SMS marketing is one of the most effective strategies for growing a BigCommerce store. It allows businesses to stay in contact with their customers via text and to promote sales and growth.
SMS marketing is the act of sending text message specials to your customers, updating them on new products, offering more information regarding your products and services, and getting new purchases made. For this process to initiate between your customer and the business, the customer must opt-in to your SMS list.
Once your customer opts-in, their number goes into the SMS marketing software you’re using for your automated texts. When this shortcode exchange process completes, the customer receives a confirmation response as a receipt for opting-in. They also receive an opt-out code if they wish to unsubscribe from your messages.
What is SMS marketing?
SMS marketing is a channel that helps businesses deliver promotional offers and messages to customers, quickly and precisely. This marketing strategy aims to help establish a subscriber database and boost customer loyalty for a BigCommerce business.
More than updating customers about new deals and offers, SMS is an excellent way of engaging your customers and keeping them active in their transactions with you.
Why BigCommerce stores use SMS as a marketing channel
If you’re aiming for a highly effective marketing channel for your business, consider SMS as the ideal tool for it. There’s a reason so many stores are implementing SMS in 2021. SMS helps you notify people almost instantaneously about your offers.
Apart from this, what are the significant advantages when BigCommerce stores implement SMS marketing? Let’s take a look at them below:
Younger buyers prefer to use their phones
Nearly everyone uses a mobile phone now, but millennials and Gen Z are particularly glued to their phones. When you’re catering to Gen Z and millennials, there’s no better tool than SMS for marketing.
Today, mobile-phone addiction has reached such an extent that younger people can’t even imagine a few minutes of their day without their phones. We’re guessing mobiles are even a permanent companion in their showers. With this kind of usage, you have a better chance of your messages being seen when compared to flooded email inboxes.
Most texts are opened within 3 minutes
Email inboxes are flooded. SMS messages are easier to see. This is because a text message is easier to open and read through than sifting through your inbox and reading lengthy content. SMS enjoys a 98% average open rate, but emails merely score an average open rate of 20%.
Even when a person does finally get to opening and responding to their emails, it takes them an average of ninety minutes at least. If you compare this to the maximum of ninety seconds per-response for an SMS, you will see this as a more engaging channel for customer engagement.
Email inboxes are flooded
Email inboxes are pretty crowded. This is mainly because of the fierce competition in the world of emails, with thousands of other businesses fighting to grab your customer’s attention too. If they’re a business professional on top of that, you can imagine the piles of emails already sitting in their inbox.
Your email has a better chance of being unseen. And most likely, your customer will not even learn about your products and offers, etc when you’re competing with dozens of emails sent at the same time. With SMS, your offer has instant visibility and quick access.
How to grow your BigCommerce store with SMS
For your BigCommerce store, SMS marketing can be one of your most valuable tools if you implement it well. But what are the correct measures and approaches for a foolproof SMS marketing success? Let’s take a look at them below:
Recover abandoned carts
If you’ve been searching for exceptional cart recovery campaigns to drive sales, then SMS is just the right tool. You need to optimize this tool for engaging customers who failed to complete their purchase.
Design automated yet personalized messages that would remind the customers to complete their purchase and grab their attention. You could provide a recovery link in the message and some promotional offers to pick up where they left off and even recommend more items.
Send winback campaigns
Winback campaigns help businesses retain their valuable customers. If you are a BigCommerce store owner, you know it’s easier to sell to existing customers than attracting new ones. Besides, the higher open rate of SMS promises to make your winback campaign even more successful. Here is what you can do to rekindle your dormant customers:
- Send them a personalized offer, but place a time limit on its availability. Make sure the offer is extraordinarily enticing but set a time limit so that they have to act fast.
- If your initial offer expires, send them an even better one a week later.
- If a customer has made a purchase, make another offer to link to products you think they’ll like.
- Follow up through surveys to improve customer engagement.
Combine SMS with email to get better results
BigCommerce stores don’t necessarily have to choose between emails and SMS for their marketing campaigns. Why not use the best of both to drive sales and prosperity for your store? You can attract and engage customers through both channels.
- Use your email contact and encourage them to subscribe to your texts too. You could send incentives, promotion codes, and the promise of winning gift cards and prizes, etc. Send them an email for subscribing to SMS, and provide them with a code they have to text to you. This way, you will integrate both your channels for customer engagement.
- Encourage your SMS contacts to subscribe to your emails. Offer them some incentives for this too.
- Send sneak peeks of future company events and offers through SMS but ask them to subscribe to your emails for complete details.
Start SMS Marketing with Recapture
As a BigCommerce store owner, you must never underrate the value of customer loyalty. These can add more sales in comparison to customer acquisition. While we don’t mean to discourage the other, all we’re highlighting is that SMS marketing with Recapture is equally essential for keeping your profits on point.
If you note your once-active customers are now dormant or out of the spotlight, bring them back into action with Recapture. You could send them personalized messages and make offers on products your history shows they had liked and offered discounts on others too.
Final Thoughts
SMS marketing is a powerful tool for BigCommerce stores and can drive higher sales and profits if you use it strategically. Like every other business component, marketing requires careful detailing and impressive strategies, which is the same for SMS marketing.
From giving you quick and instantaneous access to customers to marketing your products and services at a glance, there are so many advantages your business can enjoy.
Get started with Recapture today to get started with SMS marketing for your BigCommerce store.
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