Nike, Fenty, Puravida, Aliexpress, Zaful – sounds familiar?
These are just a few of many brands that are daily contemplating on how to make you their customer. The list goes on with no end in near sight.
The eCommerce market is heavily saturated. Nevertheless, it is predicted that the Covid pandemic will impact its incredible expansion during the next couple of years.
So how can you compete with the big giants, and still increase sales and conversions of your online store?
- Personalization
- Detailed targeting
- Channel focus
One word – SMS Marketing!
Calculating Conversion Rates
Before we dive into the strategy of the conversion increase, we will quickly go over the formula of calculating the conversion percentage and SMS role in it.
The formula is very simple: take the total number of website visitors and divide it with the number of purchases made, all in the specified timeframe.
This is the overall conversion rate percentage you are operating with at a given time.
A generally accepted baseline conversion rate for e-commerce stores is 2%, however this changes depending on many factors such as what a store sells, the average cost of products, etc.
Next to this, there is a specific way to track the conversions coming only from your SMS marketing campaigns:
- Stop all other marketing campaigns and focus on tracking the SMS conversions
- Have a unique sales/discount code you will track and send in your SMS’s
- Compare overall conversion rate before and after launching an SMS marketing campaign
Why SMS for Ecommerce?
Although it may seem a bit old school, SMS marketing can do miracles for your marketing efforts if used properly. The biggest reasons for that are before mentioned personalization and a sense of urgency!
2.29 billion of the 5 billion cell phones in the world are non-smartphones, which means that using SMS marketing gives e-merchants access to the 50% of cell phone owners that can’t be reached via other mobile marketing channels.
Moreover, even if your target audience consists of smartphone users, their SMS inbox is much less saturated than their email inbox.
SMS open rates easily go over 90% which is the reach no other marketing channel can brag with.
As we mentioned in the beginning, with text messages you are creating a personalized approach to every customer in your database. They feel important and valued, hence are happy to start being related to your brand.
Conversion increases here we come!
Make it Spicy
SMS works because of the limited amount of words you can put in there. No sugar coating or unnecessary word stuffing.
Just a clear, concise message, with a bit of spice in it!
The trick here though is to grab the attention of the person reading the message.
Make it relevant, short, simple, and do address them by the name. The more info you have about your target audience, the bigger chance is that your SMS will lead to a conversion.
Pro tip: Have a dramatic BANG moment in the text. 30% off doesn’t sound the same as 30% off the best pair of boots you must have today!
Make them feel special in your message and just keep tracking those add-to-cart buttons.
Take Your Time With Profiling
Focus on details.
At which time of the day is your audience going to be checking their phone?
When is the best time to catch them in a good mood?
What music are they listening to?
Which slang words are they using?
What do they want to hear from you? (discounts, new products, events, etc.)
Finding this kind of information is not easy, but it is quite possible.
Creating focus groups and sending out short surveys can go a long way.
Short SMS surveys have a really big fill-in rate and it is the fastest and easiest way to get to the desired information mentioned above.
Focus groups can often save you a lot of money by showing you what works and what doesn’t.
A/B testing on a focus group makes you choose relevant texts, time frames, and effective CTAs and increases the probability of a successful SMS marketing campaign.
When you have collected all of the data and created a personalized approach, you are ready to go to the next step – creating SMS templates and choosing the right tool for your campaign.
SMS Tools and Templates
When it comes to sending text messages to thousands, potentially millions of customers, smart automation is an option to consider.
An advanced and reliable SMS marketing platform will allow you to send attention-grabbing personalized messages in bulk, enable easy conversion tracking and deliver all of these with ease.
Emitto.io enables you to set up the whole campaign in just 5 minutes, has various numbers of SMS templates to choose from, and gives you insight into the analytics of each campaign.
When choosing the right SMS tool make sure it is user-friendly and intuitive. Easy-to-use tools keep you time-efficient and allow you to spend your time on good copy and targeting.
Dashboard analytics is equally important, as it will show you how successful your campaign has been.
SMS for Ecommerce is the safest, most productive way to increase your conversion rates starting today.
Check out our other blogs to learn more about the templates and how to create a copy that converts!
If you have any questions or would like us to cover another related topic do shoot us a comment below.
Happy SMSing.
