What is E-commerce SMS Marketing: Strategies & Examples 2024

As the world is moving towards e-commerce and businesses are finding new and innovative ways of marketing.

In this race, SMS marketing is the most significant way to reach out to customers and get engaged with them.

SMS marketing in e-commerce helps to make direct communication with customers and helps to boost the ROI of business. 

In this blog, you will delve into ecommerce SMS marketing, about its benefits and explore more about the strategies and best practices. 

What is e-commerce SMS marketing?

E-commerce SMS marketing is a strategic approach that uses text messages to grow an e-commerce business through promotional, transactional, and relational channels.

 It allows customers to engage directly with an e-commerce business using their mobile devices. 

Using SMS marketing methods, businesses can send customers discounts, promotions, order tracking updates or other important information, which helps increase sales and enhance engagement. 

Examples of e-commerce SMS marketing 

Here are a few examples of e-commerce messaging strategies

1. Promotional Discounts

2. Loyalty Programs

Benefits of SMS marketing in E-commerce

The benefits of using SMS Marketing in E-commerce are as follows:

1. Exceptionally high open rates

SMS marketing in e-commerce has many benefits, one of the best being exceptionally high open rates, which sometimes exceed 90%. 

Unlike emails, text messages can’t be ignored or lost in spam folders. They have a high chance of being read, often within minutes of receipt. This makes it highly effective for your e-commerce business. 

2. Instant and reliable communication

Communication is important in e-commerce, especially when there is a promotion or limited-time offer or for any time-sensitive updates like notification delivery.

And we know SMS can be used to deliver the message instantly and reliably. 

This means that SMS helps e-commerce businesses connect with customers in real time. Reliability maintains communication flexibility and enhances customer satisfaction and experience. 

3. Personal and direct engagement

SMS marketing offers personal and direct engagement with a business’s customers, which is effective for building strong customer relationships.

It helps to direct engagement by providing personalized communication, where businesses can tailor there messages to individual customers based on their preferences, purchased history or demographics. It helps to create more personalized and relevant experience.

4. Highly cost-effective solution

SMS marketing is an extremely budget-friendly and cost-effective solution for e-commerce businesses, offering a high return on investment (ROI) compared to other forms of marketing. 

SMS marketing is the best option for growing sales without an effective marketing budget for small—or medium-sized e-commerce businesses. 

There is no need for design or production, which makes it easy and affordable to implement. 

5. Improved long-term customer retention

A direct and regular engagement using message marketing helps businesses improve their long-term customer retention.

Through SMS marketing, you can send personalized messages about offers, loyalty rewards, and exclusive deal offers to customers, which helps them stay engaged and come back for more. It makes customers feel more valued and appreciated. 

6. Significantly higher conversion rates

As mentioned above SMS marketing has significantly higher conversion rates than other marketing, such as social media or email marketing. 

This means that customers tend to open and react to text messages more, which helps businesses see fast and direct responses to their marketing strategies. 

Whether to increase website traffic or sales or promote new products, SMS marketing can help convert viewers into buyers. The brand Whisker Seeker sees a 25% conversion rate from using its text messages for promotions. 

E-commerce SMS marketing strategy: How can you boost your ROI with e-commerce SMS?

You can boost the ROI with e-commerce SMS by following these e-commerce SMS marketing strategies.

1. Personalized Messaging

Sending personalized messaging is one effective strategy for boosting the ROI of e-commerce SMS.

First, tailor messages based on criteria like customers’ preferences, purchase history, location, browsing history, or age group. 

Then, personalize your messages on a customer basis based on these criteria, which can help businesses make communication more relevant. 

This personalized message grabs the attention of customers and engages them with messages. It also increases the chances of increasing conversion rates and boosting customer loyalty. Also, personalized messages help develop direct relationships with customers, encourage them to visit next time, and foster trust, which significantly improves the ROI. 

2. Reminders with incentives

Customers abandon carts due to having second thoughts or any distractions, but sending reminder messages with special discount offers or free shipping messages can change their minds and make them think more about purchasing the product. 

This strategy enhances customer satisfaction and increases conversion rates for e-commerce businesses. Automating reminders with incentives helps businesses grow their revenue and improve the overall Return on Investment (ROI). 

3. Special discounts and offers

SMS is an effective tool for promoting special discounts and offers. You can send special discount offers to customers via SMS text messages. 

This creates a sense of urgency and encourages immediate action. Sending such exclusive discounts, limited-time offers, or flash sales for SMS customers can help establish reliable communication and increase sales. 

This strategy works efficiently in e-commerce businesses, making competition fierce where customers are always ready to make purchases. With this approach, businesses can increase short-term sales and develop a strong customer base where customers always look forward to receiving messages. 

4. Status and delivery notifications

In e-commerce, sending the customer’s order status information, like order confirmation, delivery time, and shipping updates via SMS marketing notifications, is also a good strategy to boost ROI. 

To make it even more effective, you should try adding a link so that they can track or manage the order from the SMS, which will boost customer satisfaction scores and long-term ROI.

5. Program promotions and reward reminders

Promotion programs and reward reminders through bulk SMS are essential for e-commerce businesses to retain customers. Sending messages reminding customers about member benefits, rewards points, or promotions motivates them to take advantage of these programs. It is a direct way of engaging customers and encouraging them to buy.

These personalized messages remind customers about the expiration date of offers or reward systems in upcoming products. With this strategy, businesses can improve the value of customers’ lifetimes and encourage them to make repetitive purchases, which will impact increasing ROI.

6. Customer feedback

Customer feedback sent through SMS is also an effective strategy to improve the e-commerce business. For example, sending a follow-up SMS after a purchase requests feedback, helping to gauge satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. This will show the customers that they are valued and appreciated.

