#140. The 3 Big No-Nos of SMS Marketing | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello and welcome to Email Einstein, the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m marketeer at an agency called Flowium. And here at Flowium, we really, really love what we do. And because we love e-commerce, because we love email marketing, and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment— that’s what we do here at Flowium. And today we will be talking literally about delivering the right message, but in this case, not necessarily email message, but more SMS message. As you guys already know, many of you know know this fact for sure, mobile commerce is on the rise. According to Adobe,$88 billion, so 43% of online retail sales during last year’s holiday season, were made from smartphones. So 43%. Honestly, I think this number will be even higher this year, but mobile is like a big integral part of how consumers shop nowadays, from browsing and research to actually purchasing the product. And SMS plays integral role in that ecosystem. The generational shift has brought changes in communication patterns, and the research actually shows that 37% of Americans, they actually prefer to receive brand communication through text and not through email. 37%, that’s like a huge portion of your audience, right? And these numbers are even higher when it comes to younger generations. For example, 45% of millennials said that they would prefer to receive SMS from the brand and not the email. And 43% of Gen Zers prefer text from brands. So as you can see, pretty much like half of population would prefer to get some sort of like an SMS from the brand. And honestly, I wasn’t a big fan of SMS at the beginning just because it felt a bit more like intrusive compared to email. But now I am a believer that when you marry the two, when you marry the SMS and email, that’s when you can see the real results. So today, today’s episode, it will be short and sweet, but we will be talking about 3 major SMS marketing mistakes and how to fix them. For some of you, this information might be already known, so you probably heard something about it, but these are just 3 very big and very crucial mistakes that even like the biggest brands are making them, unfortunately. So mistake number 1, this is a huge one, you guys, sending without consent. All of the text marketing mistakes you can make, out of all of them, This one is probably the more serious, and not just because it’s like it’s a bad practice to send without a consent. In fact, it’s illegal in accordance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, TCPA. This is the document that you will hear a lot about when you’re working on your SMS. So according to this document, when you send SMS marketing messages, you must first secure that like written consent from all of your recipients. This means that you can’t purchase lists. Can’t upload the list of contacts from a CRM, or you can’t just use the phone numbers of your customers that you somehow gathered. You actually should have the written consent for you to use their phone number. So your customers have actually expressly opted in to receive text messages from you. So in addition to generally this being a bad practice, it is illegal and it actually can cost you a ton of money because the penalties for violating the TCPA, they believe me, they can be severe. So fines range anywhere from$500 per violation to$1,500 per willful violation. So the difference is that meaning is that you knew what you were doing was wrong, but you did anyways. So, and this is like per one number. So some settlements have reached into the tens of millions of dollars. Because, I mean, do your math. If$500 per violation is the price that you pay, then just imagine what would happen if you send this message to a big list of the consumers. You see, with email, it’s slightly different. And all that legal aspect of sending emails to different people, we actually discussed that aspect in episode number 133 with Adam. Robinson. Um, so basically we were discussing how to maximize audience growth and reclaim those like lost revenues. That was the topic of the podcast. But we kind of discussed the legality of, um, getting the email from someone who didn’t like opt in into your list willfully and sending them an email. So that was like a really, really interesting episode. If you haven’t listened to it, I do recommend it. But with SMS, unfortunately, or fortunately, I don’t know, it’s not just a bad practice, it’s also illegal. Now, another compliance issue that a lot of brands are having, and that’s something that you absolutely need to have in your SMS, you want to make sure that you’re not just like collecting SMS consent through obviously opt-in forms or on the checkout page. You also want to make sure that you don’t fail to provide an opt-out. In European Union and US, The rules are very clear. You are legally required by law to provide a simple way for consumers to opt out from receiving any further text from the brands. For most of the brands, or like most of the time, you can just like add some opt-out language to your SMS, and this needs to appear in actually in every marketing text that you are sending. So this is a big one. To summarize this mistake, make sure that you are sending with consent from the customer and make sure that they can opt-out that customer can like easily opt out just by replying stop to the text. This is a big one. So yeah, here you have it. Mistake number 1, sending without the consent or not letting your customer to opt out from the list.

