results, you need to know your customers too, and Yotpo SMS & Email gives you all of the insights you need to have a 360-degree view of every subscriber.
With our cross-product synergies and native Shopify integration, eCommerce brands get access to a wealth of customer data to make Text-to-Buy campaigns highly impactful. Know which product(s) they bought, how much they spent, and their sentiment from past reviews. Predict who is more likely to purchase next and who is more likely to churn based on their engagement level. Identify your most nurtured and loyal SMS subscribers, learn from their preferences and behaviors, and reach them with products they are sure to love before they even have to search for them.
With three top drivers of convenience and personalization soon to be under one roof — Text-to-Buy, Click-to-Buy, and a brand new subscriptions offering — Yotpo is committed to innovation that accelerates direct-to-consumer growth in the mobile-first world. Text-to-Buy is our next step towards delivering the ultimate mobile shopping experience, and it’s nearly here.
Register for our waitlist to be one of the first brands to send fast, relevant, shoppable texts.
