The recipe for success in marketing is simple: Give customers what they want. 93% of customers prefer to receive communications from businesses through texts instead of emails. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to listen to your audience and add SMS marketing to your toolkit.
However, an SMS marketing strategy involves much more than just sending promotional texts or reminders — it requires a carefully crafted plan and the right automation tools to bring it to life.
But with so many options for SMS marketing automation, how do you select the right one for your business needs? At Bloomreach, our goal is to offer top-tier SMS marketing tools designed to help you personalize every text message you send to get more conversions while sending fewer texts.
To help you get started, here are some important features to look for in any SMS marketing solution and their benefit for your ecommerce business.
What Is SMS Automation?
SMS automation allows you to send texts to one or more recipients on your contact lists with little to no action from your end.
You can schedule messages, segment your audience, and set up drip campaigns using automation. These tools also allow you to send autoresponders on various occasions.
Common SMS use cases include:
- New product launches
- Appointment reminders or follow-ups
- Order confirmations
- Shopping cart abandonment reminders
What Do SMS Automation Tools Do?
SMS automation, often included as part of SMS marketing software, automatically sends texts based on workflows or predefined triggers, such as when someone makes a purchase, abandons a cart, or signs up for your newsletter.
A good tool allows you to streamline your SMS marketing to help it easily fit in with your overall marketing efforts, ultimately enhancing your customer experience and driving conversions.
Other benefits of using automation tools are:
- Instant communication
- Improved communication efficiency
- Higher open rates
- Better response rates
What Are the Features To Look for in a Text Message Automation Tool?
Selecting the right automation tool is as crucial as planning a marketing campaign. These must-have automation features ensure you have everything you need to get the ball rolling with effective SMS marketing.
Personalization Capabilities
The best message reaches the right audience at the right time, and personalization can help you achieve this goal. However, personalization is much more than just adding the customer’s name to the SMS.
Personalized messages are tailored to customer needs based on past behavior. For instance, if your customer has bought a pair of shoes in the past, you can send messages with targeted product recommendations that go well with those shoes. When your customers find your messages helpful, it improves their experience, making them loyal to your brand.
To help you achieve this level of personalization, we’ve built all our products with Loomi AI at their core. Loomi AI is our AI built for ecommerce and trained on over 14 years of data from how customers shop and search. It analyzes visitors’ browsing history and purchases to provide personalized product recommendations.
Bloomreach helps you capture and unify your zero-party and first-party data, and then seamlessly integrate this information into your SMS strategy. This allows you to create highly effective and personalized messaging.
Segmentation and Targeting
When you send personalized messages, you’ll want to first segment your audience based on demographics, purchase or browsing history, or product preferences.
By understanding your customers, you can send SMS messages that address the specific needs and interests of each segment, making your customers feel valued and making your message as revenue-driven as possible.
Bloomreach enhances this process with sophisticated segmentation and gives you a single customer view — a central and individualized view of your customers. This allows you to create deeper, more detailed segments, as you have access to a comprehensive view of all your customer data, not just pieces. As a result, you can send fewer but highly targeted text messages that are more likely to convert.
Online beauty retailer Notino leveraged this comprehensive customer data to cleverly retarget customers at risk of churning, offering them special discounts across various channels. Even though SMS was a new channel for the brand, its use of personalization and customer data resulted in 60% of the orders from the campaign coming through SMS.
Automation Workflows
All marketers know the importance of automated workflows in email marketing campaigns. However, many make the mistake of not utilizing these automated messages in SMS marketing campaigns as well.
Imagine this: You’re winding down your day and decide to check your email, only to discover you’ve missed a great deal on that headset you’ve been eyeing — it’s already expired. What if you had been notified sooner? With SMS notifications, you’re more likely to catch these offers right away, as most people check their phones frequently.
Similar to email automation, the right SMS marketing platform allows you to set up various automated workflows, such as welcome messages, abandoned cart reminders, and promotional offers.
Bloomreach utilizes the power of AI to learn from this data and grow with every new interaction. This allows your SMS strategy to be a step ahead and anticipate your customers’ needs, sending a message exactly when the customer is ready to engage with your brand.
Integrating With Other Marketing Solutions
One of the challenges that prevents marketers from using SMS messaging is adding a separate SMS marketing channel to their complicated tech stack. Their concern is valid, as multi-channel use could lead to a disjointed customer experience if it doesn’t sync with other campaigns.
At Bloomreach, we solve this challenge by giving you an all-in-one omnichannel marketing solution. Our SMS automation platform seamlessly integrates with your CRM systems and other touchpoints, ensuring your text messages align perfectly with your broader campaign efforts. With over 130 built-in integrations, our platform connects effortlessly with a variety of third-party services, maintaining a cohesive customer experience.
Analytics and Reporting
After all the hard work you put into your SMS messaging strategy, it won’t matter much to your organization if you can’t show the impact it drove. To understand how well a campaign is performing, you need robust analytics and reporting that goes beyond the must-have metrics like open rates and link tracking. You need an in-depth view of your SMS marketing campaigns to truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy.
Bloomreach offers a comprehensive picture of data collected from your campaigns, giving you insights like optimal send times and whether SMS is the right mode of communication for a particular audience segment. This allows you to optimize your strategy to drive conversions, improve engagement rates, and increase revenue.
How To Implement SMS Automation Tools
Once you’ve selected your SMS marketing automation software, the next step involves building a strategy that maximizes the potential of these tools.
