As the ecommerce industry has grown in size and complexity, so has the number of tools and SaaS solutions available to help merchants market and grow their businesses. Many of the options available to us these days often offer a suite of different features to increase their value to users, both because it’s convenient to manage fewer accounts and services, and also because it opens up the ability to do more complex things with less setup and frustration.
One of the best examples of the benefits of using one platform for multiple activities is combined email and SMS marketing automation software. In this blog, we’ll explain why ecommerce merchants should seek out an all-in-one SMS and email marketing software for their business, rather than running their communication efforts across two distinct platforms.
The Power of Email and SMS Marketing
Email Marketing Effectiveness
Technically, the concept of email is older than the internet itself: email creator Ray Tomlinson sent the first email on the ARPANET system in 1971, making it one of the most well-known, established, and accessible marketing channels available to online businesses.
Today, email has evolved into much more than a means to simply send a message to a friend on a different computer. With 99% of consumers checking their email every day and an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, leveraging email in your marketing efforts is a no-brainer for businesses looking for a cost-effective way to market to and grow their contact lists.
With hundreds of different ways to build, design, track, and automate emails, choosing the right tool for the job can be difficult when so much is at stake regarding potential revenue and customer engagement.
SMS Marketing Impact
As text messaging costs have decreased and people have begun to spend more time on their mobile phones, SMS marketing tools have recently gained popularity as a valuable secondary communication channel to email.
With an open rate of a whopping 98% and with 72% of people making purchases after receiving a text from a brand, SMS marketing campaigns are incredibly effective if done well, as long as marketers are respectful of having such “personal” access to their customers, as texting a phone number is generally regarded as having a very close, direct line to a person.
With 61% of SMS subscribers unsubscribing because they believe they are receiving too many messages, and 37% stating that they would unsubscribe if they received the same content/messaging by email as they do via text, the importance of getting text message marketing right cannot be overstated.
Challenges of Using Separate Email and SMS Platforms
While picking a platform that specializes in email and another that is great for sending SMS communications might seem like the best way to do either perfectly, there are a few issues with keeping these aspects of your marketing stack separate:
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Data Silos and Fragmentation: Separate platforms often result in inconsistent customer data, making it more challenging for companies to build and track customer journeys or provide customized experiences effectively.
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Increased Workload and Inefficiency: A lot of time and effort is required to manage multiple platforms. There are already so many tools and platforms that need to be integrated and maintained in the ecommerce world. If you can find areas where combining services makes sense, take the opportunity! You’ll also reduce the likelihood of potential errors or inconsistencies in messaging when everything is in one place.
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Lack of Personalization: Separate platforms limit your ability to create cohesive, personalized customer journeys. Personalized experiences rely on unified data to deliver relevant content quickly through all your channels.
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Higher Costs: More tools equate to more subscriptions. Typically, the combined price tag of using two separate tools is higher than if you use one SaaS that is built with multiple features or capabilities in mind.
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Compliance and Security Risks: Keeping your SMS and email platform separate means you’ll likely need to keep a copy of the same database(s) in each, increasing the risk of your customer data leaking if any one tool experiences a security breach/data leak. Similarly, ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, Law 25, and TCPA becomes more complex when customer data and communications are spread across different platforms.
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Reduced Agility: In the same vein as our point about a lack of personalization comes reduced agility regarding campaign deployment. Coordinating campaigns across separate systems can slow down the process, and responding quickly to market changes, customer feedback, or new opportunities is harder when your systems aren't as integrated.
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Limited Automation Capabilities: When email and SMS are handled separately, you can't create integrated workflows that trigger actions across both channels based on customer behaviour. Without real-time data sharing, there's also a lag in responding to customer actions, which can reduce engagement and conversion rates.
Along with these disadvantages comes the simple fact that ecommerce businesses trying to run their marketing efforts through multiple services and tools will be at a competitive disadvantage to their peers. Today's consumers expect seamless interactions with brands. Failure to provide a cohesive experience can decrease customer satisfaction and loyalty and lead people to buy from brands that “get” them better.
Benefits of Combining Your Email and SMS Marketing Platforms
Merging email and SMS platforms is one of the best decisions you can make as an ecommerce business looking to streamline your marketing efforts and unlock a ton of exciting opportunities. Here’s how a combined SMS and email tool can benefit you:
Unified Customer Data
A combined SMS and email marketing solution offers a full 360-degree view of your customer interactions. A complete picture of customer behaviour across channels can provide you with enhanced segmentation and targeting opportunities.
