It’s no secret that SMS is currently the most valuable new revenue channel in an eCommerce brand’s marketing strategy. But how do you know if you’re getting the best ROI from your SMS strategy?
In this blog post, we’ll share the secrets that our top-performing D2C brands use to leverage SMS for customer engagement and retention, so you can use it to increase your revenue and maximize the potential of this effective channel.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if you’re getting the most from your SMS program.
Are you targeting each customer with the right message?
Developing a marketing strategy that resonates with particular audiences is essential for improving conversion and boosting your ROI. Customers want to be engaged in a tailored and thoughtful way that speaks to what’s relevant for them. In fact, a recent survey we ran showed that over 54% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if the messages they receive are personalized.
Whether it’s an abandoned cart message to recover shoppers, win-back messages to re-engage customers and boost CLV, or a welcome series to greet new subscribers, you want to make sure your SMS automation is customized and personalized for each one of your shoppers. What better way to personalize your approach and customize the copy of your text message than to understand your audience?
For example, knowing something as basic as someone’s gender could be a true game-changer when it comes to recommending product cross-sells. Or what about customer shopping behaviors? If a shopper has abandoned their cart without making a purchase, leverage their history to send a tailored message. If they are a high-value repeat shopper, send a personalized message welcoming them back. Or, if this is their first time shopping on your site, send a message introducing your brand with an enticing discount!
The robust flow builder offered by Yotpo SMS & Email allows you to segment your audience directly inside flows based on their purchase behavior, gender, location, last engagement, and more — helping you to craft the strongest message for each customer. Send your shoppers down the path that’s right for them based on the communications they want to receive.
The ROI speaks for itself, in fact, our brands see 4x higher ROI with targeted SMS flows than with any other type of SMS campaign.
Are you sparking conversations with customers to increase engagement?
The key to lasting relationships and creating customer loyalty is open communication, engaging with your customers, and knowing what they are interested in, passionate about, and more.
Conversational flows allow you to engage with your customers in smart two-way conversations creating a sequence of back and forth conversations with SMS subscribers, allowing you to collect valuable insights and personalize the experience with relevant offers. Asking customers the right questions helps you create meaningful 1:1 conversations.
Use Yotpo SMS & Email to set up automated conversational flows after a customer takes an action, like signing up to receive your texts or purchasing a certain product. From there, ask them a series of questions so you can recommend products that are perfect for them.
“Our most loyal customers appreciate SMS and it gives us the ability to engage with them in a way we never could. Using Yotpo SMS & Email, we can create personalized conversations that spark and sustain customer relationships, engaging at the most impactful points in the buyer journey.”
— Suhail Rivera, Founder, Alkaline Herb Shop
Are you sending messages at the right time to increase sales?
Text messaging should not be a one-to-many approach — it should be hyper-targeted and concise, and it should happen at the optimal time in the buyer journey. Creating automated messages that are triggered based on your customers’ behavior can help you personalize your communication with consumers.
With the right SMS platform, you should be able to have a perfectly tailored experience for every shopper using triggered SMS automation. This ensures messages are delivered based on your customer’s behavior and interests. Yotpo SMS & Email bases messages on over 20 different events, like cart abandonment, product upsells, subscription updates, customer win-back campaigns, loyalty product events, and more that you can choose from, making it easy to send personalized messages that convert.
Is SMS powering your larger eCommerce marketing strategy?
Unlock higher ROI by ensuring your SMS program is connected to other essentials in your marketing strategy. With more than 20 different integrations to choose from, you’ll be able to supercharge your messages with unique data points, events, and more!
Engage your loyalty program members via text marketing
More than 76% of loyalty members prefer to receive personalized updates from their favorite brands via SMS. To increase loyalty program adoption and boost member engagement, you should send targeted messages to loyalty members. You can congratulate your customers when they reach a new VIP Tier, notify them of their point balance, make sure they use all their perks with redemption reminders, and more. You can also encourage more and more of your loyalty members to subscribe to SMS, incentivizing them with additional points and perks.
Utilize user-generated content to increase conversion across messages
User-generated content is crucial for building customer trust, loyalty, and interest. You can integrate social proof and reviews into your SMS message at the point in which it is needed most, to increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment. Send a tailored cart abandonment message with social proof to recover more than 33% of abandoned carts. UGC SMS messages have a 15% higher CTR than regular SMS messages.
Are you collecting subscribers at scale?
SMS marketing is the optimal revenue-driving channel for D2C Brands, but we all know that in order to increase and maximize your revenue, you’ll need to be able to continuously generate new subscribers at scale.
Yotpo SMS & Email’s subscriber collection suite allows you to choose from a library of tools — including on-site subscriber collection elements and omnichannel subscriber collection elements — so you can capture existing traffic through pop-ups, on-site tabs, dedicated pages, footer, keywords, QR codes, Instagram swipe ups, and even POS integrations. These tools help you increase and maximize subscriber collection rates across channels, so you can grow month over month.
What’s the best way to grow your subscribers at scale? Use smarter, more tailored subscriber collection tools. Each customer is different, which is why subscriber collection tools with the most advanced behavioral segmentation ensure you can target each one of your on-site visitors with the subscription form that’s most likely to get them to convert.
Are you able to optimize your SMS Program for success?
With any marketing channel, the best way to increase revenue is to optimize your program. You’ll want to use a platform that allows you to do a deep dive into your SMS program, collecting the performance analytics of every flow, campaign, and message makes all the difference between an effective SMS marketing strategy and a powerful, retention-driving strategy that boosts ROI.
The most powerful SMS marketing platform
Yotpo is the only company to offer a single-platform approach to eCommerce marketing, providing integrated solutions for reviews, visual UGC, loyalty, referrals, and SMS marketing all in one place. Yotpo SMS & Email gives brands the unique ability to engage customers with personalized, higher-converting experiences for each and every shopper.
