The guide to SMS marketing for enterprises

• Use multi-step sign-up forms. Multi-step forms ask for email addresses first, then phone numbers, allowing subscribers to choose how much information they want to share.

• Target email subscribers with SMS-specific sign-up forms. You can also serve up unique pop-up forms for existing email subscribers asking them to sign up for SMS.

• Send a “sign up for SMS” email campaign. Email subscribers already have an affinity for your brand and have demonstrated a certain level of intent. Many of them will likely be open to hearing from your brand via SMS.

• Use QR codes in physical retail locations. Display in-store signage that touts the benefits of signing up for SMS to convert new subscribers.

• Collect SMS at the point of sale. Ask for SMS sign-ups at check-out (online or in-store). If you do this online, make sure the opt-in checkbox is unchecked by default to comply with regulations.

• Make sure your policy language is compliant. Set SMS disclosure language. Your mobile terms of service and your privacy policy both need to be linked from your SMS sign-up form—a process automated by platforms like Klaviyo.

Eyelash brand Tatti Lashes built targeted pop-up forms prompting both new visitors and existing email subscribers to sign up for SMS marketing, generating 40,000 SMS subscribers in the brand’s first 3 months on the channel.

The results speak for themselves: the brand’s welcome text achieves a 30% click rate and converts at 9%. “We’re generating 6-figure revenue just from the welcome SMS,” says Nina Machin from Tatti Lashes. “People know that the brand doesn’t offer discounts, so that gives us real power when it comes to devising incentives.”

Prevent churn by creating SMS segments based on engagement and sending different campaigns to those segments. The least engaged people on your list, for example, should only receive your most important messages.

Experiment with your SMS cadence, and use the results to inform further behavioral segmentation. Golf apparel brand LinkSoul found that when they ramped up to weekly SMS sends based on results from testing, unsubscribes actually went down. In Q4 2022, Linksoul’s SMS campaign unsubscribe rate was 27% below median for their peer group. 

To start, we recommend the following on a monthly basis:

• Sending 2 major SMS announcements for promotions, new releases, or holidays to your full list

• Sending 2 follow-ups to the major announcements, either for early access or last call before the sale ends, excluding profiles that have already converted

• Sending 3 targeted SMS campaigns to segmented audiences, such as:

    • VIPs

    • Category or product purchasers or viewers

    • New subscribers who haven’t made a purchase yet

Send a variety of content via SMS to maintain engagement. Sales and discounts are great—especially exclusive offers for SMS subscribers—but consider other ways to keep your list from getting stale.

Thoughtful campaigns that take advantage of the channel’s unique characteristics can drive big results. Here are some ideas:

• Product launch promotions

• Early access to sales and discounts

• VIP/loyalty program messages

Apparel brand HOMAGE used SMS to make the product launch for their retro-style NFL starter jackets bigger and better. After sharing a hype video and encouraging their audience to sign up for SMS to get first access to the drop, they shared exclusive updates and first dibs on the product to customers who opted in.

The campaign led to 100 orders in the first hour of availability. “Customers told us they got the text, clicked the link and bam, they bought the jacket. Simple and fast,” says Nathan Okuley, VP of brand marketing at HOMAGE.

Automations nurture customer relationships at scale. Here are the essential SMS flows to invest in:

• Welcome series

• Abandoned cart recovery

• Back-in-stock notifications for popular and/or previously viewed items

• Post-purchase transactional follow-ups like shipping and fulfillment notifications

• Win-back campaigns for dormant customers who have previously purchased

• Review requests based on purchase date

• Replenishment reminders for consumable products

• Cross- and up-sell automation based on purchase history

• Two-way conversations to collect preferences, provide product recommendations, or answer FAQs

Now that home decor brand Mixtiles has set up automated SMS flows including a welcome series, abandoned cart series, and sunset flow, automated messages make up 40% of their email and SMS revenue. The abandoned cart series alone drives hundreds of thousands in revenue every month.

Throughput is the number of SMS or MMS messages a carrier can successfully deliver from a source to a destination within a specific time frame. Your messages may get stuck in a queue if your throughput is low.

Note that SMS has a higher throughput than MMS. Consider limiting your MMS sends to one-off automated flows and smaller segments, while using SMS for peak times, holidays, and concise messages that require immediate delivery (like flash sale announcements).

SMS deliverability depends on checks by your SMS marketing platform and the recipient’s wireless carrier. These platforms will check whether your recipient has opted into SMS, and whether your message violates S.H.A.F.T. (sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, or tobacco) principles or references illegal activities or substances. Individual points of failure may also occur if your recipient is in a location without service or your message is filtered in spam.

To ensure your messages make it to their intended destination, make sure your content complies with all standards. Be mindful of regional regulations and languages, and time your sends to recipients’ locations.

Klaviyo’s SMS deliverability hub makes it easy to monitor your message performance and protect your sender reputation.

Choose an SMS platform with compliance built in. You should always have a human involved in compliance, and make sure your teams keep records and documentation in case of regulatory audits.

But platforms like Klaviyo make it easy to manage subscriber consent, regional customization, and other safeguards at an enterprise scale. This protects you from running afoul of consumer protection legislation such as the US’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Today’s consumers expect omnichannel experiences by default, and they notice when businesses fall short. In fact, our future of consumer marketing report found that the top frustration consumers have when shopping with the same brand across multiple channels is inconsistent pricing and promotions—a glaring unforced error in the digital age.

There’s a right and wrong way to add SMS into your channel mix. The wrong way is to set it up as a siloed channel, disconnected from your customer data, then throw up your hands and write SMS off as a failed experiment when this disjointed approach inevitably yields poor results.

The right way is to fully integrate SMS with the rest of your tech stack—or, better yet, adopt a CRM with marketing channels like SMS built in—and use the data SMS yields to improve your overall omnichannel strategy. This not only can drive better attribution modeling that gives you key insights into what’s working and what’s not, it can also lead to better overall ROI and results.

Some customers will only want to receive emails. Others will only want to receive texts. But for the vast majority of customers who sign up for both your lists, the best approach is hybrid.

Use a text message when you want to make sure someone sees a message quickly—for instance, when the content is time-sensitive, like a flash sale, or extremely important, like a store opening or closing.

Use an email for longer-form content, including newsletters, and any messages that you want to reach everyone in your audience, such as a product announcement.

Segmentation is key to running both channels (more on this next). Klaviyo tools like campaign reporting by segment can help you assess which messages resonate with which segments.