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Email Marketing, SMS Marketing

Did you know that there are about 600,000 new businesses in the United States each year? However, many of these businesses tend to fail within the first few years. As you might expect, part of operating a successful company includes investing in effective marketing strategies.

SMS marketing is something every entrepreneur should prioritize, but not everyone knows where to start. We’ve created a useful guide that conveys all you need to know in order to succeed when developing an SMS marketing campaign.

Let’s dive into all you need to know about SMS text marketing.

Leverage A/B Testing

As you might guess, A/B testing (also called split testing) compares two versions of something to see which performs better.

You can A/B test all sorts of things in your SMS marketing campaigns, from the send time to the message itself. Once you’ve found a winning combination, you can be confident that you’re getting the most out of your SMS marketing efforts.

It’s best to start small when A/B testing your SMS campaigns. For example, you might want to test two different send times to see which gets better engagement. Once you’ve found a winner, you can move on to testing other elements, like the message itself.

Don’t Neglect Personalization

Personalization is key to any successful marketing campaign, and SMS marketing is no different.

Your subscribers are more likely to engage with a message that’s been tailored specifically for them. There are a few ways to personalize your SMS marketing messages.

First, you can segment your list so that you’re only sending relevant messages to each group. For example, if you have a list of both men and women, you might want to send different messages to each group.

You can also use merge tags to insert each subscriber’s name into the message. This helps create a more personal connection with your subscribers.

Finally, you can use dynamic content to show different content to different subscribers based on their interests.

Use a Strong Call to Action

Every SMS marketing message should have a call to action (CTA). A CTA is simply an instruction to the subscriber about what you want them to do next.

For example, your CTA might be to click a link, call a phone number, or visit your website. Your CTA should be clear and concise. It should also be relevant to the content of your message.

For example, if you’re offering a discount, your CTA should be to take advantage of that discount.

Track Your Results

It’s important to track the results of your SMS marketing campaigns so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

There are a few key metrics you’ll want to track. One of the most important is your open rate, which is the percentage of people who open your message.

You will also want to track your click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people who click on a link in your message. Finally, track your conversion rate, which is the percentage of people who take the desired action after receiving your message.

By tracking these metrics, you can see how successful your SMS marketing campaigns are and make changes accordingly. This will be one of your most important responsibilities when developing an SMS campaign.

Focus on Deliverability

Deliverability is the term used to describe how often your SMS messages actually reach your subscribers’ phones.

This is an important metric to track because it can have a big impact on your open and click-through rates.

Primarily, you should use a dedicated short code, which is a special phone number that’s used solely for SMS marketing. This will help ensure that your messages are delivered to your subscribers’ phones. You can also use a reputable SMS provider, which will help improve your deliverability.

Be sure to follow the best practices for SMS marketing, which will help ensure that your messages are delivered to your subscribers.

Work With a Professional

If you’re serious about getting the most out of your SMS marketing, it’s a good idea to work with a professional. They can help you develop an effective strategy, choose the right keywords, and track your results.

They can also provide you with support and guidance along the way if you encounter issues.

When choosing a professional, ask about their experience with SMS marketing. You should also ask for ecommerce marketing testimonials from previous clients.

It’s also in your best interest to devote some time to researching their past reputation. This will ensure that you find someone who is ideal for your campaign.

What Are Common Mistakes People Make When Creating SMS Campaigns?

One of the most common mistakes people make is failing to personalize their messages or using a bad platform. We recommend Klaviyo SMS marketing.

Getting a generic text message that doesn’t include any form of personalization is sure to cause you to fall short of your goals. Additionally, not using proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling is also a common mistake.

This can make your message difficult to understand and will likely cause people to ignore it. Not having a clear call to action is another mistake that people often make. Without a CTA, people may not know what you want them to do next and they’ll likely just delete your message.

Be sure that you keep this information in mind in the future so that you can make the most of the opportunities and SMS campaign is able to provide.

SMS Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Incorporating SMS marketing might seem complex, but it’s easier than you might expect it to be. Keep the above guidelines in mind so you can avoid problems you may have otherwise dealt with.

Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to get in touch with us today and see how we can help.

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eCommerce, Email Marketing

Introduction – What is Retention Marketing?

Retention marketing is also known as customer retention. It’s a strategy that helps businesses to keep their current customers and increase the lifetime profitability (also known as lifetime value, or LTV) of each customer. Put simply, it’s the way of thinking about your business’s marketing scheme, how it works, and how it can work better for your customers.

Why is Retention Marketing Important for Your Business

Retention marketing is a relatively new concept that is gaining popularity in the business sector, specifically with the meteoric rise of ecommerce business due to the various economic shutdowns, forcing customers to shop online. It is an approach to customer retention that focuses on the customer experience, as opposed to acquisition. It aims to create a positive and memorable experience for customers so they will want to stay loyal and continue doing business with you.

