How Identification Scales Text Messaging Performance

Personalization has been a hot topic in marketing for years — and will continue to grow in importance for many more to come. It’s personalization that lies at the heart of good text performance. But it can’t happen without first identifying who your customer is, what they like and, where they prefer to shop — making identification pivotal to your success.

With proper identity resolution, brands are able to send tailored, 1:1 messages that meet customers where they are in the sales funnel. The right message at the right time can drive an otherwise stale prospect into a converting customer. And where better to engage with your audience than on the device they use most?

How to Drive One-To-One Opt-Ins

Creating a seamless experience across channels is key to maximizing revenue per user in a non-disruptive way. When choosing a text messaging vendor, retailers should look for a solution that gives them the ability to mix and match their messaging across both email and text so that they can deploy a series of experiences that talk to each other.

For example, when your text campaigns are run by a separate vendor than your email outreach is, customers who are already on your CRM list may not be recognized. This results in a frustrating experience for both you and the consumer. Not only are you potentially offering discounts to current customers, but your CRM list is unreliable and duplicative.

If both channels are in sync with one another and your identification technology recognizes customers and prospects appropriately, visitors will be able to choose how they receive messages from you. This improves onsite experience and guarantees your customers receive messages in their preferred format — all while growing and maintaining an active CRM list. So, take advantage of the scale in marketable opt-ins that texting provides by working with a vendor who gives you the ability to implement strategies across devices.

Scaling Triggered Messaging

Now that you’ve clearly identified your visitors, you‘ll be able to automatically scale triggered messages based on a customer’s previous site behaviors.

There are several text triggers to utilize from the start. A simple, straightforward trigger that doesn’t require personalization is the welcome message. Introducing prospects to your brand and setting the stage for future engagement, welcome messages are a required first step in your nurture program.

As your prospects and customers interact more with your site, identification will scale your product abandonment and cart abandonment triggers to remind shoppers of their incomplete purchase. With COVID-19 affecting inventory for many retailers, brands can also use text triggers to remind customers of items that are back in stock, low in stock, or lowered in price.

When running your text campaigns, having the ability to personalize all of your marketing messages is important, but scale will be impossible unless you work with a triggered messaging partner that can ensure your audience receives the right message at the appropriate time.

Automating Performance with On-Demand

The foundation of any strong nurture program is awareness of everyone’s stage in your customer lifecycle — who is shopping, who isn’t, and who is becoming a churn risk — and communicating with them according to where they are in the funnel.

By working with a vendor who can identify your site traffic at scale, brands can effectively target active or inactive users with automated, on-demand messages that capitalize on key lifecycle moments and minimize costly list-wide sends.

Here are a few segments to get you started:

• Prospect vs. customer: On major list-wide sends, remind prospects of their first-time discount while keeping a customer send promo-free. And consider your time-to repurchase. If a customer won’t reasonably need another order within a few days or a week, suppress them from your customer segment.
• High-Intent Mop-Up: Every week, send a message to prospects who took deep-funnel actions 3–4 weeks ago without returning.
• Sale/Promo High-Intent Mop-up: To apply targeted urgency on the last day of a sale, send a blast to all users who engaged with the sale without converting.
• High vs Low Intent: Try targeting those mid-intent users who made it as far as the product page, but didn’t add to cart.

With these triggers in place, you’ll be able to more effectively scale your owned-channel outreach by automating triggered messages that are sent to site visitors as they qualify for your different audience segments. Given the intimacy of text messaging, personalization is more important here than any other channel.

Understanding Text Messaging Pricing (and How to Save Serious Dollars)

Text messaging can be expensive. On top of platform fees, many vendors charge for the aggregator fees associated with sending texts as well as carrier fees. It adds up for brands while profiting vendors who can use it to ensure revenue growth.

But this pricing model can have a negative effect on your overall returns, especially if your vendor is charging for each individual send. When charging on sends, they’re incentivized to text your customers as much as possible to drive as much profit as possible. But texting isn’t like email, and inundating your customer base with texts will provide a poor brand experience and quickly burn out your list — decreasing engagement and performance.

Instead, it’s better to choose a partner that passes through send fees at cost, and only charges based on your subscriber list, with the cost dropping drastically as your subscriber count goes up. This ensures your returns don’t suffer in the second year of your text messaging program while also incentivizing for CRM list growth, a win-win for you in the long run.

Bottom line, choosing a vendor that can truly leverage channel-agnostic identification technology without nickel and diming you, is the path to a profitable and scalable text messaging program.

For more on Wunderkind pricing, audience segments and how identification scales text messaging performance, check out section two in How Winning Marketers Maximize Text Message Performance.