Why SMS Text Message Marketing Should be the First Choice for Ecommerce Companies

2 hours and 46 minutes per day! That’s the time an average American spends every day on his mobile devices. And the rest of the world isn’t be far behind. What this reveals is anybody’s guess – we are increasingly becoming inseparable from those marvelous rectangular boxes that we hold in our pockets. Yet companies are not fully barging in to tap the enormous opportunity which this inseparability creates. I say fully, because the focus today is more on mobile marketing i.e. developing mobile-responsive website and landing pages. This is not to say that the focus needs to shift, but to underscore that there’s another subtle opportunity which is getting overlooked. The opportunity that I am talking about lies in — SMS text message marketing.

SMS text message marketing can be a cost-effective and proven method for getting potential customers. In a burgeoning ecommerce world, it has piped emails to become the most sought after medium to reach out to customers. Here’s what the stats say: when it comes to open rate, SMS is the downright winner — a staggering open rate of 98% which is five times more than the rate of email marketing. And there’s an icing on the cake too; on an average SMS marketing messages are viewed within the first 90 seconds, whereas for emails the wait might be as long as 90 minutes.

All this unmistakably point to the fact that SMS has emerged as an ideal channel for sending time sensitive marketing messages. So doesn’t it make perfect business sense to engage potential customers on the device they’re already connected to throughout the day?

The Dunkin’ Donuts Example

This is a sweet example of a sweet company that made full use of SMS marketing to run a highly successful customer engagement campaign-

Dunkin’ Donuts aim was to tempt teenagers in Boston to try their 99 degree hot latte. The company distributed thousands of SMS coupons to targeted customers over the mobile phone and coupled this with other popular forms of mobile marketing to drive in-store redemption of mobile coupon.

The move became an instant hit, as it helped the company achieve 21% increase in store traffic. It did wonders to the brand too, as nearly one in every four participants forwarded or showed the marketing message to the friends.

What Ecommerce Companies Need to Do

At a time when exceptional customer experience matters more than anything else, ecommerce companies need to offer kink free purchases to win a bigger slice of the pie. So every ecommerce company should use SMSs as the first choice to build the smooth purchasing journey which customers long to have. Prompt SMSs about delivery updates, product onboarding, follow up enquiries, offers, promotions, flash sales and customer service means instant views, which translates into instant customer gratification. With this achieved, companies just have to sit back and see their sales graph go up steadily.