Setting up a Shopify store is quite easy. The app offers features to set up, sell as well as communicate with customers with ease. Even if you are a beginner, with the correct marketing techniques, your store can be a great source of income for you.
This is where the challenge comes in. Targeting the right audience in the right way and getting them to make a purchase is not always a piece of cake. You are almost always on the lookout for new ways to market your brand. In recent years, the way consumers like to interact with businesses has changed and SMS marketing has taken the forefront as more and more people use text messaging to communicate. Nine out of ten customers now prefer to communicate with businesses through SMS.
Given this, clearly, your business should work towards making the most out of SMS marketing. However, you need to do this carefully. With more and more businesses embracing SMS marketing, you need to employ some smart practices to make sure consumers don’t simply ignore your messages and you see actual conversion.
So, what are the best practices for maximizing your Shopify store sales through SMS marketing? In the below sections, we’ve explained all you need to know about using SMS marketing to get your audiences to click/ reply and stay interested in receiving updates about your Shopify business.
SMS Marketing Best Practices for Shopify
1. Build a Strategy
The first step, before even starting your marketing campaign is to plan it out well. Decide what the goal of SMS marketing is. What do you want your Shopify customers’ action to be on seeing the message? Should they click on a link or send a reply to the text? Would you like to receive the message you sent? You can then chart out how you go about with it, the right tools to use, and the amount of effort to put in.
Planning these things in advance helps you track the performance of your marketing efforts. When you form a basic framework of the things you want your SMS marketing campaigns to do, you can make sure everything is aligned, track and accordingly improve.
2. Obtain Consumer Consent and Stay Informed on Government Rules
In the United States, the CAN-SPAM and TCPA Acts, designed to safeguard consumer privacy, make it clear that you need to obtain the written consent of the consumer when marketing. Other countries also have similar laws. Moreover, nobody likes receiving random messages from businesses unless they are interested.
To steer clear of any complications and ensure your audience is satisfied, always make sure you have written communication before sending the first message. For this, you can inform consumers via your Shopify store to send a simple message to your number before starting SMS marketing. A text such as ‘START’ or whatever you prefer. Also, get to know the country’s SMS marketing regulations and always consult a legal authority if you have any questions.
3. Cater to the Audience
Your audience has certain expectations out of the SMS they receive. For example, if a consumer is interested in an item that is out of stock, a ‘back in stock’ update would be ideal.
Do not send the same message to customers every week. This may eventually lead to the audience opting out. Instead, be smart with the way you message the audience. Ask yourself what value the message would add to the consumer and prepare accordingly. Make changes to the messages and inform the audience about exclusive discounts, savings, cashback offers, announcements, and other valuable information about your Shopify store.
4. Be Consistent
If you message your customers once in a blue moon, they are most likely to forget that they had even subscribed to your messages in the first place. On the other hand, messaging them too many times could come across as spamming. Regardless, finding the right balance of number and frequency of messages is important.
A good rule of thumb is to text about 2-4 times a month. You can also explicitly ask your customers to choose the types of updates they want to receive.. Based on this,
5. Personalize
Along with catering to the audience and giving them what they expect, you need to also personalize their experience so that they keep coming back for more.
Divide your audience into segments and send them messages for what would be most relevant to them. Also make the writing style personal, as if you were talking to a customer in person and understanding their needs. Every message needs to be customized to the purpose. If a customer leaves the Shopify cart abandoned, personalize the message to include the name of the customer, product as well as any other information.
6. Responsiveness is Important
An important factor that makes SMS the more preferred way of communication is that it’s more personalized and people use it as a primary mode of communication. Given this, they also expect to be responded to, in a two-way communication stream. Stats show that 43% of people have proactively texted a business and 1 out of 3 of these have not gotten a reply.
This can be a major bummer to consumers and you could end up losing them. To keep your Shopify store buzzing with customers, you should make the communication conversational. Customer service goes a long way in retaining customers and you need to use that to your advantage.
7. Choose a Good SMS Provider
While the Shopify store may not take much time to set up, you still need to manage it and handle various processes. As such, choosing a good SMS marketing platform is a must. Opt for solutions that cater particularly to your needs.
One of the biggest challenges is consumers abandoning the cart without making a purchase. For your Shopify business, this means that you’ve got potential buyers who might entirely forget that they were going to make a purchase. With a 35%+ CTR, SMSGo is a great tool to send personalized messages to customers and recover abandoned carts.
8. Make Opting out Easy
Although your messages would be amazing, it’s likely that customers may not always be interested. For this reason, you need to make it clear that they are free to unsubscribe at any point in time.
Just like email campaigns have an unsubscribe option, your SMS marketing campaign also should have a line giving a similar option to consumers. It could be a simple line at the end asking the customer to send ‘STOP’ to no longer receive messages from you. This option is great to establish trust with your customers.
This is a Guest Post by Hrishikesh Pardeshi Hrishikesh Pardeshi is the co-founder at Flexiple, a fully remote bootstrapped company with $2 million+ revenue. He's passionate about remote working and has also built Remote Tools and Remote Clan. You can follow Hrishikesh on Twitter.