If your ecommerce brand isn't using SMS marketing yet, you're likely leaving some serious cash on the table. With near-perfect open rates, super high engagement, and the potential to boost customer retention, SMS marketing has quickly become a necessary tool for ecommerce marketers looking to generate more brand interest and sales. 

In this guide, we'll explain SMS marketing, its advantages and best practices, and how to choose the right platform to maximize your results.

What is SMS Marketing

SMS (Short Message Service) marketing involves sending promotional text messages to customers who’ve opted in to receive them. Unlike email or social media, SMS is direct, immediate, and highly personal.

With 98% of adults owning a cell phone and texts boasting near-perfect open rates (98%), SMS has quickly become one of the best marketing channels for ecommerce businesses looking to grow without breaking the bank. It’s immediate and direct, cutting through the noise of crowded email inboxes and social media companies favouring the brands willing to pay their high ad prices.

While email is still the leader for detailed content, SMS is about quick promotions, timely alerts, and personal touches that drive almost 3x higher click-through rates (CTR) than email.

Under the umbrella of SMS marketing, we also have MMS marketing (Multimedia Messaging Service), which is a step above the average text-only, 160-character message, as MMS supports images, GIFs, and videos. Most SMS marketing tools will allow you to send either type of message to subscribers.

Advantages of SMS Marketing

From boosting customer engagement to increasing sales, well-planned SMS marketing campaigns can seriously beef up your entire marketing strategy with a few well-planned and well-written messages. Here are some of the benefits of SMS marketing:

1. Near-Instant Engagement: Texts land directly in customers’ pockets with a ping. Unlike social posts or emails that wait to be seen, texts trigger phone notifications – hence the fast engagement. When you need eyes on a message now, an SMS campaign is how you get there.

2. Amazingly High Open & Response Rates: As mentioned earlier, SMS open rates hover around 98%, with click-through rates of around 20 - 35%. If you send a great promo by text, odds are your customers will see it and act on it.

3. Easy Content Creation: No extra graphics or long-form copy is needed. With SMS’s character limits (~160 characters), you focus on clear, punchy content. This can save time as there’s no designing elaborate emails, just crafting a compelling one or two-liner and a call-to-action.

4. Direct Customer Connection: Texting allows for a personal, one-to-one feel that builds loyalty. It’s conversational. Even if it’s automated on your side, it feels personal on theirs.

5. Higher ROI Potential: Because SMS messages are read and clicked so frequently, the return on each message can be huge. Many brands see significant sales boosts from well-timed text messages, such as flash sale alerts or back-in-stock notices. This is compounded by the fact that text messages are so cheap. Generally, they cost about $0.015 - $0.050 per message, whereas the CPC of marketing emails is closer to $6/click. 

6. Better Customer Retention: Automated post-purchase messages (e.g., “Review your order for 10% off!”) can increase repeat purchases and are largely set-it-and-forget-it, with only occasional tweaking required.

Growing your business is easy when customers trust your brand enough to share something as personal as their phone number with you. As long as you respect that trust, it’s almost impossible not to see an increase in sales and repeat customers. 

Tips and Best Practices for SMS Marketing

While sending a text is generally a quick and easy process, it’s important to note that there is a right and a wrong way to approach it. Here are some tips and SMS marketing best practices to ensure that you make the most of every text campaign while also staying compliant. 

Compliance is Non-Negotiable

First and most importantly, never text without permission. It’s not just bad form; it’s illegal in many places thanks to laws like TCPA in the U.S. and GDPR in the E.U. Use double opt-ins to ensure subscribers really want your texts (e.g., text “YES” to confirm). Always provide an easy opt-out option (like replying “STOP”) in every message.

Segment Your Audience

Segment your subscribers by behaviour or preference as you would for ads and email—for example, frequent buyers vs. one-time shoppers or VIPs vs. bargain-hunters. Additionally, segmenting by location or purchase history helps send the right message at the right time. For example, if you’re a brand that sells in multiple markets, make sure to promote winter boots to Canadians in January, not to Aussies in summer. 

Timing & Cadence 

Texts are intrusive by nature, which is both a benefit and a risk. Emails sent at strange hours are pretty easily avoided, but an accidental text message in the middle of the night might actually wake someone up and upset them. 

Stick to business hours or logical times, like lunch break sale alerts. You also don’t want to overdo it. A few messages per month can be great for your business. Anything more than that is asking for opt-outs, unless it’s a special event, and even then, subscribers should have either requested or expected the increase in frequency. 

If you’re a global brand or you service multiple time zones, you’ll also want to leverage some segmentation and rules to ensure that you’re texting people at the correct times for their location. 

Be Concise and Clear

You have limited characters, so each word you send needs to count. Identify your brand upfront (“Hi, it’s [store name]”), offer value immediately (“50% off today only!”), and include a clear CTA (“Shop now: [link]”). If applicable, add a deadline to add urgency (“Ends at midnight!”). 

