Why Ecommerce SMS Marketing Belongs in Your Growth Strategy

If you’re running an ecommerce business, the chances are you’re already taking advantage of various digital channels to engage, nurture, and convert users, from email to social media. But if you’re not investing in ecommerce SMS marketing too, you’re missing out.

Leveraging an SMS service for ecommerce marketing is the best way to connect with your customers wherever they are, drive immediate action, promote sales, and build brand loyalty. In fact, 66% of customers say they prefer to use text to communicate with companies.

SMS gives you an easy, cost-effective, and engaging way to bypass the noise and competition on other marketing channels, and forge deeper relationships with customers.

Here’s your complete guide to SMS marketing for ecommerce brands.

What is SMS Marketing for Ecommerce?

As we outline in our SMS marketing guide, SMS marketing is the practice of sending prospects and existing customers text messages featuring promotions, coupons, appointment reminders, announcements, and more. It involves using the SMS communication protocol, as well as specialist tools, like a bulk SMS platform to reach customers instantly wherever they are.

In a lot of ways, SMS marketing is similar to email marketing, as it involves collecting “permission” from customers to contact them, and creating multi-stage marketing campaigns. You can even use cutting-edge platforms to automate your SMS campaigns – just like you would with email.

However, SMS doesn’t rely on your customer to have an internet connection, and can be particularly valuable for ecommerce brands.

Types of SMS Marketing Messages for Ecommerce

When most people think of ecommerce SMS marketing, they automatically focus on promotional texts – such as the custom text messages you might send to buyers about new products, sales, offers, discounts, or items that come back in stock.

However, there are actually various types of messages that can contribute to your ecommerce texting strategy, such as:

1. Promotional Texts

Promotional SMS messages are the most common types of texts used in ecommerce marketing campaigns. These are all the messages you send with the specific intention of building brand awareness, promoting products, or increasing sales.

Promotional messages can be one-off texts – such as messages about a new product release, or multi-level campaigns that nurture and engage customers over time. With SMS marketing platforms, you can also send promotional texts based on specific triggers. For instance, you might automatically send abandoned cart text messages to customers who leave your website without finishing a transaction.

Aside from promoting products and sales, promotional texts can also be used to share company announcements, drive attention to events, or even offer advice on how to use products.

2. Transactional Messages

Unlike promotional texts, transactional SMS messages are designed to “inform,” rather than convert customers. Examples include order confirmation texts, shipping updates or delay notifications, delivery confirmations, or even messages sharing one-time passwords with buyers.

Transactional messages are more focused on enhancing the customer experience, by keeping buyers up to date after they make a purchase. One thing to keep in mind is that you still need to obtain consent to send transactional SMS messages to customers. However, if a customer gives you permission to send transactional texts, you can’t automatically send promotional texts too.

Alternatively, if a customer gives you explicit consent to send promotional SMS content, you should be able to send transactional texts without another “opt-in.”

3. Conversational SMS Marketing

Most promotional and transactional ecommerce SMS marketing strategies are pretty one-way – involving sending texts automatically or in bulk to a range of customers. Conversational SMS is a more two-way strategy. It can involve having human beings respond to customer questions about products and services, and guiding them towards the right purchase.

Alternatively, in the world of AI-powered SMS and conversational bots, conversational SMS can also involve allowing customers to interact with intelligent virtual assistants.

Companies investing in conversational commerce can create customized bots that can guide customers through purchasing processes and answer queries 24/7. Intelligent tools can even personalize experiences based on previous customer interactions or behaviors.

The Benefits of SMS for Ecommerce

So, why should you use SMS marketing for ecommerce campaigns? The easy answer is that SMS advertising works wonders for online retail brands. First, it’s one of the best ways to ensure you can reach your customers anywhere in the world, regardless of whether they’re online or not.

Beyond that, Ecommerce SMS marketing:

1. Is Cost Effective

Compared to other marketing strategies, SMS advertising can be extremely cost-effective. With the right platform and messaging strategy, you’ll spend very little – even when you’re sending messages to hundreds of thousands of customers.

2. Supports the Mobile Commerce Revolution

Mobile commerce (Mcommerce) is one of the biggest trends in the ecommerce landscape. People aren’t just shopping online more often – they’re consistently shopping through their smartphones. Around half of all mobile users spend five to six hours a day on their phones, shopping for products and connecting with brands.

