SMS marketing in retail is booming – increase conversion and gain on opportunity to win sales

Did you get an SMS from a retailer this week? Did you open and read it? Clicked through much? We know the majority of people can say check, check, check. When knowing this, the question is: why aren’t more retailers working with SMS marketing? You are obviously missing out on plenty of sales opportunities! Keep reading and we’ll explain why.

The open rates for SMS marketing in retail are unreal

You might want to hold on to your chair now to not get too blown away. SMS marketing in retail has a whopping 98 percent open rate! What? And 90 percent of these texts are read within three minutes*. Did you fall off your chair? Went to Voyado’s “book a demo” to talk about how you can get started with SMS marketing today? We figured.

Why you should use it

Since you kept reading, this is the part where we’ll give you some of the reasons why to use texts in retail:

The vast majority of your customers – if not all of them- have a mobile device. And all of these devices can receive an SMS
Customers redeem SMS-coupons and rewards 10 times more than other types of coupons
42 percent make purchases through their phones. This makes SMS the perfect channel for fast purchases – since the customer must act immediately to get the best deal
It’s easy and so effective

How to use SMS marketing in retail

Just like any other communication with your customers – it needs to be personalized. Don’t send a random text to all your customers just to push one specific item. You know that won’t work. So, here are a few tips on how to use the amazing text message function in Voyado.

Loyalty program related stuff – Let the customer know about the offers, rewards, and points they have – it reminds them to redeem! It can also lead to customers making a purchase just to get up to the next level if they’re close.

New arrivals – Promote your new arrivals to the customers who have shown interest in similar products or items before.

Back in stock – The best way ever to inform customers who have been looking at a sold-out product online, that they’re back in stock.

Happy birthday – Say congratulations, and why not give the customer an offer through a text?

Abandoned cart – Reminding customers of their abandoned cart leads to at least 10 percent going back to complete the purchase. Boom.

Marketing automation flows – when you think of eCommerce -and retail marketing automation, you might think of emails. But SMS can, and should, be included in all your automation. Send an SMS to follow up on an email, or vice versa.

Personalized SMS

When you set up an SMS in Voyado, you start by segmenting your customers to make sure the text is relevant. And then, to make it super personalized, you add in personalized fields. And there are so many to choose from. Here are a few of them:

First and/or last name
Street address
Country
Regular store
Current point balance
Latest active rewards

Before you send, or schedule, the SMS – you’ll get a preview.

This is how you know it works

To see the results of your retail text message marketing, you can create control groups in Voyado. That’s a randomly selected group that will not receive the SMS. Meaning the control group will be used as a reference group to compare the results with! We recommend the control group consists of 10 percent of the recipients.

You’ll be able to see purchasing statistics as soon as the text has been sent.

Sum of the cardamom

So, you have all this information. The insane open rates and how many more offers are redeemed through phones. You also know that there are so many different ways to use SMS marketing in retail.

What are you waiting for? You are not saving money by not sending SMS to your customers. You are actually losing money in lost sales opportunities by NOT working with SMS marketing.

Set up a demo, or contact your point of contact at Voyado and we’ll hook you up or download this SMS guide!

*Sources Rebrandly and crazy egg