How Can SMS Marketing Help Your Ecommerce Business?

There are multiple ways to compete in online business.

Price, of course, is an old standby. But its overall effectiveness is limited. If a competitor has deeper pockets than you, they may be able to operate at a loss and “out-wait” you.

Having a unique product is a tried-and-true approach. But only so many businesses have something that is truly unique.

Then there are the hallmarks that any company with the right strategy can leverage to its advantage: personalized service and customer convenience.

That’s what we’re talking about today. And the perfect vehicle for tapping both of those competitive advantages is SMS marketing. Done right, it can literally transform your eCommerce business.

SMS Marketing: Perfect for Personalization and Convenience

We’re not breaking any news when we tell you that people spend a lot of time on their phones. A lot!

So, as a marketer, a big part of your job is figuring out how your customers are going to best receive your messages. It should be pretty obvious to you that by phone is one of the top ways, if not the top way, that consumers ingest information.

If you can deliver an effective message to your customers’ phones, you’ll be providing convenience to them. They won’t have to go searching for your brand. It will be right there in the palm of their hand.

But the key to making those messages effective is personalization. See, today’s customer, especially online customers, is tired of being force-fed information they don’t care about. What happens is that they tune it out. They scroll on to the next thing — and some of them never come back.

To cut through the noise, your texts need to hit on specific things that specific people are interested in. Each SMS should be personalized to the individual it’s being sent to.

Let’s look at a handful of examples of how personalized SMS can deliver incredible value to an eCommerce business like yours.

Shipment Tracking

Rather than just the facts, spice up your shipment tracking SMS messages. Zembula makes it easy to bring your texts to life with animation. If you can add animation to personalization, you’re going to have a winner.

Call the customer by name. Show them a visual representation of where their package is in the process. Entice them to make another purchase with a limited-time discount code. The opportunities are endless.

Sales and Promotions

You can achieve deep personalization by combining your data with your SMS strategy. Take something like browser history or cart abandonment and combine that with a personalized message that highlights a specific product you know the customer is interested in. Then send that personalized offer via a personalized SMS message.

Abandoned Cart

This gets back to the convenience advantage that SMS delivers. Text messaging is a much more direct and timely means of getting customers’ attention when they’ve left something behind in their shopping cart. SMS introduces a personalized engagement opportunity.

Rewards Programs

By sending personalized updates, special offers, program benefits, and enrollment opportunities in a way that’s easy for your customer to receive that information, you’re allowing your best customers to take advantage of their loyalty status. Personalized SMS gives you the perfect avenue.

Post Purchase

After your customer makes an online purchase, what are you doing to keep them engaged? Personalized text messaging allows you to tailor your content to the individual customer’s order and experience. Engage them by asking for a review or sending them instructions on a product they just purchased. This is a big opportunity to give the customer value and to build a 1:1 connection.

Bring the Same Personalization That You Use in Email to SMS

Zembula’s SMS solution is revolutionizing the way brands do SMS marketing by allowing them to use their data to create personalized and animated SMS messages.

When you consider that SMS has a nearly 100 percent read rate, it becomes much easier to envision how SMS can help your eCommerce business. It gives you the opportunity to actually reach your customers with your most important information.

And the key, of course, to getting them to actually do something with that information is personalization.

If you’re ready to start sending SMS messages that set your brand apart, let’s work together!