Guess what, Cyber Weekend is next week! This is our second of three weekly tips to help add that extra oomph to your Black Friday marketing strategy. Today’s topic is SMS!
How can SMS drive sales this holiday season?
Inboxes get competitive on Cyber Weekend — you may even be seeing promotional emails already. While an email might get buried in an inbox, recipients typically see SMS messages right away.
Send your most critical messages by text to ensure your subscribers can take advantage of your promotion.
When Should You Use SMS?
SMS is a great channel for your most important messages. This BFCM, consider using SMS to:
- Announce your Black Friday campaign like the Maniscripting Journal
- Announce your Cyber Monday campaign like Girder Music, or send a promotion reminder
- Send a last chance reminder SMS two hours before your promotion ends, see BB Frösch for inspiration
Find more inspiration on the Klaviyo Showcase!
Tips for Timing Your Message
There are only so many messages carriers can send at a time, so we anticipate carrier delays in delivering messages to recipients. Below are strategies to ensure smooth texting—even during the busiest times:
- Segment your audience: If you have a large SMS subscriber list, send to smaller groups of subscribers and stagger the send times. Also be sure to set up key flows with SMS, like abandoned cart flow and welcome series.
- Avoid sending at the top of the hour: Most marketers send at the top of the hour, making the queue longer. Avoid delays by sending your message at 8:15 instead of 8:00, for example.
- Spread campaigns throughout the day: Early afternoon EST are popular times for SMS. Send your campaign outside these hours to avoid delays and competition for recipients’ attention.
- Remember to take into consideration quiet hours for your customer’s timezone.
- Size matters: Prioritize SMS over MMS on toll-free numbers (US & CA recipients only). MMS that include an image or GIF take more data to process, and can take longer to be delivered.
- Use Conversations to engage with customers (US & CA recipients only): when customers communicate with your brand over text, it helps improve future message deliverability.
Who Should You Text?
Only send text messages to consented SMS subscribers. Subscribing to your email list does not mean they’ve consented to SMS marketing. If you’re new to SMS, learn more about how to collect proper SMS consent.
- Send your promotion announcement campaigns to the widest audience possible (using segmentation to divide into multiple sends if you have a large list), and exclude:
- Never Actives: Subscribers that have received at least 15 texts but never clicked your messages.
- Give your best customers the VIP treatment. Create a VIP segment of SMS subscribers and send them a text with early access to your sale, or a special promotion just for them.
- Send SMS reminder campaigns to subscribers who consent to both email and SMS, but have not opened or clicked your BFCM emails.
- Exclude customers who have already purchased during this promotional period to avoid message fatigue.
Any Last Tips?
Plan your Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions in advance. Check out our suggested sending schedule for inspiration on using SMS and email together this holiday season!
If you’re new to SMS, take our course Writing SMS and MMS Copy to create messages that convert this BFCM.
Share your SMS advice below! Let us know what’s worked for you in the past, or if you’re new to SMS, what you’ll be trying out.