For example, consider whether a contact has interacted with a CTA in an email when deciding whether or not to include them in an SMS campaign. Take things even further by segmenting your SMS campaigns into buckets of people who did and didn’t complete specific actions in email, such as opening or clicking through them.
If a customer always clicks the links in your text messages but often ignores your emails, consider excluding them from your email campaigns to increase your open rates while avoiding sending contacts messages they aren’t interested in, which can often lead to unsubscribes.
Better Marketing Automation
Having all your customer data and actions saved on one platform means you can include more variables in your automations to unlock all kinds of different triggers for your email/SMS campaigns and flows.
Let’s say a customer clicked through one of your company’s texts but didn’t complete a purchase. Set up an email automation flow that triggers the following day to remind them of the item/campaign or offer them a discount.
Conversely, you can also create hybrid flows that leverage both email and SMS. For example, you can set up an automation that triggers a follow-up SMS after an email is sent, which can help drive conversions by reminding contacts of the email's content, whether it's a promotion, a back-in-stock notification, or more.
Enhanced Analytics and Performance Tracking
Analytics from a single platform offer a holistic view of your marketing performance. You can identify trends, measure campaign effectiveness, and make data-driven decisions to enhance future marketing efforts without needing to pull data into a separate tool or spreadsheet for analysis.
The value of having all your customer information and behaviour data in one place cannot be understated. From building more sophisticated automations to making it easier for customer support to review customer actions quickly, there is much to gain and nothing to lose from having a single, unified dashboard that contains all your customer data.
Consistent Brand Messaging
When you have multiple platforms, each with its own templates and asset banks, it becomes difficult to ensure you use the same voice and provide a consistent experience across all your communications with customers.
For example, if you’re running a hybrid campaign where you first announce a sale via email with a text message follow-up, and your SMS reinforces the email's messaging with the same tone and a personalized discount, it strengthens the overall impact. The customer experiences a seamless journey that feels cohesive and considerate of their preferences, ultimately providing a cohesive experience that can improve customer trust and loyalty.
Cost/Operational Efficiency
While we already mentioned the higher costs associated with holding separate SaaS subscriptions, there are other financial benefits to consolidating your SMS and email marketing software.
One aspect of some SaaS marketing tools that can increase costs is that many have caps for the number of contacts the platforms will store for you, based on the plan your company has selected.
If you plan on growing your business, you’ll want to get the most out of your budget, which means that keeping two separate, large lists on two different platforms of what is essentially the same people can add up without you even realizing it. A unified platform often provides bundled features at a lower overall cost, freeing up resources that can be allocated elsewhere in your business.
Using one platform means that you not only make it easier to set up campaigns, pull analytics, and build automations, but it also reduces human errors. When your employees constantly toggle between platforms to ensure that branding, messaging, and timing stay consistent, mistakes can happen–and they’re much harder to catch.
What Is the Best Email and SMS Marketing Software?
As an ecommerce agency with years of experience building hybrid campaigns and setting up exciting and engaging automation flows, we always recommend Klaviyo to our clients looking to unify their email and SMS marketing efforts.
One of the reasons we love Klaviyo is its advanced segmentation and personalization capabilities, which empower businesses to target their audiences with remarkable precision and build some really creative campaigns and flows.
Klaviyo excels in analyzing customer data to create highly tailored messaging that resonates on an individual level. Additionally, the platform offers great marketing automation tools, simplifying the management of both email and SMS campaigns within a single, cohesive system. This integration saves time and ensures consistent communication across all channels.
Klaviyo's user-friendly interface is designed for businesses of all sizes, making it easy to navigate without requiring extensive technical expertise or much setup, a plus for companies looking to get up and go with their marketing efforts.
Finally, its robust analytics provide comprehensive performance tracking, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies effectively. Our clients love how Klaviyo has transformed their marketing efforts, resulting in significant customer engagement and sales growth.
Conclusion
By unifying your email and SMS channels, your ecommerce business will gain a holistic view of your customers, streamline your marketing efforts, and enhance personalization — all while reducing costs and operational complexities.
Using a tool like Klaviyo can help you harness the full potential of integrated marketing automation, driving engagement and fostering customer loyalty through consistent and cohesive messaging. Don't let fragmented platforms hold your business back; choose an all-in-one solution to elevate your marketing strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
At Blue Badger, we have the experience and expertise you need to get set up with the right email and SMS marketing software for your business, but we don’t have to stop there. In addition to marketing, we offer services like designing and developing custom Shopify themes, strategy, conversion rate optimization, performance marketing, and more. Let us help you build an ecommerce ecosystem that you can rely on. Get in touch with us today to learn more.
