SMS marketing strategy boosts sales by 98 percent

If you think about it, you probably don’t open or read every single email you receive, you probably don’t read every advertisement you see on social media, but without a doubt, I bet every single text message you receive you read.

Think about that for a moment, how powerful would that be if you could find ways to incorporate SMS into your ecommerce business, knowing almost every text message you send is going to get read?

In this article, I want to show you two different SMS case studies and marketing strategies to prove to you exactly why SMS works and why it’s something you should consider for your ecommerce business moving forward.

Definition of SMS

\ ˌes-ˌem-ˈes \

: a technology for sending short text messages between mobile phones

Why consider SMS for your business?

I’m sure you already know some of these points, but I want to make it clear as possible for you as to why SMS is going to be a fantastic marketing strategy moving into the future for any business.

High Open Rates

Text messages have a 99% open rate, with 94% of those texts being read within the first 5 minutes of being received.

I think just from that one statistic you should be realizing the potential SMS can bring, but just in case you need more convincing, let me continue.

High Response Rates

Not only are the open rates higher with text messages, but response rates have been recorded to be 19% on average. Just to put this into perspective, email marketing has an average response rate of 4.2%!

Are you convinced yet? If not, let’s continue.

Mobile First

More and more people are using their mobile phones to purchase products online. With more people using smartphones and the combination of responsive websites there is no doubt that more people are purchasing products online through their phones. Texting customers is only going to enhance this!

The Competitive Edge

Last but not least, you are going to have a competitive edge if you apply this to your ecommerce business. Very few businesses are utilizing SMS and if you get in now you are setting yourself up for success before every other business saturates this strategy.

Now that we go that out of the way and you understand why this is important for your business let’s look at a some case studies.

Case study: Seattle Sun Tan generates $196,000 in new sales

Seattle Sun Tan decided to use text messaging in their marketing campaign offering discounts to their customers. Within the first month of starting the campaign they had 4,750 customers opt-in to receive text messages, which added up to $196,000 in new sales. To take this even further the customers who opted in to receive text messages ended up spending 500% more money than regular customers.

Case study & Image Source: Tatango.com

Case study: Bohemian Guitars increase sales by 98%

Bohemian Guitars decided to include a live chat support option on their mobile site, but instead of chatting with someone on the website they would actually have the ability to text the support team at Bohemian Guitars. This created such a personal feel for customers and over a 6 month time span sales increased about 98%.

Case Study & Image Source: Kissmetrics

I hope these two case studies have really opened your eyes to see the potential business you could be losing out on by not utilizing SMS in your ecommerce business. Now that you are all excited to try this out, below are a couple tools you can use to start implementing this.

Getting started

SMS marketing is similar to email marketing in the sense that you can’t just upload a purchased list of numbers or your entire customer database, there needs to be an opt-in system.

Pro Tip: Most SMS marketing companies will allow you to sign up for a free account that allows you unlimited contacts and at least 1 keyword. This means you can launch a campaign to start building your contacts without paying a high monthly fee. Then when it comes time to start sending your messages you can choose the monthly plan that fits best with your numbers.

So with that said, go take action! Test things out and let us know how things go with your new SMS marketing campaign!