SMS Marketing, or text message marketing, is a powerhouse of high customer engagement and almost guaranteed deliverability.
As a marketing channel, SMS is a highly effective workaround for the iOS 15 update and its email privacy features. But what SMS marketing strategies can you implement in time to earn a high ROI over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales period in 2021?
Before we answer that, let’s talk about why you should consider SMS marketing in the first place. Here's a rundown of the benefits for your eCommerce brand:
1. SMS Marketing Helps You Engage with Customers Immediately
- SMS marketing guarantees a 97% read rate within 15 minutes, which is perfect for delivering your more time-sensitive offers.
- According to Smart Insights, 45% of SMS campaigns generate a successful ROI.
- About 31% of consumers respond to SMS surveys in less than six minutes.
2. You Can Easily Integrate SMS Strategies with Other Marketing Channels
There’s almost no hassle involved when you integrate SMS marketing into your existing eCommerce marketing framework.
Further, you can reach over 50% ROI when you combine it with your other marketing channels, such as email and social media.
3. Enhances Your Lifecycle Marketing
The flexibility of SMS means you can engage with your customers across the whole customer journey. This, in turn, helps you address crucial customer pain points.
4. Saves You Marketing Expenses
SMS is one of the most inexpensive methods of communication you can use compared to other channels (especially paid ads).
5. Mobile-Friendly
Roughly 67% of the world's population are mobile device users. And more importantly, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues with your SMS marketing efforts on mobile devices.
With all these facts in mind, it’s easy to see why SMS can be an integral and easy-to-integrate marketing channel to your brand's marketing arsenal. But how effective is it as part of your BFCM marketing strategy?
We used SMS marketing to help one of our beauty brand clients back in BFCM 2020. Here are the SMS campaigns and flows we did and their results:
SMS Campaigns
- Early Bird Sale for Priority List SMS Announcement
- Priority List Reminder SMS
- Discount Code SMS
- Surprise Extension SMS
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday SMS
These SMS campaigns generated a grand total of $30,149 by the end of the BFCM sale. How did we do it?
Here's a quick brief on what we did that you can test with your SMS campaigns:
- We synced our SMS campaigns with email but opted for lesser campaigns.
- Sent an Early Bird SMS campaign announcing the Sale two days early for our client’s Priority List customers.
- Followed up with a Priority List Reminder SMS the day after the Early Bird SMS to remind the priority customers that the Black Friday madness starts the next day. This encouraged them to start shopping early and get first dibs.
- Sent all campaign messages as plain SMS. We didn't include images because we were advised that MMS would have problems due to the high BFCM traffic.
Again, all of these campaigns raked in a grand total of $30,149 by the end of the sale.
SMS Marketing Flows & Results
When it came to our flows, we set basic automation sequences. The New Customer Acquisition, Browse Recovery, and Cart Recovery Flows all offered the same 50% OFF discount code for BFCM.
- New Customer Acquisition Flow: $62,568
- Browse Recovery SMS Flow: $2,261
- Cart Recovery SMS Flow: $17,665
It's never too late to integrate SMS marketing into your BFCM game plan. It's versatile and it can easily mingle with your existing marketing channels. To top it all off, it's cost-effective and our customer-centric approach enables us to target the customers’ pain points across the entire customer journey.
It's this approach that amplified the impact these BFCM campaigns had on our client's customers. This would make the rest of your customer experience that much more rewarding to both your brand and your customers.
Are you interested in diving more into lifecycle marketing but already have your team's hands full with other critical projects? Lifecycle marketing takes some dedication to the craft to execute effectively, which is why we're offering to do it for you!
Schedule a free strategy call with us to find out how we can scale your brand.
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