See how two e-commerce marketers increased holiday sales with text messaging, and learn tactics you can use in your own BFCM campaigns.
Does SMS marketing for the holiday season really work? The proof is in the figgy pudding, my friends.
I spoke with some online retailers about their plans to drive more sales with SMS and decided to follow up and find out how their e-commerce text message campaigns in previous years.
I reached out to Ryan Turner, founder of Ecommerce Intelligence, and Jeff Moriarty, marketing manager at Moriarty’s Gem Art to hear how their campaigns fared and what insights they uncovered to help other online stores succeed during the holidays.
Check out the Q&A from my interviews with these two experts and get some ideas for enhancing your own holiday SMS marketing.
Overall, SMS was a great channel for our brands during the holiday season.
This year, we were working with much bigger SMS lists than in previous years, as we’d put more effort into growing them. So, that definitely paid off.
We encouraged people to sign up for texts in the weeks leading up to BFCM, so they’d get notifications as soon as deals were live. That was a big driver of list growth.
In terms of our overall strategy, we always focus on pushing early access to deals via both email marketing and SMS, as that’s always highly effective. This year was no different, and the VIP segments were a huge success.
Outside of that, we essentially mirrored our email marketing strategy on the SMS channel over the BFCM week, but didn’t send quite as many texts as we did emails.
One thing I would change next time is focusing more on text-only SMS campaigns, rather than using MMS campaigns with images and GIFs.
Carriers can struggle with deliverability for media messages during the busiest sending times, but that doesn’t happen as much if you’re using all text.
Some clients were adamant about including graphics, but I think next time we’ll try and encourage them not to.
Just include a short and to-the-point message with a clear CTA, really. If you’re pushing a strong offer, people don’t need any more information.
The strength of the offer is enough, so don’t distract people with other messaging — just focus on getting the click. This can be done very successfully without using any images at all.
We have an opt-in to our list on the checkout page, in a post-purchase email, and in a pop-up on our website. We also push people to sign up during our live online shows.
We plan on sending marketing messages to that list for monthly sales and our live shows — one to two messages per month. Then, when the holidays hit again, we will increase it to one to two messages per week.
It’s one thing to read about text message marketing concepts, and it’s another to see real-world e-commerce campaigns and their results. Get your fix of year-round SMS inspiration with our collection of success stories.
Looking for more holiday SMS tips and strategies? Check out these guides:
When’s the best time to start planning your next Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) marketing strategy? Honestly… as soon as this season is over. The holiday shopping season is a great time to start building a list of customers and contacts who opt in to hear from you via text messages. Start using SimpleTexting today and discover all the tools you available to help you engage with the people you want to reach.
Dani Henion is the content team lead at SimpleTexting and is continuously looking for ways to make text messaging strategies and tips more accessible to SMBs. When she's not writing or planning new SMS content, you'll find her decorating elaborate sugar cookies or thrifting in Atlanta.
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