Andriy: 7:18

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Vira: 8:07

Mistake number 2. This one will be a very short one, but that’s also the issue that we’re seeing across the industry is actually using the long URLs. And it’s not just because long links look spammy, which they definitely do, but when you’re sending the SMS, MS, that 160 characters limit is pretty much your entire real estate. That’s all you have to communicate the message to your customer. And you definitely don’t want to spend 160 characters on that long and spammy looking URL. Any additional parameters that you’re adding to the link, sometimes you want to embed the discount code or some sort of tracking. Any additional parameters, they can actually make the link extra long, which basically wastes that precious characters, precious valuable space that you can use for basically for delivering more information. As SMS messages have only 160 characters limit, we can definitely understand why you want to make it shorter. And there are plenty of URL shorteners on the internet. I’m not going to mention them all, just like type in URL shortener. But if you’re using platforms like Klaviyo, they actually have that functionality built in. So Klaviyo offers this in-house link shortener in your SMS message template. Basically, all you need to do, you just need to make sure that that feature is toggled on for you to use it for SMS message. So using long URLs, big mistake number 2 that you don’t want to make because it looks bad and also because obviously it’s using your precious valuable space in your SMS that you can use for more information. And mistake number 3, um, which is a less obvious mistake, and I’m sure not a few are thinking about it this way, but basically a lot of people are thinking about SMS as one-way communication when it comes to marketing. So using SMS channel as one-way communication is also like a big and common mistake in the industry. And I mean, with SMS engagement rates as high as 98%. SMS, SMS has become one of the essential tools for digital marketers. But think about SMS compared to email. When you’re getting an SMS from like a friend, you would be more willing to respond quickly compared to an email. Same with communication with a brand. SMS has such a high engagement rate, and it’s because people use their phones every day to have real-time conversations with their friends and family. And I mean, SMS in its core, it has always been the 2-way communication channel, and that’s how you want to use it as a brand. Using SMS to blast one-way messages, I mean, sure, it can, it can bring like a lot of revenue, a lot of additional revenue to your brand, but this is not ideal because customers, they kinda expect— in fact, 72% of customers said that in one of the recent Klaviyo questionnaires, or like the research, they said that 72% of customers are more likely to purchase from an e-commerce store that communicates with them about their products or with the product through some sort of chat messaging, right? So they said that this functionality is very important for them. And you can actually enjoy the human touch of SMS conversations with tools like Klaviyo. And I know that’s how the platforms, the other SMS platforms like Attentive and Emotive built as well. All of them have this 2-way communication functionality. And not does only SMS conversation allow you to see incoming tags, but you can also respond to those inquiries. And it also allows you to improve engagement with your customer on existing SMS messages that you already sent to your customers. So SMS conversations, they actually give you the ability to both see the incoming text and instantly respond to your subscribers. If you guys are using Klaviyo, there is this separate sort of like a window where you can see all of the SMS conversations and respond to them. And additionally, when someone does respond, you can see their customer profile and you will be able to get all of the context of that message because you will see basically the entire communication that that person had with you as a brand. You will see what they were purchasing in the past. You will see when they purchase, how many purchases they made, whether they open or not their emails. So you will pretty much see the entire customer profile and you will be able to quickly get that context so you have more information for you to reply immediately. Another good example of 2-way communication is abandoned cart. You can be proactively asking your customers if they have any questions about the items in their cart in the initial abandoned cart message, or you can basically provide more information about the product that they have in their cart. You want to be proactive with that communication. Also, a great example of a 2-way communication is a birthday or anniversary discount, where you basically text your customer on their birthday or first purchase anniversary to ask if they would like a discount code to celebrate. So that basically puts that human face on your brand. Order delivery questions is another great message. You can follow up with your customer after they receive their order, asking them if they are happy with their purchase, if they are happy with the service. If they are, ask them for maybe like a referral or review. So yeah, there are like a lot of ways you can communicate with your customer through SMS message. And the big mistake that a lot of brands are doing is unfortunately using this channel as a one-way communication tool on a two-way channel, which SMS is. So SMS conversation, they are great for you to connect with a customer on a deeper level, but also to deliver that timely recommendations and to deliver a better service in a way that is more convenient for a lot of customers. So yeah, so there you have it, mistake number 3. And just to summarize everything that we discussed, 3 major mistakes is first of all, sending without consent or not letting your customers opt out. Mistake number 2, using long URLs. And mistake number 3 is using SMS as a one-way communication because it’s basically a two-way communication channel. So there you have it. I hope that little sweet and short episode was interesting to you. Let us know if you would like to learn more about the SMS or if you’d like to learn more about email or if there are any any like specific topics you would like to learn about. And stay tuned because we will have a lot of cool guests over the next few weeks. I have guests from Justuno, from Klaviyo, from other really cool platforms, the guests that we’re really, really excited about. And in the meantime, if you are interested in getting some more advice for you or the brand or your brand on how to establish a solid email marketing strategy, or if you have an email marketing strategy but you want to get a free email marketing audit. Maybe you’re feeling like your online store is not making enough out of email marketing. Definitely reach out to Flowium. We will review your email marketing strategies, setup, and metrics and look for places to basically tweak and improve your approach. So all of the links that we mentioned in this episode, they will be linked in the description box to this podcast. I hope you enjoy this podcast just as much as I enjoyed recording it, and we I hope to have you back here next Tuesday because we do have a very exciting guest that we can’t wait to introduce you to. Thank you so much, and I’ll talk to you next Tuesday. Bye.