Getting to know Short Message Service (SMS) Marketing

Digital Marketing / March 11, 2022

In today’s episode of What’s Blooming, we’re uncovering quite the topic: Short Message Service (SMS) marketing. Meet Mikaela Reed, Customer Onboarding Specialist at Emotive, a text messaging marketing software used by some of the world’s top e-commerce brands. 

Can you tell us more about Emotive and what makes you different from other SMS marketing tools?

Put simply, Emotive is a text messaging marketing software that can easily be installed directly onto an e-commerce website in order to collect phone numbers, order information, and ultimately connect with customers via SMS. 

Emotive can be viewed as similar to the more commonly known marketing tool of email marketing, yet, instead of email, the software translates marketing efforts towards text messaging.

I would say Emotive primarily makes us different from other SMS marketing tools in how we value the two-way conversational flow built into our platform, emphasizing the human aspect. We successfully execute this innovative feat through a team of “Shopping Experts”. These individuals dedicate themselves to managing common questions asked by customers so as to not always rely on a brand manager. For instance, if someone is looking for a link to a sizing chart or general shipping information, the team collaborates with brands to establish in advance the ideal response for the customer. I feel as though this pre-built response feature is extremely beneficial as the customer has the exact answer to their question come from a real person rather than receiving an answer that is too technical, general, or automated.

Emotive also differentiates itself through its long-term customer success team, a team aimed at continuously supporting and building relationships with customers. We recognize that SMS marketing is still relatively new so we want to ensure people don’t think we just set things up and expect you to handle everything on your own. Companies have access to our resources for best practices, we host webinars, on top of having our team of copywriters help maximize your SMS marketing. Consequently, this hands-on approach continues to reinforce our value for human interaction on both sides of the conversation. By preemptively anticipating a client’s needs and not pre-filling general answers, we understand what a conversation looks like and mold it to a real interaction without having somebody on the other end writing each individual response to all questions, saving us a substantial amount of time.

What is the role of conversational marketing and SMS marketing in the marketing funnel?

I think the beauty of conversational SMS is that it’s set up to engage customers throughout the marketing funnel front to back, pre-purchase to post-purchase. Evidently, we prioritize e-commerce brands where we tend to focus on the conversion side of things but we’ve also seen other brands use SMS marketing to build a community, have general customer service or even for general built-in product feedback built.

I’d compare the experience to that of having a sales associate who’s always there to lend a hand and answer questions throughout your shopping experience.

Overall, SMS tries to shorten the buying cycle as well as personalize the online shopping experience. On the flipside, the process becomes so much easier and effortless for the consumer since they don’t have to worry about keeping a tab open as they’re interacting with, say, a chatbot. Instead, think of it as simply having a sales associate at your fingertips and text back and forth whenever you please.

How have you seen SMS marketing evolve in the last few years? When do you think the shift from “spammy” to “conversation and trust” happened?

For the longest time, SMS marketing was relegated to shipping updates and automated responses and as a result, consumers became accustomed to brands texting reminders such as shipment tracking updates. Order tracking texts were however the main type of message consumers received until brands started sending automated texts that weren’t necessarily related to specific purchases – at which point consumers would get that “spammy” feeling. Nonetheless, with time and as more and more brands started using SMS marketing, they’d notice faster response rates than email open rates.

Tying back into the Shopping Experts team, the way our response system is set up, customers don’t need to worry whether they’re talking to a human or a chatbot, even for the specific questions requiring the expertise of our brand managers. As a matter of fact, whenever I’ve used Emotive in the past to respond to a personal inquiry, customers would react with such surprise that someone actually responded rather than a bot. Having this real connection between your brand, your manager and your customers ended up heightening the one-to-one customer service experience. Subsequently, delivering the human aspect becomes a lot easier on our end as connecting with customers virtually enables SMS marketing to become more accepted and trusted over time.

What are the factors that make an SMS campaign successful? Why do you think it’s so important in a 360 marketing strategy?

I think a huge part of making an SMS campaign successful would be the length of messages. For example, a typical marketing message such as through an email campaign or blog post would prioritize a high number of words with the goal of including as many keywords as possible for SEO purposes.

Many brands and marketing managers that I’ve worked with are really accustomed to expanding on their ideas right there in the message, whereas with SMS, a text would be short and sweet and to-the-point (i.e. announcing a new product or promotion). Not everyone is necessarily looking to read a five-paragraph essay on their phone, so we simply focus on the parts of the messages that add value and contribute to our conversion goals. 

What we’ve particularly seen with successful messages is always having a clear call-to-action (i.e. “Shop Now”, “Save Today” “Get It Before It’s Gone”, “Stock Up Now”). Ultimately, we want to direct people back to the site and connect with them on products that they care about.

In parallel, we stress the importance of segmenting customers when running a successful SMS campaign. For instance, when a person is looking to shop for a specific holiday, we attempt to capture within our flows whether they’re shopping for themselves or someone else.