SMS marketing gives you an easy way to reach customers where they are, and help guide them through their purchasing journey. You can even use links in SMS messages to guide customers towards specific products and enable transactions with a text-to-pay feature.

3. Earns High Open Rates and Engagement

It’s easy to ignore emails clogging up your inbox, or messages shared on social media channels by brands, but few people ignore an SMS message.

Customers also actively engage with SMS messages. Countless consumers respond to text messages, click on CTA links, and complete transactions. G2 found that 33% of customers click on CTAs in text messages, and 47% end up buying something after receiving a text.

4. Ensures Direct, Fast-Paced Communication

Unlike emails, which can sit in a customer’s inbox for days before grabbing attention, an ecommerce SMS marketing strategy helps you reach your customers instantly. As mentioned above, most customers will read messages that arrive on their phone immediately, and they don’t have to wait until the next time they’re “online” to see your message.

This means if you want to drive immediate action by promoting a flash sale, or an exclusive offer, SMS is the best way to drive results. It’s also fantastic for keeping customers informed about issues, like delivery delays or payment issues.

5. Drives Personal Connections

B2C and B2B text messaging strategies are becoming increasingly common, but SMS is still primarily the way people communicate with their friends and loved ones. By reaching out to your customers on a more intimate channel, you can forge deeper connections over time.

What’s more, an intelligent approach to SMS for ecommerce (using personalization and segmentation techniques), can help strengthen those connections and improve brand loyalty. Sending personalized messages, timely updates, and exclusive offers to customers is a great way to keep subscribers engaged, and encourage them to constantly return to your business.

6. Allows for Greater Ownership over Leads

With a lot of marketing strategies, it’s easy to lose access to your leads and prospects. Changes to social media algorithms, or the rules used by RCS and OTT messaging platforms can leave you unable to connect with customers.

With SMS, once you have your customer’s contact details, and their permission to contact them, the only thing that stops you from reaching out is their decision to “Opt-out” of a campaign.

7. Provides Valuable Insights

Similar to email marketing solutions, SMS tools for ecommerce texting can give you valuable insights you can use to guide future marketing and customer nurturing strategies. Monitoring click-through rates, SMS opt-out rates, engagement levels, and more can help you improve your ROI.

Over time, you’ll learn which messages connect best with your target audience, when you should be scheduling your messages, and more.

SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing for Ecommerce

So, SMS marketing vs email marketing – which is better for ecommerce brands? Both options are pretty similar. With both email and SMS marketing, your goal will be to educate, sell products, nurture customers, and build loyalty. Both channels give you “ownership” over your leads, by ensuring you have direct access to their contact details.

Plus, with the right technology, you can set up SMS marketing automation strategies for ecommerce, similar to how you can create automated email campaigns.

The biggest difference is that ecommerce SMS marketing doesn’t rely on your customers having an internet connection, and allows you to reach your customers faster.

Email marketing can be more versatile, allowing you to share rich content (text, images, links, and videos) with your customers. It’s a great option when you want to create comprehensive newsletters, or long-form marketing content. Email is also fantastic for nurturing leads over time, with “drip campaigns” that guide customers through the buying process.

Email also allows for more branding and design elements to be implemented into messages, which can help reinforce your brand identity. However, SMS is better for reaching customers directly.

It’s perfect when you want to share short, impactful messages with customers that drive immediate action. If you don’t need to send “rich content” to your audience, and want to connect with customers on a personal, interactive level, SMS is unbeatable.

Plus, SMS can encourage two-way conversations – as customers can easily reply to your messages, using AI tools for customer support, or requesting assistance with a transaction.

Realistically, you don’t need to choose between SMS or email for ecommerce marketing – both options complement each other, giving you a more versatile way to connect with and engage your audience in different ways.

How to get started with Ecommerce SMS Marketing

So, how do you start using SMS for ecommerce marketing? The good news is that the process is pretty straightforward – particularly with the right technology. Here’s your step-by-step guide to diving into the world of ecommerce texting.

1. Establish Clear Goals in Advance

Start by deciding what you want to accomplish with your ecommerce SMS marketing strategy. Are you focusing on boosting customer engagement and retention, with helpful transactional text messages, automated text responses to common questions, and exclusive promotions?

Do you want to promote more special events and sales, increase traffic to your ecommerce website, or reduce cart abandonment rates? Deciding what you want to accomplish in advance will help you identify the marketing strategies and tools you need to implement.

