Retailers can drive conversions through text alerts and notifications

What this means: Meeting consumers where they are is a continuous challenge for retailers and brands. More often than not, meeting them today means engaging with shoppers through mobile devices, whether it be apps, browser, social media or text. Texting and social media engagement provide a true connection point with consumers, even in automated settings. But, consumers still want something valuable for connecting with a brand in any channel. Text message marketing shouldn’t be viewed as a “nice to have” offering from retailers — it's become necessary to compete in the marketplace, according to Listrak's 2023 Cross-Channel Benchmark Report. The report examined campaign performance across more than 1,000 retailers and reported analysis of approximately 112 billion email and text messages from all of 2022. “They love how personal and immediate it is,” Jake Pasini, Listrak’s vice president of strategy services, told Retail Leader Pro. ”They like to feel a real connection with the brand and love getting information on new products, personalized VIP discounts, etc.” Text messages about items of interest along with relevant news and offers are what resonate with consumers the most. Price drop alerts stand out as the top-performing click-through category for text message marketing with a 21.5% click-through rate. Back-in-stock alerts posted a 19.6% click-through rate last year. Listak said the immediacy of price drop and back-in-stock text message marketing propels customers to see how much a price drop is or grab an in-demand item. Listrak analyzed 11 message types, including broadcast, activity-based triggered messages, loyalty-based triggered messages and transactional. Top-line findings include: Text and email marketing work best in tandem. Customers who subscribed to both text and email marketing programs had a 30% higher customer lifetime value (CLV) than those subscribed to a single channel. Of note, retailers saw an explosion in send volume — including 75% increase year-over-year (YOY) send volume for text messaging — during the 2022 holiday season alone. Transactional messages are table takes. These have proven YOY to perform well across click through, conversion and revenue per-send metrics for both email and text messaging. Personalization is key in cross-channel marketing. Consumers no longer resist personalization on shopping platforms, but rather, expect it. Leveraging customer data to show greater personalization that can be displayed in messages like abandonment, alert and transactional categories drives higher key performance indicators across the board. Using a unified platform best leverages data. When text messaging, email and other channels share data, retailers can ensure they are communicating with customers in the channel they prefer, and it enables them to send the right message to the right customer at the right time, increasing loyalty and conversions. Personalized texts Consumers’ personalization expectations are growing throughout the omnichannel shopping experience. “They expect brands to know what products they have viewed, expressed an interest in, or even carted,” Pasini said. ”What’s more, they want to know when those products they’ve viewed go on sale, are low on inventory or come back in stock. They want to see their preferred colors, items that will fit — and things they didn’t even think they needed — but now must have. Finally, consumers expect personalization to be sophisticated and interwoven through marketing communication: across email, SMS, app push, browser push, social media, etc.” Consumers prefer retailers to communicate with them across all of their devices, seamlessly, as well. “Retailers should use a unified platform so the channels can share data and communicate with customers in the channel they prefer,” Pasini said. Consumers have the same expectations and preferences for text message personalization as they do for email. “The key is it being relevant and timely, as nobody likes receiving text messages that aren’t useful,” Pasini said. “They expect a brand to know they were browsing on their work computer but can receive a text message later in the day on their personal device.” Welcome series texts showed the strongest conversion rates among text messages with a 14.3% conversion rate. These messages offer a compelling incentive to get customers on board, then introduce the brand and invite customers to buy, Listak reported. It also helped that the average time from opt-in to opt-out on text campaigns was significantly longer than the opt-in to opt-out time on the email side. Back-in-stock alerts produced the highest revenue per send among text messages last year, followed by welcome series text messages, Listak found. The 2022 holiday season saw an explosion in send volume for marketing messages, including a 75% increase in YOY send volume for text messaging. Retailers that leveraged text messaging alongside email for holiday season marketing saw accelerated success through cross-channel strategies, Listak said. For this year’s holiday season — in regard to text messages from retailers — consumers expect to receive steeper discounts and sooner, Pasini said. What’s next: With consumers spending so much time engaging with social media and converting via that channel, text message offers may shift into consumer’s direct messages. Consumers source so much product research on social platforms, and receiving promotions to convert consumers quickly as they’re engaged may unlock additional growth opportunities.

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