How you may be sitting on thousands of uncovered SMS opt-ins
With a 98% open rate, SMS campaigns are a powerful way to connect 1 on 1 with customers. Many brands have recognized this, and have begun collecting SMS opt-ins through checkout pages, email lists, and social media campaigns, but haven’t done anything with this untapped reserve of customer phone numbers. If you’ve compliantly grown a decent text subscriber list (by making sure the user opted in for marketing messages through SMS), your sitting on a huge opportunity for meaningful connection and revenue growth. Before reaching out to thousands of phone numbers through this feature with no strategy to interact and grow, you have to have a solid plan in place. Read along if you want to hear our two cents on how to successfully gain consent to your text marketing initiative.
What’s in it for your audience?
The first step is sharing the purpose of your SMS campaign, and having users acknowledge and agree to sign up to the text program. Although the compliance portion stirs a knee-jerk reaction of dry, boring, and annoying. It doesn’t have to be, at all. Focus on an ask, not push approach, with a proper introduction to your SMS program and a clear, and powerful value proposition. For our clients, we have built out an interactive Activation Campaign that helps them share their SMS program’s value to customers at that first re-engagement, creating an exclusive membership feel vs a coupon generator. More broadly, to ensure customers want to sign up for your text program, think long term, not short-term benefits. To activate their subscriber-status, some of our clients have looked to reward their customers for their loyalty with a referral program, early access to limited releases or coming sales, but always with the overarching message that this is an exclusive, membership program that will garner tons of value over time.
The next steps
After starting off your conversation with your SMS audience on the right foot, it’s time to thank them, automatically onboarding them into your system with the necessary customer info and mandatory how-to opt-out text. This is the easiest and most effective way to kick-start your SMS program.
The proof is in the pudding
Following the launch of an SMS initiative for one of our newest clients, we uncovered thousands of numbers collected during the Shopify checkout stage that was waiting to be tapped into. Launching our interactive Activation campaign surrounding the upcoming deals and early access to Black Friday sales, we converted 16% of that list into text marketing subscribers. Through this effort, we were able to push their SMS audience to over 15K, which in turn was able to generate over $1M in revenue with zero effort on acquisition (organic or paid ads).
What about those who don’t opt-in?
While we have found that 15% of our client’s customers opt-in to their SMS program through this activation campaign, a large majority do not respond, creating the opportunity to re-engage with these customers with different values and benefits in the future. This allows you to better understand what value props excite customers to join, and also allows you to segment your text list by that exact offer that pulled them into your program in the first place.
Whatever you do, don’t sleep on this.
Because of the effort (and eyes) needed for social, email, and website CTA’s, this method of growing your list is a no-brainer that doesn’t need extra work from your team or gets lost in the digital content sphere. If you’re already collecting customer numbers, you’re sitting on potential SMS opt-ins that could have a major impact on your bottom line. If you're not already collecting customer numbers, you can easily get your feet wet by adding a mandatory or facultative number field at the checkout page by enabling the checkout box for users to opt-in for marketing messages. With SMS's ability to convert much higher than email or social, and with 99% of each text being viewed, each new subscriber means a new, highly-engaged customer primed for repeat purchases and a lifetime of value. If you want to go over how this strategy could work for your company, let us know! We’d love to talk.
If we’ve piqued your interest in conversational marketing, want to learn more about Drop, or simply want to connect, send us a text at 1–833–217–4200 or sign up to get early access here.
