Why email and SMS marketing are a match made in heaven

• Updated on: 2018-11-08
• Read original article here

There’s no better way to reach every customer than by bringing together the two giants in communication: SMS and email marketing automation. More than 5 billion people will own a mobile by 2019, while nearly 54% of the entire planet (3.7 billion) currently use email. Talk about reach.

Combining these two push channels nurtures that all-important 360° customer view, and adds relevance and granularity to your strategy by helping you tailor your engagements to the individual. Plus, both mediums provide much more bang for their buck compared to, say, paid media, giving you back valuable resources to spend as you see fit.

We’ve put together 6 prime use-cases for the SMS/email partnership, along with some ideas for your multi-channel campaigns:

Shipping/updates Using automation to deliver a dual-channel transactional strategy is the best way to keep customers up-to-date with their purchases and deliver exceptional customer service. If you’re using an ESP like dotmailer, you can trigger SMS messages – like dispatch alerts – using the dotmailer extension. By automating all of your key transactional communications through your email provider, you can map out logical customer communication journeys and keep all of your analytics in one place to see if your methods are getting the right responses.

Customer feedback surveys If you’re looking for a quick way to gauge the experience your customer has received while engaging with a specific area of your business, a quick SMS survey could be just the ticket. Get feedback on your transactional emails by asking customers to reply with a number between one and ten. Quick, easy, and informative.

Reminders and alerts Slotting SMS extensions into your automation programs enables you to deliver emails and SMS at appropriate points along an individual customer’s journey, but at mass scale. Appointment reminders and expiry prompts are just two examples of SMS notifications that you can automate.

Personalised offers/marketing campaigns Offer-led messages are more likely to strike the right chord with customers if they’re carefully considered and well-timed. Consider this use case: an existing customer browses and ‘favorites’ a sale item on your website. They then leaves the website without buying, so your automation program triggers an ‘abandoned browse’ email to the customer to remind them of the product they’ve flagged – you could also include the date that your sale ends. If the customer doesn’t return after a chosen period of time, delivering an SMS to remind them that their favorite item will return to full price soon might just do the trick. You could even offer the customer an exclusive SMS discount to bring them over the line.

New product updates Got a new mobile app or an upgrade to your service? These brand landmarks are worth telling your customers about, and an SMS could be the ideal way to spread the good news. If you’re communicating your new app, including a CTA link to a download page helps the recipient instantly get the goods.

Loyalty VIP customers deserve VIP treatment. They already feel affinity for your business and, in some cases, may be true advocates who are sharing the positive experiences with their peers.

Loyalty reward emails containing time-sensitive content are often best backed up with SMS reminders. Updates about new points earned or those that are due to expire are a good way to show that you know and respect your customer. Think too about optimising the conversion period for valuable customers with SMS alerts about exclusive sales access.

Being able to build your own best-of-breed marketing suite is crucial if you want to maximise your ROI across all channels. You can easily extend dotmailer to pull SMS marketing into your strategy via the Textlocal extension, allowing you a better chance of achieving the desired action from every customer.

dotmailer for Textlocal enables you to push personalised text messages to Textlocal’s SMS gateway directly from the email platform. You can use dotmailer in conjunction with the data from your ecommerce store to deliver the messages mentioned above, providing a highly relevant marketing experience across the board.

Press the button below to find out more about the dotmailer/Textlocal integration, plus how to send the right messages, to the right people, at the right times.