Introduction

Savvy Shopify merchants know that marketing to your existing customers is the easiest, cheapest, and fastest way to boost sales and revenue. After all, it’s well established that existing customers…

1. Purchase more often.
2. Are less price sensitive.
3. Are less likely to defect to a competitor.
4. Are more likely to recommend your business to friends and colleagues.
5. And are cheaper to reach with marketing solutions and cost less to serve.

Hell, a Bain and Company study showed that a mere 5% increase in customer retention boosted profits by a staggering 25-95%. That’s correct… turning your focus to your existing customers and not solely on acquiring new customers can make a big difference to your bottom line.

As result, most managers of ecommerce stores do everything in your power to obtain their customer’s permission for follow up marketing, so they can reach out to them regularly with promotions, new inventory arrivals, and whatever else might be relevant to their niche.

And the Shopify platform does offer an option for this. By default, it allows you to collect email addresses from your audience. And while email marketing is still worthwhile (largely because it’s dirt cheap to do), open rates for commercial emails are generally pretty dismal (just above 20% – with open rates in the retail industry being slightly lower).

That means that 80% of your audience is not being exposed to your follow up promotions. And this is critical, because of the 5 points I made earlier in this article – these are the very people who have the biggest potential to make a huge difference in your bottom line.

So how do you turn this around?

With text marketing.

Why use Text Marketing in Your eCommerce Store?

You probably already know the answer to this one… it’s the open rate.

Almost 100% of text messages are opened, the majority within a few minutes. In fact, the new message notification features built into modern smart phones make it virtually impossible for a recipient not to see a new message.

But what accounts for the huge discrepancy between email and text message open rates, especially when many people check both on the same device?

The difference is the sender.

Texting is a intimate communication channel, usually reserved for close friends, partners, spouses, family members, colleagues and a few select merchants and service providers. When a new text message arrives, you check it almost immediately (if you’re anything like me), because 99% of the time, the message originates from someone with whom you have a close personal relationship.

Emails on the other hand, come from anyone.

So it may take hours (or even days in some cases) before the average person checks their email.

In short, sending your promotions by text bypasses the noise and clutter of email and delivers your message directly to the place where you’ll have your customer’s complete and total attention.

How To implement Text Marketing in Shopify Store: Step 1

To begin, you’ll need a way to collect your customers’ cell numbers at the checkout and add them to a mass texting platform.

This is done by…

1. Obtaining a subscription to our BROADCASTsms mass/bulk texting service (our pay-as-you-go subscription starts at just $9.99/month, which means you don’t have to invest a lot of money in a subscription as you build your client database).
2. Installing our SMS Marketing Plugin in your Shopify store.

This adds the following widget to your checkout…

Those who include their phone number will automatically be added to your BROADCASTsms database, all ready to be sent text message promotions.

How To implement Text Marketing in Shopify: Step 2

Collecting cell numbers at your ecommerce checkout is a great first step, but you shouldn’t stop there.

After all, it’s likely you already have a list of people who have subscribed to receive email promotions, and going forward, there will still be some who choose to receive email promotions over text. That’s OK, but you should work diligently to convert these customers into subscribers of your text message promotional program.

This is done by using your email newsletter. Going forward, every promotion you send should include an invitation to subscribe to your text marketing program (a link to a web form where your customers can enter their details works best, but you can use a “text to join” option as well).

For best results, this invitation should be accompanied by…

1. A clear definition of the benefits of being subscribed. Some possible options include early bird access to sales or limited availability items, special promotions (only available to text subscribers), additional discounts (only available to text subscribers), plus the reduced likelihood that the customer will never miss an important sale notification again.
2. Notification of publishing frequency (no one wants to receive 10 messages a day from you. But they’d probably be happy hearing from you twice a month).
3. Emphasis on subscriber control; let the customer know they can opt out of receiving your messages at anytime (“if you don’t think our text messages are awesome, just reply STOP and we’ll remove you from any future campaigns”).

How To implement Text Marketing in Shopify: Step 3

If your business has a physical location (or locations), you should be doing your best to collect cell numbers from customers directly in your place of business.

You can make it easy for customers to subscribe to your “texting program” by…

• Loading your webform (included with your BROADCASTsms subscription) onto a tablet and displaying it prominently in your place of business.
• Printing posters with a similar call to action and posting them throughout your business (this works best of the poster includes the QR code that the customer can scan to subscribe – we provide this as well).
• Including an invitation to join your texting program in any print or online advertising you do.
• Featuring the benefits of your texting program regularly in your social media posts and posting a link to your web form.

In short, you should take advantage of all available avenues to build out your text marketing list, because the potential ROI from doing so can be massive. In addition, by building such a list, not only are you creating push button income that generates revenue on autopilot, you’re building an asset for your business.

Better yet, unlike social media audiences which have the potential to disappear overnight, you own your subscribers. This means you can download a list of them at anytime and move to another provider, for example.  

Let’s Chat

If you’re interested in investigating the texting opportunity further, I welcome you to touch base with your questions using the form below. You’re also welcome to book a call with us, or even a Zoom demo of the software so you can see the process in action.