For over a decade, SMS has been a key marketing tool for brands around the world, but over the last few years, it has become particularly useful for e-commerce brands. Specifically, family-oriented e-commerce brands looking to boost customer engagement and drive sales.
Running a family-oriented e-commerce brand is not easy, of course. Parents and caregivers are often juggling multiple responsibilities, from managing the household to coordinating family schedules. If you’re running a family-oriented business, you need to reach that audience in a way that is both timely and convenient, and SMS marketing provides you with a way to do that.
With open rates of over 98%, SMS guarantees that your message is likely to be seen, and so long as you adopt the best strategies for conversion, it could be the difference between an inactive customer and a sale.
So what are the best SMS strategies for family-oriented e-commerce brands? We’re going to look into seven of them now, giving you the best chance to utilise SMS effectively and grow as a result.
Cart Abandonment Recovery
As we just mentioned, targeting and converting families can be particularly challenging. While you might lead a lot of customers to the checkout page, 7 in 10 of those shoppers will end up abandoning their cart before purchase, whether that’s due to the complexity of the process, unexpected costs, or simple distractions.
If you’re operating on Shopify or WooCommerce, however, you have a good opportunity to get them back. One of the most effective plugins for both platforms is automated cart abandonment messages – SMS alerts that remind customers that they’ve left items in their cart. With Shopify and WooCommerce cart abandonment being one of the top issues for businesses, this could be the key to targeting those interested customers and getting them to complete the process.
Exclusive Family Offers
In a crowded digital marketplace, it’s easy for families to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of promotional, spam emails, ads, and messages they receive daily – especially when they’re not necessarily targeted at them. A good way to get around this, however, is by offering exclusive family-focused discounts and doing so over SMS to give that discount the best chance of being seen.
This could be a personalised promotion, a bundle offer, or a seasonal discount that falls around family-centric events like holidays, back-to-school shopping, or birthdays. By providing exclusive family offers through SMS, you’ll be cutting through the noise of generic advertisements, while also showing customers that you understand their needs.
Recommending Products
Speaking of understanding the customer’s needs, being a family-oriented business, you do understand your audience’s needs, and you should make sure to demonstrate this at every available opportunity. By using data derived from previous purchases or browsing behaviour, you can send targeted SMS recommendations that reflect the customer’s preference, helping them to save time, effort, and money while also making their shopping experience far more convenient. Through SMS, these recommendations will be delivered directly to their devices, ensuring that they’re highly visible and can be acted on quickly.
Updating on Shipping
Another reason why that last point is such a good strategy is because it helps create a seamless shopping experience that feels personal rather than transactional. As a result, families are more likely to trust your brand and recommend it to others, but this personalisation cannot stop once the products are ordered.
On the contrary, this is where SMS can become even more important, as it gives you a way to stay in contact with your customers and update them on the shipping process directly. As soon as the order is made, you should be sending timely SMS updates to provide families peace of mind and demonstrate that you value their experience. This will only help to build that level of trust they have with your brand and encourage them to come back for more.
Conclusion
These are just a few ways that SMS can be used to boost your family-oriented brand, but there are many more, including fun and interactive marketing campaigns, milestone reminders – once again building that sense of personalisation – and limited-time flash sales. The important thing, however, is that you realise how useful SMS remains in 2024, and put in all the necessary steps to make the most out of it.
