How to Optimize Your Marketing: Keep Email & SMS Together

We’ve recently covered the importance of using SMS marketing for your shop. But what software should you use? If you’re using Shopify, we strongly recommend using Klaviyo for both email and SMS marketing. There are two big reasons for this, and a couple tricky things to know about when considering providers.

Let email and SMS marketing work together

The most important reason to keep these two channels together is that it gives you the ability to weave your email and SMS messages together into one flow. Your email and SMS are part of the same conversation with your customer, and are building the relationship in tandem. When you manage these conversations on one platform, you can use conditional logic to send different SMS messaging depending on how your customer interacts with your emails. You can also avoid sending duplicate messages, which can save you money and reduce the risk of overloading your customers.

Understand how each channel is working

Another important thing to consider is attribution, meaning figuring out which channels are seeing which results. Klaviyo ensures that when you are sending both SMS and email, a sale is never attributed to both channels. If you’re using separate platforms, they will both claim attribution if someone interacted with an SMS on one platform and an email on the other. Klaviyo uses cooperative last touch attribution which more accurately reflects how SMS and email play off each other. If you don’t have accurate attribution, you don’t know what is working in order to refine your strategy.

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Don’t sign a lengthy contract!

When looking into a provider for SMS, you shouldn’t have to sign a contract for an email or SMS service provider. Tech changes too frequently to tie yourself to a tool that may not continue to be a good fit for you. We recommend a month to month agreement for this type of software. Are you stuck in an SMS or email contract now? Reach out to us to discuss solutions – we’re often able to help with this.

What to know about pricing

You may see an SMS provider that looks like a better deal than Klaviyo. It can be hard to compare pricing and ROI for a few reasons:

• Attribution windows are different. This means some platforms take credit for orders that happen long after a message is sent which can make ROI seem much higher than it is. Some platforms use a 30 day window by default. Klaviyo uses 24 hrs for SMS, which makes more sense. When’s the last time you dug up a month-old text message?
• Some platforms charge extra for carrier fees. These are included in Klaviyo’s price.
• When you have both email and SMS on one platform, you can more easily cut costs. For example, skipping an expensive SMS message if a prior email on the same topic was already opened.
• You can just do more with Klaviyo. It has a deep integration with Shopify which means you can precisely tailor your messages to your customers’ activity on your site. Klaviyo also has 300+ other integrations, which means you can segment using data from the apps you use for product reviews, wishlists, loyalty programs, subscriptions and more. Check Klaviyo out here.

How to set SMS up correctly

Klaviyo email and SMS flows (automated messages), segments, and best practices take a lot of research and knowhow. If you’d like to make sure yours are set up effectively, I’d strongly recommend you check in with us. These projects are designed to pay for themselves, and once you have all the automations set up, they make money for you while you’re sleeping and on vacation. It’s something I’d urge every ecommerce brand to optimize in 2023.

The average ROI for email is well above 60:1, and the average return on investment for Klaviyo SMS is 24x. Don’t miss out on keeping your hard-won customers engaged! You can learn more about Klaviyo Services here then check out our rate sheet for a pricing range for email and SMS services, and please schedule a call with us to talk about what would work best for your business.