Boost Sales Using in WooCommerce SMS services

The ecommerce landscape has witnessed steady growth for the past few years, sending WooCommerce SMS has positioned as one go-to channel for a variety of reasons we list down below.

With each day larger consumer base, the number of players in the e-commerce market has also increased by many folds. Studies have shown that 9 out of 10 consumers prefer communication with businesses through SMS.

That’s why, with a significant raise in the number of promotional messages an average user comes across daily, it becomes a bit challenging to put your product or service in front of the target audience.

This is where WooCommerce SMS notifications present an ideal opportunity for your store.

Differentiating with SMS in a mobile dominant ecommerce industry

There is no doubt that mobile is the future of marketing. The gradual shift of internet users towards mobile can be inferred from the fact that around 52.2% of all web traffic worldwide comes from mobile.

For ecommerce shoppers, the shift is more visible: the web-traffic share of mobile in retail e-commerce expected to reach 72.9% globally by 2021. 

As SMS is exclusively a mobile-based service on the user end, it allows your marketing efforts to cope with the shifting trends. 

Reaching your audience instantly

Receiving SMS in real-time does not require mobile users to be connected to the internet, they can be reached at all times.

If being delivered instantly wasn’t enough, 90% of all text messages are read within 3 minutes. This high efficiency and speed of delivery of marketing messages make SMS a perfect medium for sending WooCommerce SMS order notifications and important product updates to your customers.

Boosting engagement with your brand

Apart from a brilliant open rate, the response rate of text messages also beats email by a large margin. SMS has a high click-through rate at 36%, compared to 3.4% for email.

These rates are particularly useful if you need to send WooCommerce SMS, to remind your customers about unfinished purchases.

Timely reminders will help you to minimise the rate of shopping cart abandonment, to boost your sales and to drive traffic to your website. 

More personal marketing communications

Personalising your WooCommerce SMS communications is a simple and rewarding.

You can personalise a message for addressing your customers by their first names. For example:

Apart from names, you can customise a customer’s parcel number, address and more. You can also personalise your name as a sender, where instead of sending the text from a random four or five-digit number, it displays your brand name as the sender.

Octopush offers a service named SMS Pro, which allows customisation of the sender of your SMS so that you are instantly identifiable to your customers.

Sending scheduled promotions

Timing promotional content can be tricky, and maintaining that timing can be trickier. But thanks to scheduling features, you don’t need to be sitting around waiting for the perfect hour to send out your promotional WooCommerce SMS notifications in real-time.

You can schedule single or multiple messages for sending at different times, depending on your marketing plan. 

Reaching your customers during a time when they are likely to read your texts is sure to boost engagement.

Scheduling texts is particularly useful if you want to use WooCommerce SMS for promotional messages during peak hours. You can also schedule text messages for sending periodic reminders to your customers about an abandoned cart or an approaching expiry date of your offers.

Putting promotions on auto-pilot 

Although personalisation and scheduling are great for an efficient marketing plan, without automation, these can take a lot of resources. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to send personalised texts individually to hundreds or thousands of users without automation.

By integrating an SMS gateway with your ecommerce store, you will be able to automate tasks such as purchase confirmations and cart abandonment alerts, ensuring a smooth user experience for your customers.

Getting more out of analytics

Marketing is no longer a qualitative practice involving non-targeted communications based on abstract metrics. Instead, it has evolved to incorporate a data-driven approach to reach the ideal type of audience for your marketing messages.

Consumer activity statistics from your past campaigns, and user activity on your website, helps you identify consumer intent. Which becomes a differentiating factor between a good and a great marketing campaign.

Octopush helps you effectively gather relevant data and measure the impact of your campaigns with its powerful statistics tool, allowing you to make the most out of your WooCommerce SMS marketing campaigns.

Proven tactics to make the most of WooCommerce SMS

Automating text sending requires a WooCommerce SMS plugin like the one Octopush provides, which can integrate with your WooCommerce store to make the most out of your SMS marketing plan.

You can send SMS messages to more than 196 countries for the best prices.