If you have the space, a little personalization (using their name or referencing a past purchase) can also work wonders here.

Add Value & Exclusivity

Since SMS marketing can be intrusive, you must make it worthwhile for contacts to fork over their phone numbers. Reward SMS subscribers with content they only get via text: early access to sales, exclusive discount codes, or first dibs on new products. 

This exclusivity makes customers feel special and justifies their decision to share their number with you.

Integrate with Email & Other Channels 

Text message marketing is a cornerstone of omnichannel commerce and should always be used to supplement or enhance your other marketing campaigns. For example, consider integrating SMS into your cart abandonment flows by triggering a text after an email reminder, or using it as part of your loyalty program to send text coupon codes to your VIP customers.

When selecting your SMS marketing software, make sure that it allows you to easily view all the texts and emails your customers receive in your flows and campaigns, preventing double-dipping or sending conflicting messages. As a rule, you should reserve SMS for the most urgent or high-value communications and let email handle the rest.

Automate & Personalize 

Use automation triggers to send the right message at the right moment. For example, a welcome text when someone joins your list, a shipping update, or a cart abandonment nudge.

Personalization goes beyond using a name. Leverage data like past purchases or browsing history to tailor all your messages. 

Monitor Performance & Adjust

Track metrics like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for each campaign. Most SMS platforms offer analytics dashboards. See what’s working and use A/B testing when possible. 

You should always be learning and iterating. Over time, your SMS marketing should get sharper and more tuned to your audience’s tastes, making each text even more valuable. 

Building an Effective SMS Marketing Strategy

Getting started with an SMS strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s how to start:

1. Define Your Goals: What are you aiming to achieve with your campaign? Increase sales? Reduce cart abandonment? Boost retention? Align your tactics with objectives.

2. Grow Your Subscriber List: Collect phone numbers by offering an incentive to maximize responses. For example: “Text SHOES to 55555 for 15% off your first order.”

3. Map Customer Journeys: Understand what the customer journey looks like in relation to the goals you have set. Here are some examples:

1. Welcome message → First purchase.

2. Post-purchase review request → Loyalty program invite.

3. Post-purchase of consumable product(s) → Replenishment reminders.

4. Integrate with Other Channels: As mentioned earlier, SMS is a great addition to any omnichannel strategy. Once you have mapped your goals and journeys, start syncing your SMS messages with other campaigns, such as email and social ads. For example:

1. Email: “Your cart is waiting!” → SMS 24 hours later: “Last chance to save!”

5. Analyze & Iterate: Use your SMS platform’s data to see what’s working, what isn’t and where you can improve. 

A good SMS platform will enable you to complete each of these steps and iterate on them quickly, ensuring that your strategy delivers the results you expect. 

Best SMS Marketing Platform: Why We Choose Klaviyo

As an ecommerce agency with a lot of experience in enabling our clients to create the automations and campaigns they need to succeed, we always recommend Klaviyo as our #1 choice for SMS marketing and beyond. 

Klaviyo stands out because it combines email and SMS in one place. This unified approach means that your customer data, segments, and campaign insights are all stored together. No more juggling separate tools and risking duplicated or inconsistent messages. Klayvio gives you a holistic view of the customer journey.

The platform was also built with ecommerce in mind. It easily plugs into Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more, allowing your store data (purchases, carts, browsing behaviour) to flow into Klaviyo, which powers smart segmentation and automation. For example, if a Shopify customer abandons their cart, Klaviyo can automatically trigger a text with a reminder or discount without requiring any manual action on your part beyond setting up the automation to begin with. 

With Klaviyo, you can easily segment your audience based on real-time data: purchase history down to specific products, engagement level, location, predicted lifetime value, and more. You can then personalize messages with dynamic fields, like including a product name or a unique coupon code, so texts feel truly personal.

Another area where Klaviyo shines is in marketing automation. You can set up pre-built flows for common scenarios like welcome series, birthday texts, or re-engagement campaigns for lapsed customers. Since everything is done on the same platform, it can easily be a multi-channel endeavour (email + SMS combos).

Finally, Klaviyo offers tons of reporting features so you can see exactly how SMS contributes to sales, either alone or in tandem with email. Its attribution model avoids crediting SMS for sales it didn’t really cause, giving you a clearer picture of performance.

Conclusion

By implementing the right strategies, respecting compliance, and integrating them with your broader marketing efforts, you can reach customers directly and drive higher engagement and conversions. 

Ready to see SMS marketing work for your business? As a Klaviyo partner, Blue Badger has the knowledge and experience you need to get started with integrating the platform into your ecommerce stack and building SMS campaigns and automations that convert. Contact us today to learn more about our Klaviyo automation and marketing services.