How to Use SMS Marketing for Your Shopify Store

Have you put much thought into SMS as a marketing channel for your business? If not, we urge you to make that a priority project for this year. Why? This is your chance to make it work for you while it’s still relatively new.

Why SMS marketing is important in 2023

Don’t you wish you’d collected a bunch of email subscribers in the early days of email marketing? You have a unique opportunity now to grow your SMS subscribers in this same way. The idea of getting texts from brands is fresh and interesting to customers. We expect people to be more selective about subscribing to SMS than to email newsletters. If you wait to build your list, other brands will get the head start. Your customers will have a limit, and you want to be the one welcomed into their message inbox.

Engagement on SMS is much higher than email. Almost every text sent gets read. Many customers (potentially as many as 85%) prefer to hear from brands by text than other options.

Are you worried about bothering people or being intrusive? Here’s why we’d encourage you to give it a try anyway:

• People who sign up for SMS will be your most enthusiastic subscribers – they’ll want to hear from you!
• There is a multi-step process to opt in to SMS marketing. This means the only people getting messages from you will be the ones who asked you to text them.
• SMS campaigns aren’t sent as often as email campaigns, and you can keep to a comfortable frequency.

What we do for your SMS marketing channel

This is a new area for most businesses, and we would love to take the work off your hands. We’ll get everything set up correctly and using current best practices. Here is what you can expect from our SMS service:

Initial account configuration

We’re Klaviyo (our partner link) email marketing and SMS experts, and we’ve done our research. We know where to find all the options, what they mean, and how best to configure them. Skip the googling and get a professional setup from us. We’ll then move on to next steps. Our copywriter will create your SMS messages, we’ll add SMS messages to your flow logic, and much more.

Training and tutorials

We’ll provide you with tutorials about best practices for SMS marketing. It’s very different from email and different rules apply. There are built-in automated messages required by carriers. We’ll have instructions for updating your related settings in Shopify.

We’ll help you avoid costly mistakes. We’ll share how to avoid having your messages filtered by mobile carriers. We also include advice on how often to send and what types of content to include.

Collecting new subscribers

Our service focuses on collecting SMS subscribers using a variety of methods. We’ll create an SMS welcome flow to deliver a signup incentive to your new subscribers. We’ll add a “smart” block to your Klaviyo email template. This will allow SMS opt-in from email, and will work well and look great on desktop and mobile.

Since we’re Shopify Experts as well, we can adjust your site to build your SMS list. We’ll entice customers to opt-in to SMS messages during checkout. Our specialized pop-ups encourage people to join your list without discouraging email signups. We’ll also target existing email subscribers to opt in, with a special tap-to-send option for mobile users.

Getting started with SMS marketing

SMS pairs with email marketing through Klaviyo, our preferred software. We are happy to offer our SMS service to anyone who is already using or would like to use Klaviyo with Shopify. If your Klaviyo flows aren’t set up, we can combine the two projects for a powerful ROI, or start with SMS as a standalone project.

Learn more about our Klaviyo setup services here. Then, get in touch with us here to discuss your SMS project. I hope we can help!