Plus, it will ensure you know what kind of metrics and results you need to monitor to ensure your ecommerce SMS marketing strategies are paying off.

2. Familiarize Yourself with Compliance Standards

Before you dive into SMS marketing for ecommerce, there are a few compliance guidelines you need to be aware of. One of the first things you’ll need to do is create a TCPA compliance checklist – this will include crucial tasks like obtaining explicit consent from customers before texting them.

If you’re using specific numbers for mass texting, like 10DLC numbers, it’s also worth familiarizing yourself with the process involved for 10DLC registration.

Other points to consider include marketing compliance regulations (like the CANSPAM Act), and specific standards relevant to your industry, such as HIPAA or FINRA regulations. Learn as much as you can about compliance rules before you start sending out any texts.

3. Choose your Ecommerce SMS Marketing Platform

If you’re going to be using SMS for ecommerce marketing purposes, you’re going to need a dedicated platform that allows you to send mass texts, create custom messaging templates, track subscriber opt-in and opt-out rates, and access analytics.

There are plenty of innovative solutions out there, all with their own unique features to offer. One of the first things worth looking at when choosing the right platform is integrations. Look for ecommerce platform integrations (such as a Shopify SMS integration), so you can create automated campaigns that respond to triggers like purchases or abandoned carts.

It’s also worth making sure you can integrate SMS with your CRM platform, so you can manage contact details and segment your customers effectively.

Other key things to think about include:

• Essential features, such as automation workflows, segmentation tools and analytics.
• Compliance and security solutions, such as multi-factor authentication and encryption.
• Transparent pricing structures so you can adhere to your marketing budget.
• Access to innovative tools such as conversational AI technology.
• Scalability to ensure you can accommodate a growing number of subscribers.

4. Build and Segment your Subscriber Base

As mentioned above, you need to gain explicit consent from customers before you can communicate with them via text. This means finding ways to encourage potential leads and prospects to share their contact details with you. You could use pop-up forms and landing pages on your ecommerce website that promise customers something valuable in exchange for them “opting-in” – such as a discount.

You could also generate leads via SMS, by asking would-be subscribers to text specific keywords to your business number to join your list. Make sure you highlight the benefits of being part of this list – such as exclusive early access to sales, or unique promotions.

Once you collect your customer’s contact details, segment them based on purchasing history data, behavior, location, demographics, or anything that might be useful for personalizing your future campaigns. Make sure you keep track of customers that opt-out over time, too.

5. Plan, Execute, and Optimize Your Campaigns

Finally, all that’s left to do is to build, execute, and enhance your ecommerce SMS marketing campaigns. Plan each campaign carefully, thinking about the kind of customers you want to reach with each message, timing strategies, and what kind of language you’re going to use.

Your SMS marketing platform should include tools that can help you to create ecommerce SMS templates for different strategies – like transactional, promotional, and conversational SMS campaigns. As you send out your texts, track their results.

Pay attention to engagement rates, click-through rates, conversions, and even opt-out rates. Consider using A/B testing strategies to find out if specific CTA links, messaging strategies, or even scheduling methods drive better results for your business.

Impressive Ecommerce Texting Strategies with Examples

Not sure where to get started with ecommerce SMS marketing? Here are some of the top strategies you can consider using, with examples.

1. SMS Welcome Campaigns

Welcome campaigns are an excellent way to set the tone for a wonderful relationship with your customer. You can use them to introduce customers to your brand, your top products, and even share exclusive discounts or rewards (in exchange for your buyer opting-in to a campaign).

Sharing a discount or deal in a welcome message is a fantastic way to encourage customers to start buying from you straight away. Plus, it can give you insights into the kinds of products your customers are interested in – helping you to personalize future marketing strategies.

2. Transactional Text Strategies

Transactional texts might not directly encourage customers to purchase products from your ecommerce company – but they drive amazing results. They’re a fantastic way to keep customers informed, and earn their trust.

Whenever a customer buys a product from your ecommerce store, send them an immediate thank you text, an order confirmation message, and details about their upcoming delivery. You could even share a tracking code, so your customer can monitor their product in transit.

3. Promote Limited Time and Flash Sales

As mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits of using SMS marketing for ecommerce is that it helps you to communicate instantly with customers. That makes it great for promoting limited time deals and sales.

Plan upcoming offers in advance, and schedule text messages to reach your customers just when a deal or offer begins. The result should be quick traffic and rapid sales – particularly if you get your timing strategy just right. You could even make your SMS subscribers feel extra special, by giving them exclusive access to a sale before anyone else.

