One of the most underrated ways to market or reach customers is through SMS text messaging. Compared to phone calls and email marketing, SMS messaging has a 98% open rate which is tremendously high compared to a 17.8% open rate for emails. For many businesses, SMS messages are a great way to send customers NPS surveys, order status updates, thank you messages, store information, and more. With one of our former businesses, Fiix, SMS messages served as a crucial way for us to receive feedback from customers and drive reviews to our Google Business Pages to boost our local SEO and help us be the top search result on Google.
As a result, we, at Lazer, are very bullish on SMS text messaging for its multitude of use cases, which is why we're excited to launch our second app for the Shopify ecosystem: SMS Text Messaging For Shopify Admin And POS
Texting for business is becoming a popular option of communication for business owners across North America. However within the Shopify ecosystem, there wasn't a simple and effective way for a merchant or staff member to dispatch a custom text message to a customer manually, while also being able to create reusable text message templates within Shopify Admin or POS.
After speaking and listening to numerous merchants, we've highlighted 3 example cases of how SMS text messaging can improve your store.
Increasing conversions for purchases
A very common journey for a customer is for them to come visit your online or physical store, peruse items, express interest in a few items, and then leave without purchasing them. The challenge that merchants face here is now that they have a signal or are aware of a customer expressing intent in an item, how can they convert that customer into actually making a purchase.
One really good technique that online stores are implementing is texting customers who have abandoned carts. By texting a promotion or incentive to customers who have abandoned carts, it oftentimes increases the likelihood of them following through on the purchase. For physical stores, they don't necessarily have this advantage of an "abandoned cart", but they can capture a person's information in person in order to reach them later.
With the SMS text messaging for Shopify Admin and POS app, you can now increase conversions for purchases by texting incentives to customers that you identify could use that extra push. No need to wait for a specific event or trigger to occur in a customer's journey with your online store or physical store - you can message them whenever.
Prompting feedback with NPS and experience surveys
Feedback is king - it has the power to make or break your business. The conventional way for businesses to collect feedback is in-person or via email. However, due to the poor reply rate and open rates of in-person and email feedback, those methods tend to perform poorly if you're a business that values lots of feedback. By texting a customer a link for feedback right after their experience with your store, you'll find the response rate to significantly higher and allow you to gather enough significant data to make actionable adjustments.
Getting more reviews
Typically when it comes to reviews, the traditional way businesses receive reviews is by organically waiting for the customer to decide to post a review on the channel they desire. The challenge with this is two-fold.
This method has a low conversion rate of a customer leaving review.
Where the customer leaves the review is completely up to them.
As a business owner, you obviously want as many high-rating reviews as possible, and oftentimes want those reviews to be concentrated on a specific channel that you desire (e.g. Yelp, Google, etc).
Now, with SMS text messaging for Shopify Admin snd POS, you can choose to send a text message with a link to the appropriate URL for the customer to leave a review at the precise moment you desire.
The benefits of this are:
You can increase the conversion rate of a customer leaving a review by reminding them to do so via a messaging channel with a 98% open-rate
You can increase the conversion rate of a customer leaving a review by dispatching this message right after their experience with you (whether it was through a purchase, refund, or miscellaneous encounter)
You can increase the concentration of these reviews by directing the customer to the precise channel you'd like them to leave a review on
Sharing important updates
Oftentimes with a store, a customer's journey isn't as simple as come in, select your item, and purchase. Oftentimes, stores have custom flows and journeys throughout a customer's lifecycle.
For example, a custom baseball bat store might have a customer journey of:
Selecting the baseball bat
Specifying what customizations you'd like
Purchasing the bat alongside the customizations
The shop performing those customizations
Delivering the bat to the customer's address
In the latter part of this journey, post-purchase, it would be a great experience if the store could send a status update, via text to the customer, on where along the customization journey they are for the customer.
For example:
"Hi Daniel, your baseball bat is next in queue for customization."
"Hi Daniel, your baseball bat is currently being worked on by our expert John."
"Hi Daniel, your baseball bat's customizations are complete and we've shipped it to your address."
At the moment, these texts can't be triggered automatically by Shopify, so as a store owner or merchant, you could set up templates and dispatch the text messages to the customer at the respective moments in time.
These are just a few examples of how to leverage this app to improve and continue to be successful within Shopify.
All-in-all, with SMS Text Messaging For Shopify Admin And POS you can now do the following all within Shopify Admin or Shopify POS app for any device:
Create and send custom SMS text messages to customers
View replies from customers who have responded to your SMS text messages
Create and manage SMS text message templates to avoid creating and writing the same text message over and over again - all within Admin or POS.
Select multiple customers at a time to send the same text template to
Select multiple orders, draft orders, and customers from the Orders, Draft Orders, and Customers tab, and send an SMS text message to all selected recipients
View the history of all the SMS text messages that were sent out to customers
Set your retail location's Google Business Short Name in settings, and choose to attach a link to your Google Business Review page to drive more reviews to your physical location and boost your Local SEO
This is just another step towards empowering e-commerce and physical retailers! We plan on extending this further by allowing merchants to schedule texts to be sent out at certain times and offering more rich analytics and automation associated with messaging.