The goal of retention marketing is not just to keep your current customers but also make them happy so they will want to come back again and again. With retention marketing, you are focusing your efforts on making sure that your customers have a good time each time they interact with your company, rather than just trying to get them in the door for the first time.

Retention marketing is important because it’s a lot cheaper to retain a customer than acquire them. Acquiring a new customer is typically 5x to 25x more expensive than the cost to retain one.

If you’ve established a solid foundation of customers, you should aim to split your time 70% on Acquisition and 30% on Retention. If that sounds like you, read on to learn ways to begin working on marketing retention tactics.

What are the Best Ways to Improve Customer Retention and Loyalty

Retaining customers is one of the most important aspects of a business. Customer retention strategies are a great way to increase customer loyalty and help businesses grow. In this article, we will discuss some strategies that you can use to retain your customers.

Customer Service

The first strategy is to ensure that your customer service is on point and that you are providing the best possible experience for your customers. This starts with having an efficient customer service team that knows how to solve any problem and provide fast responses in order to satisfy the needs of your customers. You can leverage site chat if you have a support team or email support at minimum. You should also have a comprehensive FAQ page with all the answers for the most common questions so that customers do not need to wait for a response from a member of staff.

If you have a live chat you can turn questions into sales or resolved complaints into a smooth resolution and preserving that experience. At FORGE, we love Hubspot’s built in chat feature but you can also leverage plugins for Facebook Messenger or Customer Specific Support like Tawk.To which even offers the ability to hire remote chat staff to support you as you grow.

Gifting

If you have the margin to do so, consider adding free gifts at checkout or within your packaging to encourage the “law of reciprocity”. When people get something from you without asking or expecting it, they will be delighted and often times want to give back. This can encourage referrals or return business.

Another simple way to delight your customers is handwritten thank you notes. You’d be surprised; a little goes a long way.

Customer Loyalty Program

Part of effective marketing retention strategies is consumer psychology. You want to help each customer achieve what they set out to when they first opted in to try your product or service. One way to help

Email Marketing

This is the #1 Retention Marketing tactic. Specifically, we’re talking about Email Marketing Automation.

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools for companies. However, it can be time-consuming for marketers to manually send personalized emails to their customers. This is where email automation comes in.

It allows marketers to automate and schedule the sending of personalized emails so they don’t have to worry about sending a message at the right time. It also saves them time by automating repetitive tasks like creating a welcome email and following up with people who haven’t opened an email in a while.

Email automation is one of the best ways for marketers to save time, money, and energy when trying to create customer engagement campaigns.

If you’re an ecommerce brand looking to increase your retention and improve your conversions, you will be hardpressed to find a better all-in-one solution than Klaviyo, our preferred Email Marketing and retention platform.

Klaviyo is a comprehensive retention marketing tool that provides a number of templates for high impact email automations, or as they call them, Flows.

Here are just a few of the Flows we recommend at Forge to get you started on your retention strategy:

Welcome Series: Get your subscribers to close the first deal by teaching them about your brand and services while increasing trust and building the foundations of a long-lasting relationship.

Post-Purchase: Will increase customers retention and lifetime value turning them into loyal buyers.

Re-engagement: Save money and stop sending emails to people who don’t want it. Using the re-engagement tactic will improve your email deliverability and make sure that you keep your list clean.

Abandoned Cart: 73% of shopping carts are abandoned. Recover them at the right time, while they are still considering your product.

Browse Abandonment: They can help remind your subscribers of their early interest and potentially bring them back to your online store, softening the sting of your initial disappointment that they didn’t buy on their first visit.

SMS Marketing

Text marketing is a type of marketing that uses text messages to promote and sell products or services. It is also called SMS marketing, short message service (SMS), mobile marketing, or by the abbreviation “texting.” Text messages are delivered to a cell phone via an SMS message.

Klaviyo doubles as a SMS marketing tool allowing you to reach your customers where they are constantly looking: their phones. You can also send MMS messages, or text promotions with images included. Check out Klaviyo for SMS here.

Loyalty Programs & Referrals

If you’ve been able to retain a loyal customer for a long time, this will feed acquisition naturally through referrals. Make sure to encourage referrals from your loyal customers by rewarding them for referrals.

Measure your Retention Strategy

Your Repeat Customer Rate is the number 1 thing to monitor to see if your retention strategies are being effective. Shopify will calculate this for you in your dashboard, but if you’re using Woocommerce or another CMS, use this quick equation to establish your Customer Retention Rate:

# of Customers Who Purchased More than 1x

————————————————————————————————————

# of Unique Customers

 

Next, you’ll want to manage your AOV, or average order value. Calculate it thusly:

 

Yearly Revenue

————————————————————————————————————

# of Orders Your Store Processed

 

Lastly, calculate your Customer Value:

Purchase Frequency x Average Order Value = Customer Value

 

If you’re in need of assistance setting up a high converting retention marketing strategy, please feel free to reach out. Forge Digital Marketing is your go-to partner to establish your ecommerce retention strategies and grow bigger than you ever thought possible!

