SMS Marketing and Conversational Commerce: A Perfect Match
At a time when the digital world seems to be changing by the minute, marketers can feel pressured to stay up-to-date with all the new ways to reach their target audiences. They’re expected to know about, and test, the latest and greatest Facebook ad options. They’re encouraged to add new tracking pixels to their sites so they can retarget visitors who didn’t make a purchase. They’re inundated with requests to establish a brand presence everywhere, even on Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices.
While all of these marketing tactics are new, exciting, and might even make a lot of sense for your brand, there’s something to be said for some of the older, tried-and-true approaches. We’re not talking newspaper ads or billboards... but when was the last time your company ran an SMS marketing campaign, if at all? For text messaging being a relatively new method of communication in the course of human history, SMS marketing could be utilized a whole lot more. Some large companies have prioritized SMS marketing, such as Coca-Cola who spends 70% of their mobile marketing budget on SMS services, but that’s not the case for all brands. In fact, 65% of brands still don’t have a formal SMS marketing strategy in place. SMS marketing being so underutilized is shocking on its own, but the fact that businesses aren’t using it in combination with other online marketing tactics (when this approach can be incredibly successful) to capitalize on revenue shows that businesses still have a ways to go in better reaching their mobile-savvy customers.
Why SMS marketing is impactful
If you have your customer’s or (potential customer’s) phone number, you already have a direct line of communication to them with a strong chance of your message being read for a couple of reasons. In most cases, if you have someone’s number, they’ve likely opted in to receive messages from you. Also, SMS open rates have been reported to be as high as 98%. And it’s not just the open rates that are surprising. According to Twilio, a leading cloud communications platform for building SMS applications, 47% of consumers prefer native SMS when communicating with businesses.
When your messages are carefully crafted, aren’t spammy, and direct people to the right place, they can help drive solid revenue for your brand.
But where do you direct that SMS traffic for optimal conversion rates?
Taking SMS marketing to the next level
You can direct your promotional SMS messages to a page on your website, but by doing so, you have little control or influence over the buyer journey. Instead, here’s where you can mix some of the old marketing channels with some of the new. If your brand offers an AI-enabled chatbot on your site or through a social media messaging app, you can send an SMS promotion with a link that opens up a chat conversation. From there, your bot can chat with the customer, answer questions, and provide purchase suggestions.
The key to closing the deal from the initial SMS marketing message to the final purchase is giving the customer the ability to complete their purchase within the chat window. Nothing makes for a more disjointed experience than providing customized and unique support within chat, helping the customer arrive at a purchase decision, and then directing them elsewhere. When a customer is interacting with your brand on chat (especially after arriving there from a text message) there’s a good chance they’re on the go and thus might not have time to go through the whole checkout process. If you’ve taken the initiative to provide them with on-demand guidance in a way that fits into their busy lifestyle, you should also provide them with a way to easily make their purchase so they don’t abandon their shopping cart.
If you’re ready to pair your SMS marketing efforts with a conversational commerce solution to increase conversions, request a demo with the Joinedapp team today.