SMS + Email Welcome Series Best Practices

Hi @bill_wishgarden,

This is a great question, and the answer depends on how you plan to manage your SMS vs Email Flows and analytics, as well as how many messages you plan to send as part of the Welcome Flow.  Typically, you’ll have less SMS messages compared to Email in a Welcome Flow since text messaging is a more “precious” channel and you want to avoid overloading your text subscribers.  But to really decide, it depends on a few factors. Here’s a few pros/cons to see what works for you:

Separating Welcome Series for Email and SMS:

• Pro: You can see analytics and reporting separated by channel easily from the Dashboard
• Pro: And, you can get a good sense of how many people are entering each channel
• Pro: If different people are managing different channels, this creates a nice logical split in which Flows are being maintained by whom.
• Pro: Separating out the messages makes the Flow look less “messy” and easier to maintain.
• Con: You need to manage and setup thoughtul Message Filtering to avoid sending the same type of content twice in both channels
• Con: You may have to update things in two places whenever you want to make a change.  You may forget to do one or the other!
• Con: You have to aggregate reporting on these two separate Flows if you want to know how your Welcome Series is doing overall. 

Combining Welcome Series for Email and SMS:

• Pro: You have one place for your Welcome Series, and it’s nice to have it in one place to see the “whole picture.”
• Pro: In the same way, you can easily see in one place all the Flow analytics of which emails are being sent, and if there are conditional paths, where SMS are being sent.  
• Pro: You may be able to do more complex Email vs SMS tests since its in one Flow and not have to worry about Message Filtering since its all done in one place.
• Pro: You won’t “forget to update the SMS version” because it’s right there!
• Con: Your Flows can get really big quickly and become messier and harder to follow or maintain.
• Con: If multiple people are working in the Flow, it can break each others process by accident.
• Pro/Con: Your reporting for this Flow is aggregated, so sometimes you can’t tell without opening the Flow which channel is contributing to the results.  For some, this might be good or bad - depending on how granular or “summed up” you want your data to be.

The good news is, for dynamic coupons, if you use the same “coupon code” label they will be the same code regardless of the channel (and even for subsequent emails/sms so long as the coupon code has not expired or is still valid).  

Hope this helps!

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Joseph Hsieh // retentioncommerce.com // twitter: @retenion