13 SMS Marketing Tips for Ecommerce Businesses
The movie “Field of Dreams” made popular the saying “If you build it, they will come.” Sadly, for ecommerce businesses, just building it won’t bring in customers, no matter how strong your SEO mojo is. If chinese overseas europe data you want to sell stuff you have to go tell people about what you sell — and that’s called marketing.
SMS marketing in particular involves sending promotional materials via text message — in contrast to transactional messaging, which encompasses things like delivery updates and one-time passwords.
SMS is the best communication channel for marketing. It’s highly available — consider how many people have cellphones and how high open rates are for text messages. It doesn’t require anyone to download a mobile app. And according to research by SAP SE, “70% of respondents say that SMS is a good way for a company to get their attention and 64% say that organizations should use SMS-based engagement more often.”
Build your subscriber base
Having said that, however, you can’t just buy a list of phone numbers and send unsolicited text messages to individuals with whom you have no business relationship. You must gather opt-in consent from message recipients first. Once you have that consent, you can add the contact information to your subscriber list.
How do you gain subscribers? Offer customers and potential customers incentives to be contacted. Typical incentives include cost savings, time savings (such as faster shipments), and early access to information, such as insider priority for sales.
Here are six ways to gather opt-in consent.
Put a signup box on your product pages.
Let customers tick a box to opt in to messaging when they first provide their phone numbers as part of their purchase information.
Display an exit intent popup when someone’s about to leave your site, asking for consent.
Offer a link to the subscriber signup page in email newsletters.
Give people a short code they can use to subscribe by texting a keyword.