Off the top of my head, a scenario where I’m looking to buy a present for my sister and the only texts I’m receiving from a brand are restock alerts for men’s hiking boots, there’s a chance I may be less attracted to the brand. Needless to say, I don’t need those kinds of texts, even if, down the line, I could become interested in them, they aren’t relevant to my current needs. It is, therefore, crucial to effectively segment the right customers to ensure relevancy and accuracy to each experience. A person who made a purchase over 90 days ago versus yesterday will not receive the same type of message; the former would likely receive an awareness reminder, as opposed to the latter who would receive a “Thanks For Shopping With Us” text. This, in turn, allows to boost conversions and reduce the number of unsubscribers as well.

All in all, yes, it is important to reach people but also to make sure to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Who do you think will win, SMS vs Email? Or is it a tie?

From our research, anywhere between 60% to 80% of site traffic tends to come from mobile users. So I hope we never reach the point of extreme clash but we definitely try and emphasize the complementary side of SMS to email marketing, essentially scoring a tie between the two. As it’s been around longer and people are more familiar with it, email definitely has a clear precedent. However, a lot of what we observe with email marketing is that messages, even if they’re accurately targeted, will often fall into an abyss of 60,000 unread emails. Reaching a shopper via incoming messages, the notifications on their phone further allow them to be reached easier, thus having SMS stand out from an email notification where the shopper can’t read the whole message without having to click on it.

Email is certainly not going anywhere but since SMS is the primary way people are communicating with each other, why shouldn’t I receive personalized product recommendations or abandoned cart reminders right to my phone where I was already shopping?

From what we’ve seen, within the next two to three years, we can pretty much expect most brands to offer both channels. To reiterate, we don’t see email slowing down or stopping by any means but rather see ourselves working alongside email to communicate throughout the lifecycle of a customer.

Another point marketers tend to forget is that when customers are actively browsing on their phone, they’re more likely to answer a text message quicker than an email as they’re easier to retrieve when looking for a specific message later on down the consumer life cycle.

It’s also so easy to respond to a text message versus crafting an email which often gives off a professional communication format that would require more details. Basically, a text is just an easy response to the point where we’ve definitely seen higher open rates, click-through rates, and response rates across SMS in general.

Consent and permission-based marketing is crucial now, what regulations are SMS marketing subject to?

Consent is absolutely key to SMS marketing and again so wildly different from email. If you’re using the same tactics for both, it’s not always going to provide the same type of results since regulations for SMS are constantly changing. Carriers, for instance, are constantly changing their privacy policies which can often make SMS a difficult endeavor to manage on your own. But that’s where Emotive comes in! What helps us follow policy is mainly the product team, a team that focuses on the deliverability of changes and regulations.

We followed the telephone consumer protection act (or TCPA), really making sure that messages are all sent to compliant phone numbers. Updating privacy legal language on websites and terms of service and conditions also helps secure conformity.

If a customer is curious or wants to know how you’re using their information, Emotive ensures the data is already built-in so they can always find it on your site.

Another key element to ensure is, whenever somebody is opting-in, we want to make sure that the first message, if not the first couple, lock in the legal language. If, by accident (or on purpose), someone inputs the wrong phone number and a message goes to the wrong individual, we obviously still want to make sure everything’s fully compliant and that they have the option to opt-out. Since it isn’t like an “unsubscribe” link that’s built into the bottom of an email, SMS typically tends to be a little bit more in your face. On the other hand, as opposed to a person who manually opts-in – making it clear for us that they’d like to receive messages – it can happen that someone accidentally checks a box at checkout without realizing they’ve opted in.

To fix this, we always recommend including brand names in the message so that if, for any reason, it goes to the wrong person, the choice to opt-out is clear-cut and easy to execute. Currently, Emotive sends messages to the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico but as SMS marketing is growing, we want to make sure that our compliant messages are growing as well. We’re looking forward to getting into the nitty-gritty of regulations for international shoppers and overseas markets as well.

Could you share any tips for growing a subscriber list while following regulations?

Since SMS marketing is still relatively new, we definitely want to make sure that everybody has the tools to be able to opt people in very confidently while still following regulations and getting those boosts in subscriber lists.

Several ecommerce sites luckily have the legal language already built-in. Shopify for instance knows that marketing efforts are starting to switch towards SMS marketing. Again, it’s all about ensuring that you’re meeting with customers and making it very clear that they’ll receive texts from your brand.

Then, if they are opting in in-person, you know they’re manually texting into a subscribe number which constitutes one of the easiest ways to ensure that they understand that they’re opting in. Having in-person retailers or employees dedicated to asking for phone numbers or inputting pop-ups on the site are some of the best ways to gain consent, in addition to the original “Track Your Order” type of text. Across the board, there are many compliant and regulated ways to get people to opt-in. A final point to keep in mind is that, once they provide their phone number, brands should send a welcome message just so they know right away who to send questions to should they need to.

What’s the biggest success story you’ve encountered?

I would say the ones that hit the really big revenue numbers are always really exciting when they’re getting anything above 50k in two weeks – I’m always blown away by those results.

However, I always like to focus on the click-through rate of messages, where we again aim between 15 and 20%. Even so, I had a brand in November of last year hit 55% during their trial period and I was completely taken aback. Obviously, this kind of result tells us that what we’re doing is working, that customers are engaged, they’re clicking on messages, and making purchases, even actively reading your blog posts and checking your brand’s updates.

We’d like to thank Mikaela for taking the time to share her knowledge, insights, and experience with SMS marketing. Check out the Emotive software and book and demo!