4. Promote New Products or Back-in-Stock Items

Want to make sure your customers are all aware of the latest products you’ve added to your ecommerce store’s collection? Send them a quick text message. You can highlight the new product, include a link-based call to action, and even promote conversions with a limited time discount.

You can also use ecommerce SMS marketing to let customers know when popular items are re-stocked. This gives you a fantastic opportunity to recoup lost conversions that might occur when customers visit your website and see that an item they want isn’t available.

5. Use SMS to Increase Customer Loyalty

SMS messages can be an excellent way to both encourage customers to join your loyalty programs, and keep them engaged once they’re signed up. You can use data about your customers to find your best leads, then send messages to them asking them to join a loyalty program.

From there, once they’re signed up, share regular messages about how they can earn points, use their rewards, or take advantage of member-only benefits. You could even send requests for feedback to your most loyal customers, gaining behind-the-scenes insights into their preferences and pain points.

6. Abandoned Cart Recovery Campaigns

Sometimes, customers on your ecommerce website forget to actually complete a purchase. They might get distracted by something else they see online, or second-guess their purchasing decision. With an SMS marketing platform integrated with your ecommerce solution, you can identify customers that “abandon” their carts, and send them SMS messages instantly.

Since SMS subscribers see messages immediately, they’re far more likely to revisit your website after they get a text – particularly if you include an incentive, like a flash offer or discount code.

7. Nurture Customers with Updates and Content

When you’re investing in SMS for ecommerce, it’s worth remembering that not all of your texts have to be directly promotional. You can also send messages designed to nurture and inform your target audience. For instance, once you know how to send out mass texts to customers, you can keep all of your subscribers up to date about upcoming products or business changes.

You could even share snippets from and links to your latest blog posts, or invite customers to take part in an upcoming online event.

Ecommerce SMS Marketing Best Practices

At this point, you’re almost ready to start using SMS for ecommerce growth. However, before you dive in, there are a few final “best practices” worth keeping in mind.

• Make it easy to opt-in: Ensure your customers have an easy way to opt-in to your marketing campaigns. Take advantage of pop-ups, forms, and landing pages on your ecommerce website. Consider creating an “opt-in” keyword that customers can text to your business too.
• Ensure customers can opt-out: Make sure all of your SMS templates include easy instructions on how customers can opt-out of receiving messages from you. This is crucial for adhering to SMS marketing compliance standards.
• Deliver genuine value: Customers should look forward to receiving messages from your brand. Deliver genuine value with exclusive promotions, discounts, tips on upcoming sales, and unique content to make your customers feel special.
• Keep it simple: SMS messages have a 160-character limit, so it’s important to keep them short, compelling, and straight to the point. Make sure they include a clear call to action, and avoid overwhelming customers with too much information.
• Create a consistent schedule: Develop a timely schedule for sending messages to your ecommerce audience. It can help to segment customers by location and age, so you can better determine when they’re likely to be available and checking their phone.
• Take advantage of automation: Use your ecommerce SMS marketing platform to automate certain messaging strategies. For instance, you might use automation to send SMS appointment reminders to customers, or order notification details.
• Personalize every message: Always segment your audience based on demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data. Tailor each message to the person that’s going to receive it, and use dynamic fields to include specific details, like your customer’s name.
• Experiment with AI: Take advantage of conversational AI for retail communications. AI tools can rapidly answer customer questions, enable transactions, deliver personalized product recommendations, and offer 24/7 customer service.

Unlock the Benefits of Ecommerce SMS Marketing

In a fast-paced and competitive space like the ecommerce landscape, SMS marketing is a valuable tool. It gives you a quick, convenient, and personal way to constantly connect with your audience, nurture leads, and increase conversions – without relying on digital channels.

With ecommerce SMS marketing, you can improve your relationships with customers, learn more about your audience and their preferences, and increase your company’s revenue. All you really need to get started is the right platform and strategy.

Clerk Chat, the world leading platform for business messaging, gives ecommerce companies everything they need to excel at message based marketing. With tools for mass SMS, two-way texting, automated campaigns, and even conversational commerce, Clerk Chat can help you take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Plus, with integrations for the top ecommerce platforms, and state-of-the-art AI, reporting, and analytical tools, Clerk Chat makes it simple to optimize and scale your strategy over time.

Embrace the era of SMS ecommerce marketing with Clerk Chat today.