Implementing an SMS feedback system as part of an SMS marketing strategy increases the response rate, as replying to text messages is convenient. This initiation allows businesses to make quick adjustments to improve sales performance and customer experiences.

7. Alerts for sales and events

Sending alert messages for sales and events can boost engagement and traffic on your business sites. 

Whether they are limited-time events, product launches, or seasonal sales, these SMS can notify customers and create excitement and a sense of urgency to encourage them to act faster.

This strategy helps promote time-sensitive offers and boosts sales during the peak shopping season. It will increase website traffic, sales, and ROI as customers act quickly upon receiving the notifications.

8. Automated SMS for key interactions

Automated SMS for key interactions like order confirmations, re-engagement, and thank-yous ensures easy and reliable communication with customers. 

These types of automated messages are best suitable for special actions like reaching milestones or completing a purchase process.

In e-commerce business, using automated SMS marketing software allows companies to foster customer relationships at each stage of the customer journey and maintain consistency.

 With in-time interactions and engaging customers in relevant activities, businesses can improve customer retention and boost sales with ROI.

Best practices for e-commerce SMS marketing

SMS marketing is an essential tool for e-commerce businesses that offers a direct and effective way to engage customers. Here are some best practices to optimize your SMS marketing strategy:

1. Get permission before sending

In e-commerce SMS marketing, obtaining permission is essential. Customers must opt-in to receive messages, as it’s both a legal requirement and a way to build trust. 

Sending unsolicited messages can harm your brand’s reputation and lead to complaints or legal issues.

With permission, you can be sure that your customers want to engage with your content, which leads to high conversion rates. 

SMS communications become valuable for customers because they give customers an opportunity to set expectations about what content they wish to receive.  

2. Make your SMS content relevant, valuable, and unique

If you want to keep your customers engaged, ensure that the SMS content is relevant, valuable, and unique.

Send messages that align with customers’ preferences, behavior, or interests, such as products they’ve viewed and special discounts.

 Ensure your messages offer value through important updates, promotions, and discount offers.

Don’t forget to make your SMS content unique so that customers can notice it among the flood of marketing messages they receive. 

3. Keep SMS messages short

Keep your messages short and sweet, and add a limited number of characters that concisely represent the main idea behind sending them.

 Short messages are easy to understand and read. With them, deliver the main information, like sale alerts, shipping updates, or discount codes, without unnecessary information. 

One more thing, long and complicated messages are difficult to understand and can confuse customers, which leads them to be uncurious towards your brand.

 Simple and well-developed messages grab customers’ attention easily, and they act faster, which is necessary for high conversion rates. 

4. Send SMS regularly and add a variety

Consistency is key to success, but it’s also important not to irritate customers by sending too many SMS constantly. 

Plan a schedule for sending SMS to customers and ensure that the content varies in each SMS so that customers can get engaged. 

For example, change the time while sending SMS for order updates, loyalty programs, promotions reminders, and more. 

Differentiating the time and content of messaging maintains the frequency, and there are fewer chances of customers choosing to opt out or ignore messages in the future. This steady approach helps SMS marketing be effective without getting messages ignored.

6. Avoid text-speak

To maintain clarity and professionalism in your SMS, avoid using text speaks as messages must be short and easy to understand as well. The use of text-speak (Textese) may confuse the customers or may not highlight your business’s image.

So, instead, focus on delivering clean and concise that can provide information about offers and updates to customers effectively. A well-written and personalized message adds more value while making SMS communications. 

7. Include a link as a CTA

Include a link as a Call-to-Action in the SMS that allows the customer to take immediate action either for tracking their order, making a purchase, or redeeming discount vouchers.

 For the best user experience, ensure that the link redirects customers to a mobile-customized page. The easy and clear link drives customer engagement and high conversion rates.

This simple task can make your SMS more measurable and actionable. It also helps to track customer orders and behaviors, create future campaigns or promotional activities, and boost the ROI. 

8. Make it easy to opt-out

Respecting and understanding the customer’s preferences is important in SMS marketing. Making it easy to opt out is a legal requirement available in different regions. 

If customers ensure the opt-out method, that means they have unsubscribed from the message receive option and no longer want to receive sms.

Making the easy opt-out option for customers helps to build trust, keep the subscribers list clean, reduce complaints, and engage those customers who genuinely want to receive messages. 

As an end result, it improves the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. 

9. Test using MMS and emojis

As the standard SMS has a limit in characters, so try using Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) and emojis to make your marketing effort more creative and unique.

 In MMS, you can send audio, video, or images by which you can showcase your business products. Whereas emojis and GIFs help to make these fun to read. 

Adding images or emojis makes the messages more eye-catching, attractive, and customized, and it helps increase response rates and customer engagement. You can test multiple formats based on your audience group to get the best outcome possible for you.

10. Stay compliant

Staying compliant with the rules and regulations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is essential. They dictate how businesses can send marketing messages and allow customers to opt out. 

If the compliance of these laws fails, then the consequences can be legal actions, fines, and damage to the business’s image.

So, get clear consent from customers regarding explicit information about clear opt-out instructions or avoid sending messages beyond the legal frames. 

Conclusion

E-commerce SMS marketing is an effective way for businesses to get connected with customers as it offers high open rates, long-term customer retention, and instant and reliable communication. 

SMS marketing directs personalized engagement with customers. Using SMS marketing can help to enhance customer experiences, increase sales and boost Return on Investment (ROI).

Using SMS marketing for your e-commerce businesses can be cost-effective and reliable. Just keep your messages short and effective only include necessary information. 

You can use this, for notifying customers about promotions, discount offers, order status, and reminder notifications. It can helps to grow your business image and gain trust of customers.