Can SMS marketing help with e-commerce customer acquisition?

Can SMS marketing help with e-commerce customer acquisition?

You’ve invested thousands of dollars in building a great, user-friendly online store. You’ve picked the most engaging design and tailored some pretty intuitive and interactive features. Next, you’ve spent hours and hours listing your products, creating descriptions, and taking top-quality photos of your offering. Now, it is time for people to visit your e-commerce store and spend some money, right? Well, unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You’re now facing a very common struggle of all e-commerce store owners: Customer acquisition.

A top-quality online store is a great start to find success with your online business. But, you can’t just expect people to visit your website and buy from you just because you’ve put in lots of resources. You have to convince people to do so with an engaging, efficient, and fast approach to your marketing.

This is where SMS marketing can help.

SMS marketing is today’s digital marketers’ best-kept secret. While some argue that it is dead and inefficient compared to more recent marketing channels, data shows otherwise. Plenty of stats prove that SMS marketing is actually making its comeback, bringing many benefits to businesses of all sizes.

Keep reading below to learn more about SMS marketing’s assets and why it works perfectly as a communication channel that will help attract customers to your e-commerce store!

Why is SMS successful?

First things first, let’s dig deeper into the benefits of SMS marketing.

Why should your business use text messages instead of social media, email, or other digital and more popular channels? Well, it’s not that you should choose SMS over different digital strategies. It’s about your business not ignoring SMS and rather blending it with your other digital marketing efforts. Why? Here are a few strong reasons:

It’s the best mobile-first approach

Today’s largest customer base is made of Millennials and Gen Zers, two generations known for being so in love with their mobile devices and carrying them wherever they go. Google knows that and asks for the mobile-first approach to become a priority for all businesses who want to make it to its first search results. So, why not take the search engine giant’s words as proof that you need to invest in mobile channels, like SMS.

SMS texts are the most mobile-friendly way to reach your customers, considering that they use smartphones’ native messaging app.

It delivers your message instantly

In today’s busy world, consumers expect everything to work fast, from websites to the channels they receive information through. This is where SMS texts shine because they are instant, delivering your business’s message to all customers within seconds.

It has phenomenal open rates

Data shows that SMS texts have a staggering open rate of 98%, which is significantly high, especially compared to email’s open rate of only 30%. This means that pretty much all prospects you want to attract to your e-commerce store will not only receive but also open your texts.

It truly gets read

The good news is that most of your prospects will not only receive and open your SMS bulk text messages, 60% of them will also read your messages within 1-5 minutes after receiving them.

It reaches non-smartphone mobile device users

Another great thing about SMS marketing, especially compared to other marketing channels, is the fact that it helps you bridge the gap between your digital efforts and those consumers who are still not riding the smartphone wave. Data shows that there are 6,378 active smartphone users globally, which means  

It’s creating a fantastic customer experience

The ease of communication, instant delivery of the message, requiring no Internet connection, and no display challenges faced by customers all contribute to providing a fantastic customer experience.

Ways SMS marketing helps with e-commerce customer acquisition

Now you know why SMS is such a popular marketing channel, but you may wonder whether it is suitable for your online store goals related to attracting more customers. There are many ways in which you can use SMS text messages to convince more people to become your customers, including:

Attract customers to your website

One of the simplest yet efficient ways SMS can help you attract new customers is by allowing you to use it as a channel to invite people to your online store.

By sending SMS texts to your prospects and inviting them to visit your online store (don’t forget to include a link to your website in your message), you’ll attract visitors who can turn into buying customers.

Send personalized deals to prospects

Maybe your prospects aren’t buying your products because they find them too expensive or simply don’t want to waste a significant amount of money on a product/ service they are not sure they will like. By using SMS to send personalized deals to these people, you may convince them to give your offering a try and purchase from your online store.  

Inform consumers about your latest products

How else could people know about your products/ services unless you inform them about them? SMS also allows you to send short text messages to tell your audience about your latest product/ service release. They might be interested in finding out more and visit your online store for this info.

Send order updates to customers

One great way to attract new customers is to provide an excellent customer experience to your existing buyers. This is where the power of word-of-mouth does wonders in attracting more customers to your business.

Sending SMS order updates is an excellent strategy to offer a fantastic customer experience. Buyers want to know whether or not their order has been received, shipped, paid for, and so on. Using SMS to inform them about all that will improve their experience with your online store, which will quickly transform into positive reviews on your website or recommendations to their peers.

Carry on market research

Market research is one of the most efficient ways to gain insights into improving your business and attracting new customers. SMS can help you carry on market research to find out valuable insights about your audience’s wants and needs that you can later use as strategies to attract more people to purchase from you.

Wrapping up

SMS marketing is a fantastic tool for running promotions with the goal of customer acquisition. SMS marketing has plenty of benefits, and this communication channel is perfect for delivering messages that will attract more customers to your e-commerce store.  

CTA: Acquire new customers with our SMS marketing solutions!