Your e-commerce brand needs to stay ahead of the curve and continuously adapt while refining your marketing strategy. 

SMS marketing in 2024 is hyper-competitive, so creating effective campaigns that outpace your competition requires more than just sending out occasional texts. While SMS performance can significantly impact your brand's bottom line, clinging to outdated strategies may be costing you money if you don’t know how to properly analyze your results for long-term growth. 

Luckily, our expert marketers at Emotive put together a comprehensive guide of the best SMS marketing tips for 2024, designed to help small businesses, marketing professionals, and e-commerce entrepreneurs maximize their campaign effectiveness.

Growing Your Opt-In List

The foundation of a successful SMS marketing campaign lies in a robust and growing opt-in list. Without a substantial and engaged audience, even the most well-crafted messages can fall flat. Here are some strategies to grow your opt-in list:

  1. Offer Incentives: Encourage customers to subscribe by offering exclusive discounts, early access to sales, or special promotions.

  2. Promote Across Channels: Utilize all your digital touchpoints—website, social media, email newsletters—to promote your SMS subscription and highlight its benefits.

  3. Simplify the Process: Make it easy for users to subscribe by using clear calls-to-action (CTAs) and simple opt-in procedures. A short and memorable keyword, followed by a number to text, can work wonders.

Increasing LTV with Multi-Touch Campaigns

Lifetime Value (LTV) is a crucial marketing metric that measures the total revenue a customer generates during their relationship with your brand. Multi-touch campaigns can enhance LTV by engaging customers at multiple points in their journey:

  1. Welcome Series: Start with a warm welcome series to introduce new subscribers to your brand, products, and values.

  2. Follow-Up Messages: Send follow-up messages after purchases to thank customers, request feedback, and suggest complementary products.

  3. Re-Engagement Campaigns: Re-engage inactive subscribers with personalized offers or updates on new products and services.

Strategic Two-Way Messaging

Gone are the days of one-way communication. Today's customers expect brands to be responsive and engaging. Two-way messaging can foster stronger relationships and provide valuable insights:

  1. Customer Support: Use SMS as a channel for customer support, allowing customers to ask questions and receive prompt answers.

  2. Feedback and Surveys: Solicit feedback through SMS surveys, making it easy for customers to share their opinions and experiences.

  3. Personal Touches: Personalize interactions by addressing customers by name and tailoring responses to their specific inquiries or concerns.

Personalized Messaging for Each Segment of Your List

Segmentation allows you to send highly targeted messages that resonate with specific groups within your audience. Personalized messaging can significantly boost engagement and conversion rates:

  1. Demographic Segmentation: Divide your list based on demographics such as age, gender, location, and purchasing behavior.

  2. Behavioral Segmentation: Segment your audience based on their interaction with your brand, such as past purchases, website activity, or engagement with previous SMS campaigns.

  3. Dynamic Content: Use dynamic content to tailor messages to each segment, ensuring relevance and increasing the likelihood of a positive response.

Backtesting Your Campaigns

Backtesting, or A/B testing, is essential for optimizing your SMS campaigns. By comparing different versions of a message, you can identify what works best and refine your strategy accordingly:

  1. Test Variables: Experiment with different variables such as message content, timing, and CTAs to see which combinations yield the highest engagement.

  2. Analyze Results: Use marketing metrics to analyze the performance of each variant. Pay attention to open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

  3. Iterate and Improve: Continuously iterate on your campaigns based on the insights gained from backtesting, aiming for incremental improvements over time.

Using First-Party Data to Inform Decisions

First-party data—information collected directly from your customers through interactions with your brand—is invaluable for crafting effective SMS marketing strategies:

  1. Customer Preferences: Leverage data on customer preferences and behaviors to send relevant and timely messages.

  2. Purchase History: Use purchase history to recommend related products or offer special deals on frequently purchased items.

  3. Engagement Patterns: Analyze engagement patterns to determine the best times to send messages and the types of content that resonate most with your audience.

Emotive deploys a proprietary first-party pixel that allows your brand to get the best attribution on the market. In turn, this informs your brand’s SMS segmentation and decision-making for maximum ROAS.

Hiring the Best SMS Vendors

Following up on our endorsement of the first-party pixel, it’s only logical to talk about why a professional SMS vendor can be a no-brainer for your brand. The right SMS platform can provide the tools, support, and expertise needed to execute your strategy effectively:

  1. SMS Growth Marketing Tools: Look for vendors that offer a comprehensive feature set, including segmentation, automation, and analytics capabilities.

  2. Customer Support: Ensure the vendor provides robust customer support to assist with any issues or questions that may arise.

  3. Reputation and Reviews: Research the vendor's reputation and read reviews from other businesses to gauge their reliability and performance.

Emotive is the Top SMS Platform for E-Commerce

SMS remains a powerful channel for engaging customers and driving conversions - but you need the right approach to achieve maximum ROAS. Emotive can help you grow your opt-in list, increase LTV with multi-touch campaigns, and create strategic two-way messaging that will help you outpace your competitors.

Not only that, we do it using proprietary first-party data, meaning our campaigns will be properly attributed. This lets you see whether we’re walking the walk after having talked the talk in this article.

Here’s another hint: we do walk the walk.

We’re so confident we’ll even pay you $100 to demo.

Sign up today ↓