25/07/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 25/07/2024 20:51
Thinking of launching an SMS program and want some motivation and direction?
Klaviyo and recurring payments platform Recharge recently conducted a global survey of over 8K participants to learn more about how people are interacting with text messages from brands and how brands can optimize their SMS marketing strategy.
The results should be enough to motivate any brand to launch an SMS program:
Here are the top 9 segments we recommend creating as you're building your SMS marketing strategy.
The first must-have SMS segment is a centralized, high-level look at everyone who has opted in to your SMS communication.
Chances are, your marketing platform automatically creates a list of all your SMS subscribers when you first enable SMS. It's still imperative that you create this segment on top of that, for a few reasons:
Batching and blasting will drive up your unsubscribe and spam complaints. That's why you want to send most of your SMS communication to your highly engaged SMS segment: subscribers who are regularly opening and engaging with your text messages.
Once you've created this segment, you can confidently send your best texts, knowing you've already established a relationship.
SMS segmentation tip: If you're migrating from one marketing platform to another and you have a large SMS subscriber list, migrate your engaged segments in addition to your entire list. Your new platform won't be able to track your engagement data until you start sending with them.
Unlike email, SMS has no warming period. But if you send most campaigns to your full list frequently, you may get more spam complaints, your sender reputation may suffer, and you'll be subject to more carrier filtering.
That's why it's a good idea to build several different SMS segments based on engagement:
SMS segmentation tip: Give all new SMS subscribers at least 90 days to engage before suppressing them.
Your subscribers who prefer SMS over email is another segment to build, for 2 reasons:
SMS segmentation tip: Make sure you collect preferences from customers when they're first opting in to receive messages from you.
Most brands treat any SMS subscriber as a VIP, and for good reason: if they're willing to get messages from you on the same screen as the ones they get from their mom and their best friend, they're worth investing in.
But creating a segment of your most valuable SMS subscribers-those who spend the most money, order most frequently, or meet a similar threshold that makes sense for your brand-will help you focus on your biggest fans.
Send this segment exclusive deals, sneak peeks, and promotions. And don't be shy about letting them know how much you appreciate their ongoing support.
Anyone who has started a check-out at least once in the last 5 days but hasn't finished a purchase qualifies as high-intent.
This segment can be particularly helpful when you're running a sale over a long period of time and people are starting check-outs, but they're not finishing. It can also be a great segment to test a campaign or flow with before you launch to a bigger audience.
If you're conservative with your SMS credits and hesitant to add SMS to your abandoned cart flow, this can be a good way to test results while still encouraging your audience to complete a purchase.
Location-based segments help ensure you're sending personalized and relevant content to people who can take action on it. They can be helpful if your brand:
After you've been running your SMS program for a while, you can segment according to who you want to draw back into the fold. Once you have a group of subscribers who have decreased engagement, send them a discount or special offer to try to re-engage them.
If they still don't engage, consider suppressing them.
If you see a spike in failed deliveries, you need to identify why the send failed. Creating a segment for SMS errors can help you understand why they're happening and prevent further deliverability issues.
SMS segmentation tip: Create this segment if you're migrating over to Klaviyo from another platform. If your previous platform didn't track why your sends were failing, Klaviyo will.
Let's face it: people are looking at their text messages more quickly and more often than their email inboxes. Just about everything you can do via email you can do via SMS, and your subscribers may just respond even better via text.
Don't miss that opportunity.