By now, you’re already rolling out the S.P.A.M. Strategy for your email program (of course!), so take the time to level it up to your SMS program.
Segmentation
Finding the right SMS person can be duplicative or additive to your email program. Using our brown shoe use case again, identifying brown shoe buyers is pretty standard, but you’ll want to segment out further by 1) email + SMS subscribers, 2) email only, and 3) SMS only.
The SMS-only segment is incremental to your email program and vice versa. The email and SMS segment is going to be quite valuable. If a customer wants to hear from you on BOTH channels, that’s a potentially loyal customer!
Finding the right person for your message is as critical for SMS as it is for email. Zero in on the right population for your messages.
SMS allows for these types of conversations to occur, whereas email is a more direct response and promotional. Take advantage of the conversation to get the actionable data you need to segment better.
Personalization
SMS personalization comes down to a really great context and how you get that across in 140 characters. Above 140 characters and you’re faced with a two-text message (which could be annoying to some subscribers) and additional costs.
The key part is to be conversational while slightly promotional and invitational. A great one featured above is the CB2 text on the right that was sent on Thanksgiving Day, asking if you “need a chance to escape the in-laws” and directing subscribers back to their holiday sale. This is a great example of being conversational and promotional.
Automation
We’ve already discussed that the core transactional and marketing triggers should be turned on, regardless of the strategy, so I want to primarily show you where SMS automation becomes a great contributor to your bottom line.
Let’s take a cart abandon automation. Of course, you can have an SMS cart abandon text for people who are signed up.
SMS needs to be able to fill in the gaps in your cart abandonment that may be overlooked. Above is a simplified example of a multi-channel cart abandon that some of the top brands run.
In the case of customer service calls, that’s a business decision. Some retailers can actually offer a better discount by phone to close the deal than by email (MAP violations and all). Other brands have a really close connection to their customers and are comfortable calling them up; this is especially applicable with high item values where customers may need some hand-holding to complete the order.
Multiplication
When it comes to SMS, as well as push notifications, in-app notifications, retargeting, and browser push, the multiplication pillar needs to be interpreted as multi-channel. Considering you’ve turned on the core SMS triggers, focus this step on making SMS additive to all your automation.
Just like email, segmentation, personalization, and automation all apply to these SMS strategies. But because of the conversational tone of these texts, you may need a point person or agency to manage the inbound correspondence.