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Email Marketing

If you haven’t considered using SMS marketing in your digital strategy — think again. 9 out of 10 customers prefer to communicate with businesses via text.

But how exactly does an SMS marketing strategy work? And what should you look for in an SMS marketing service?

Below we include a guide explaining SMS marketing services and the 6 considerations for choosing the best SMS marketing services.

Basics of SMS Marketing

SMS marketing has been around for a while, but many businesses haven’t tried it for themselves. Here’s a quick refresher on what SMS marketing is and the benefits you can receive from an SMS campaign.

What is SMS Marketing?

SMS marketing involves using text messages to promote your business’s products and services. It’s a digital strategy also known as mass texting. It works like emails do but is much more effective – research shows that Americans check their phones 96 times a day.

What Do SMS Marketing Services Do?

your SMS campaigns through the use of a team and relevant software.

The team will be responsible for writing and researching all of the messages behind your campaign. They’ll then use their top-notch technology to schedule texts to be sent to people on your contact list.

What Are the Benefits of SMS Marketing Services?

SMS marketing has numerous benefits and has come a long way since its inception. With SMS marketing, you can boost sales, engage your audience, earn consumer loyalty, collect and nurture leads, and create buzz around a product or competition. 

SMS marketing services will amplify all of the positive effects of an SMS marketing campaign because you’ll have a team of experts dedicated to crafting and delivering the perfect message.

What to Look for in SMS Marketing Services

Not all SMS marketing systems are created equal. Here are a few things you should consider when looking for your SMS service.

1. Combined Platforms

Aside from SMS marketing, email marketing is one of the best revenue-generating channels – especially for e-commerce businesses. It only makes sense that you try to build your SMS and email strategy together. This is why we recommend Klaviyo to our marketing clients 9 times out of 10.

When selecting your SMS provider, look for one that can manage both SMS and your email at the same time. That way, the services can merge customer data into one profile and provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the customer interacts with your brand.

You’ll also have an advantage when contacting your customers because you can make smarter communication decisions. For instance, if the customer doesn’t open an email, you can send them a text with the same information since you know they haven’t seen it yet.

2. Flexible Contract

Having contract flexibility with digital marketing services is key to any positive relationship. Your business needs will grow and change over time, and so will your marketing strategies.

Look for providers that charge you based on the size of your subscriber list, not based on the size of your business as a whole. You may only want to send targeted messages to a small number of people.

Also, consider the length of your contract. It should be flexible enough so that you can change it every month or even every quarter. You should not have to sign a multi-year deal that leaves no room for change.

3. Seamless Functionality

Selling directly to your customers via SMS is of course meant to increase sales. But it’s also meant to be a tool that gives you data for more personalized experiences in the future.

You want services that will use your SMS to create a seamless customer journey. Messages are only the first part – next, the user should visit your website and have a positive experience there

This means that the SMS team should be sending text messages based on your customers’ actions – not based on a random timeline. They’ll only send messages when it will optimize the sales funnel.

4. Communication Expertise

Text messages may be short – but that makes them even more difficult to get right. In just a few lines, you have to attract the customer’s attention and encourage them to engage with your call to action.

Your SMS marketing services should be expert communicators, able to reach people of all different backgrounds and positions in the sales funnel.

And they also should know how to personalize messages based on what the target audience will respond to best. It could be anything from opening with a customer’s name to only texting them about sales in their size.

5. Clear Tracking Tools

SMS has some of the best returns for any digital marketing method. But of course, this is if you have the right data available.

Your SMS marketing service should be using software and tools to accurately track customer actions and interactions.

For instance, say a customer receives both an email from you and a text message within the same 48 hours. They then place an order.

With the right software that manages email and SMS together, only the message the customer saw the most recently would get credit for the sale. Otherwise, both channels would get credit and you wouldn’t have a true understanding of what was working.

6. High Compliance & Deliverability Standards

SMS compliance may not be complicated, but it’s required. Your SMS marketing services need to be completing all tasks above board. Messaging subscribers who haven’t given explicit consent or failing to provide an opt-out option are grounds for trouble.

Make sure that the provider you select has run numerous SMS marketing campaigns before and knows the ins and outs of the law.

Deliverability is another important element of your SMS campaign. How often are messages going through? Your SMS provider should have a deliverability rate of 90% at the very least.

Transform Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Your business can’t thrive without a strong digital presence. SMS marketing services and other strategies are the keys to standing out.

And you don’t have to do it alone. The Forged team is here to guide you through your digital strategy, whether you need text message marketing tips or a new website.

Contact us to get started!

ecommerce marketing service

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