Recover cart abandonment 

One of the biggest headaches for ecommerce businesses is shopping cart abandonment. The average documented cart abandonment rate stands at 69.57%, which means that 2 out of 3 people do not complete the purchase after adding products to their shopping cart.

This points to a lot of missed opportunities and more revenue lost than gained. 

Whilst cart abandonment cannot be completely stopped, because a part of the customers who abandoned the cart had no purchase intent in the first place, it can be partially recovered. You can use automated SMS texts to send a reminder after cart abandonment in your WooCommerce store.

This helps you recover carts from people who had purchase intent but couldn’t follow through for some reason. You can send a text that reads:

Most likely you cannot recover all of the 60-70% lost revenue, however anything around 10-15% is a very good recovery rate.  

Track WooCommerce Wishlist items

WooCommerce SMS can also be used to send alerts related to Wishlist, which allow both guests and customers to create and add products that they plan to buy later.

Since the purpose of the Wishlist is to make customers come back to your site, why not give them a gentle nudge about their pending purchases?

You can send SMS in your WooCommerce store periodically about their Wishlist items, or send alerts when discounts or offers are available for any of the selected items. You can send texts like:

Following up on ecommerce’s wishlists will help drive sales by converting potential customers to actual ones by simply nudging their purchase intent. 

Notify restocks  

At times, customers with purchase intent fall short of completing a purchase because of a product being out of stock. This can lead to lost revenue if not followed up.

You can detect such activity on your website and notify them through your WooCommerce SMS when the product is restocked on your store. Restocks regarding size, colour or style variant of a product is also important to notify if applicable.

You can automate the process to send the SMS alert immediately after the product is restocked with a text that reads:

Notifying your customers about the availability of a product they intended to buy will help you boost both conversions and customer retention.

Track the delivery 

The most anxious phase for a customer in the buying process is the delivery.

Unlike a physical store, they don’t get their hands on the product immediately after purchase. So, it is natural for customers to be concerned about the status of delivery of their products. 

You can use the personalised user experience through your WooCommerce SMS, and provide purchase and delivery status updates through text.

You can send a message like:

Octopush offers a reliable service for sending automated texts regarding order confirmation, collection tracking and delivery follow-up, creating a seamless experience for your customers.

Provide high-quality customer service

In call-based customer support, most customers face issues getting a line to voice their concerns. Calls often have long waiting times and have to be transferred more than once to complete the service. This often leads to customer dissatisfaction.

For an WooCommerce SMS based customer service, businesses don’t need a support staff 24/7 to respond in real-time to customers. 

Customers can send their queries over text at their convenience without facing busy lines or endless call forwarding. Which is why over 50% of consumers prefer text messaging over phone calls for contacting customer support. 

Text-based customer support is also efficient in terms of resources, as it saves a lot of time and money on customer service, making it a more efficient medium than phone calls. SMS is also a highly engaging platform for users to interact with the company. 

You can automate your SMS-based customer support to answer the common questions by your customers. It reduces the overall time and effort for your customers to get the information they want, as the automated response is generated within seconds. 

If the automated messages cannot answer the query, it can send a text like this:

Customers will appreciate the swift service, which will help you to have a better retention rate.

Gather feedback easily

Customer feedback about your product or service can serve as a tool to gather word of mouth. Customers often check reviews before acquiring any service to get assurance about it. While you can leverage the high response rate of SMS to gather feedback from your customers, it is also important to encourage customers to leave reviews in your ecommerce store.

If a customer raises an issue that calls for your attention, be sure to reach out to the customer and assure them of improvement. After you have resolved the issue, send a text like:

Reaching out to customers helps to build a strong connection with them, which eventually helps in retention. You can also display customer feedback received through WooCommerce SMS, as a guarantee of your service quality. 

You can use an SMS marketing service like Octopush to send polls and surveys to your customers after a purchase where they can provide you with the positives and negatives of their experience. For example, after a customer checks out, you can send a text that reads:

With the rapid growth of e-commerce, SMS marketing trends are likely to continue the climb in the coming days. Integrating an WooCommerce SMS service makes a compelling case for online stores, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce communities. The possibilities of growth utilising SMS marketing are virtually endless.

So, make the most of your opportunity by starting your free trial on Octopush today by creating a free account!