How to Recover Lost Revenue with SMS Marketing

October 19, 2022 Julio Romero

Reading time about 3min

How to Recover Lost Revenue with SMS Marketing

Mara Lam on Dec 8, 2021 6:04:00 AM

Overstocks, returns, and out-of-stocks cost retailers $1.75 trillion in lost revenue every year. When you pair that with the $18 billion retailers lose every year on abandoned carts, it’s never been tougher to keep your hard-earned money.

You need a strategy that will help you keep more of your customers. SMS is the best way to put your Shopify store in front of more shoppers, increasing sales and making back your lost revenue. Compared to other strategies like social media or email, SMS is the best way to see a return on your investment:

  • Text campaigns have an average 98% open rate, compared to emails’ 20%
  • In 2020, average SMS conversions increased by 102%
  • SMS marketing has a 295% higher response rate than phone calls

After all, SMS is part of each customers’ experience with your brand. When you think outside the inbox and go all-in on SMS, you’ll recover more sales for little added effort.

Ready to recover lost revenue? Try these five SMS marketing tactics to make more sales with the power of texting.

1. Send automatic abandoned cart reminders

On average, shoppers abandon their carts 69.57% of the time. That spells out a huge, expensive problem for your Shopify store. The majority of shoppers add items to their cart and leave, never to be seen again.

Fortunately, you can reclaim some of these abandoned carts with a few simple SMS messages. You can’t recapture every abandoned cart, but you can use a tool like Winback to send automatic reminder texts to shoppers who left without buying anything. Sometimes a quick “Oops, you forgot something!” text is all a shopper needs to complete their purchase.

2. Humanize your SMS messages

The biggest mistake retailers make with SMS marketing is using robotic language. This is your opportunity to have conversations with your shoppers at scale. Feel free to sprinkle in a few emojis, pop culture references, and friendly language.

While it would take forever to have individual conversations with shoppers, you can still create personable, automated SMS messages:

  • Asking shoppers to vote on new looks, patterns, colors, or products
  • Alerting SMS subscribers about upcoming deals or sales
  • Celebrating shoppers’ anniversaries with your shop, complete with a few funny GIFs

Try to send specific, personalized SMS messages whenever you can. If possible, include shoppers’ names in every message.

If you segment your SMS list, you’ll be able to send super-specific messages, too. For example, you could send reminders and promotions to shoppers who bought your shoes. Instead of targeting your entire SMS list, you can send hyper-specific messages just about shoes, which can bring more shoppers back into the fold.

3. Make it easy to subscribe

Do shoppers have to jump through hoops to subscribe to your SMS list? If you want to recover lost revenue, you need to make it as easy as possible for shoppers to join your SMS list. After all, it’s easier to recover abandoned carts when you actually have a way to contact shoppers!

This depends on your Shopify setup, but you can make it easier to sign up for SMS by:

  • Adding an SMS opt-in at checkout
  • Placing a popup on your site that offers a 10% discount to SMS subscribers
  • Allowing shoppers to subscribe with a simple SMS shortcode

Remember to do a double opt-in for all of your shoppers. This keeps your SMS list clean and ensures you’re only talking to interested shoppers.

4. Share occasional discounts

If you really want to pull a shopper back in, offer them a sweet discount via text message. Since 50% of consumers buy something after they receive a coupon or a discount, this is a clever way to make back some of your lost revenue.

But a word of caution: Discounting can cheapen your products and devalue your brand if you do it too frequently, so make sure your Winback discounts don’t incentivize people to abandon their carts. Set limits on how often you send discounts to shoppers.

5. Share testimonials and reviews

Eighty-seven percent of shoppers look for reviews before they buy anything. Why not win them back with a reminder of how awesome your products are? SMS marketing allows you to send testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content to shoppers who abandon their carts. If you pair that with valuable how-tos, FAQs, or guides, you can definitely persuade more shoppers to check out their cart.

Make back your lost revenue

You won’t be able to recapture every single dollar of lost revenue, but you can certainly reduce abandoned carts with a few simple tricks. SMS marketing helps you stand out in a less competitive environment where shoppers actually want to hear from you. Try these five SMS marketing tips to recover more lost revenue with just a few clicks’ worth of work.

SMS marketing is a lot easier with the right set of tools. Try Winback in your Shopify store for free—our one-click installation makes it a breeze to do SMS marketing in just minutes.

 

Topics: Best Practices