Set Clear Objectives
To get the most out of your SMS marketing campaigns, it’s best to start with your goals. Identify what you hope to achieve with text messaging.
For example, if cart abandonment is a major issue for your business, that’s an excellent place to start. You can set up customizable text messages that are automatically sent when customers leave items in their cart.
SMS can also be a great add-on to your overall marketing strategy. So, it’s best to align your campaign with the overall business goal.
Ensure There Are Compliance and Opt-in Procedures
The opt-in mechanism is how you get consent from your customers to send text messages from your brand. Opt-in could be through a web form popup on your website, an option in your checkout process, a link included in an email, or by texting a specific keyword to your SMS shortcode.
Opt-in texts to receive consent aren’t just good to have. Businesses are legally required to get consent from a customer before sending them marketing communications. You should also make it easy for them to unsubscribe from your campaigns.
For instance, if you’re planning to use SMS marketing services in the United States, you need to follow all the requirements of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which regulates telemarketing calls, auto-dialed calls, pre-recorded calls, text messages, and unsolicited faxes.
However, legal requirements don’t mean you need to be monotonous with your messaging. There are creative ways to get consent, like requesting a phone number in exchange for a promotional deal.
Having an opt-in SMS message campaign can simplify this process for you. As a rule of thumb, an SMS opt-in should be the first text message you send to any customer.
Craft Effective SMS Messages
Have you ever received a message that didn’t serve a purpose? We all have at some point in time.
You don’t want this experience for your customers. The first and foremost thing to keep in mind while writing a text message is to ensure it’s personalized for your audience. Don’t just send out bulk text messages to everyone!
Some other considerations include:
- Keeping the text concise with a character count between 80 and 160
- Hooking the reader’s attention with the first few words as they act as a “subject line” of sorts
- Making the text readable with line breaks
- Making texts visually appealing with GIFs, images, or video (though these may be better suited for other channels like WhatsApp)
- Being empathetic and respecting your customer’s emotions
- Ensuring the text serves a purpose, be it a promotion or any other incentive
With Bloomreach’s visual builder, you can easily create, test, or preview your SMS or MMS messages. You can also utilize the journey builder to seamlessly incorporate SMS into your cross-channel strategy, be it one-off campaigns or complex omnichannel experiences.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can build on what has worked in the past? Bloomreach also includes an SMS template library with prebuilt messages based on high-converting campaigns.
Test and Optimize
Testing and optimizing your campaigns is the key to success. A/B testing is one of the most traditional approaches to test the effectiveness of your message, and the platform you select should be able to support this function.
But with today’s audience expectations, traditional A/B testing isn’t always enough. Every customer is different, and your campaigns need to consider individual preferences instead of just serving the winning variant to every member of your audience.
Bloomreach Engagement’s contextual personalization fixes this by using AI to understand each person’s context (their past purchases, preferences, and much more). This way, you can show the best option for the person instead of what’s best for the majority.
How Bloomreach Can Help With Automated Text Messages and Services
Ready to see how Bloomreach’s SMS marketing services can help your ecommerce business? Here are some of the many benefits our clients have experienced:
AI-Driven Customizations
Today’s consumers need more valuable content than ever. Achieving this level of personalization can be overwhelming for any team. AI is the solution.
Loomi AI’s optimal send time prediction determines the time of the day a customer is most likely to engage with your SMS campaign.
Let’s say you have a customer who’s most active around 7 p.m. Loomi AI knows, based on their previous interactions, to send them your SMS campaign around 7 p.m., increasing customer engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates.
boohooMAN integrated AI-driven customization with Bloomreach Engagement and saw remarkable results. While the brand was previously sending more generic one-off campaigns via SMS, it used a single customer view in Bloomreach to create more personalized SMS campaigns that connected with its omnichannel strategy. As a result, boohooMAN achieved a 5x overall ROI from SMS campaigns and an impressive 25x ROI from a birthday flow targeted at customers not opted into email.
Comprehensive Customer Insights
Like any successful marketing campaign, text message marketing requires a flexible approach that adapts quickly. Bloomreach’s evaluation dashboard allows you to check all metrics with just one click, for a comprehensive view of customer engagement, failed sends, revenue, and much more.
No matter the type of data — whether it be from your website, back-end systems, offline sources, or forecasted trends — you get a comprehensive view of each customer’s relationship with your brand.
Overall, the process of tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your messaging has never been simpler. Every decision you make is supported by real-time data, ensuring your SMS campaigns are successful.
User-Friendly Interface
An effective automated SMS platform should be as intuitive as it is powerful. At Bloomreach, we’ve designed our SMS platform to echo the simplicity and user-friendliness of our email campaign builder. This ensures that anyone in your team can easily set up and manage automated SMS campaigns without the need for technical expertise.
Our intuitive interface eliminates the usual complexities, allowing you to swiftly design messages, schedule them, and track their performance. Everything you need to execute a successful SMS campaign is just a few clicks away. This user-friendly approach ensures you can focus more on strategy and less on the technical details.
Improve Your Omnichannel Ecommerce Communication With Bloomreach
Choosing the right SMS marketing automation tools is crucial for enhancing customer engagement and streamlining your marketing efforts.
Bloomreach stands out by offering sophisticated segmentation capabilities and a powerful customer data engine, ensuring your messages are highly targeted and effective. By integrating comprehensive customer insights into one place, Bloomreach enables you to personalize communications and boost conversion rates, all while simplifying your marketing processes. Ready to see how Bloomreach can transform your SMS marketing strategy? Request a demo today and experience the difference.
