Build Out Operational SMS Workflows that Drive Revenue with Attentive & Malomo

SMS marketing is going to be the main communication channel for ecommerce brands in 2022. With open rates as high as 98% and Apple’s recent email privacy changes, brands are leveraging SMS in 2022 to drive growth and improve customer retention.

Approximately 50% of consumers check their phones a minimum of five times an hour, which means your marketing messages are unlikely to go unnoticed. However, as easy as it is to contact customers through text messages, you need to be cautious not to spam or overwhelm them with marketing messages.

SMS marketing helps ecommerce merchants increase their brand, improve customer retention, and enhance a buyer's shopping experience, among numerous other benefits. Here's how Attentive helps ecommerce business owners ramp up their revenue and drive customer engagement.

What is Attentive?

Attentive is an SMS marketing platform for Shopify store owners. Attentive lets you create hyper-segmented campaigns, grow your SMS marketing list, create SMS marketing campaigns, and track your ROI with powerful reporting options.

Attentive is a Shopify Partner and is Shopify Plus Certified. Attentive facilitates two-way conversations, meaning you can use Attentive to have conversations with customers, provide text-based reorder services to customers, and collect consumer feedback via reviews.

How much does Attentive cost?

Attentive doesn’t have public pricing options listed. However, a 30-day free trial is available for any Shopify store when installed from the Shopify App Store.

How do I use Attentive on Shopify?

Here's a more detailed rundown on how to get started with Attentive for your SMS marketing needs.

1. Install Attentive on your Shopify store

Installing Attentive is easy – you can find it in the Shopify App Store. The app will ask you to accept the permissions, and after accepting, it will take a few minutes to install and sync with your store.

While the app is syncing, you can configure the settings. At this stage, Shopify merchants can generate segments, create campaigns, and enable automation.

Attentive will send you an email confirming the sync, after which you can check how many customers in your store qualify as "sendable." These customers have provided their contact information and agreed to receive marketing messages (they opt into your list).

2. Set up automations

You can get started with Attentive's "Customer Win-back" and "Abandoned Carts" automations and configure trigger automations as needed. Don't forget to customize your automated messages!

3. Segment your audience

Attentive lets you segment your sendable audience to launch targeted campaigns. The segmentation is fully customizable, and you can define criteria like "Total Spent" or "Number of Orders" to organize your customer list.

4. Launch SMS campaigns

While automations are activated by triggered events, campaigns are one-off events that you can send to segments or your entire list. To create a campaign, select "Campaigns" from the main menu and proceed to "Create Campaign." You can then select a segment and customize your campaign with text, tags, URLs, and if it's an MMS, you can also add media items.

After setting up a campaign, you can check if it functions as you intended with "Send Me A Test." After sorting the details out, you can select "Schedule Campaign" to send the messages later or "Send Campaign Now" to launch SMS campaigns immediately.

Tips and Best Practices for SMS on Shopify

Next, here are some best practice tips to get the most out of your SMS marketing strategy.

Don’t spam customers with texts

When it comes to launching SMS campaigns, pick quality over quantity. Customers don't appreciate being spammed. Sending them too many marketing messages comes across as invasive.

First, determine the best way to convey the information for your SMS campaigns before sending out the messages. The goal is to provide your audience with the most value in fewer messages, to limit how frequently you communicate with them.

Send order updates via SMS

Did your customer's order get delayed? Is there a hot new flash sale? Shoot your customers a text message to get their attention quickly and make it easy for them to respond to urgent matters.

Use SMS with email

SMS messages work best when complimenting your email marketing efforts and increase user engagement and participation overall. For example, let's say you have a big sale coming up, and your marketing team launches an email campaign to share the details.

Now, if your email open rates aren't high enough, a segmented SMS campaign can help you reach your goal. You can create a segment of your audience that hasn't opened the emails and shoot a short text with the campaign promotions. By segmenting your compliant subscriber list and strategically executing supplementary communications, you increase your open rates significantly.

Make use of GIFs and rich media to drive engagement

Word count is important since SMS and MMS limit the amount of text you can send per message. Leveraging GIFS and images to communicate your message can be incredibly impactful when designing your email marketing campaigns.

Since SMS and MMS have a significant character limit, the quality of your messages is all the more critical. Thus, be sure to use fresh copy to drive engagement and increase conversions.

Make use of tags to personalize campaigns

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, Attentive lets you personalize your SMS subscribers' experience by including tags in texts. For example, instead of writing a generic greeting like "Dear Customer," you can use a tag to address them by name. Adding a personal touch encourages user engagement and helps build lasting relationships with your shoppers.

How to drive revenue Attentive + Malomo

Did you know customers check their tracking info an average of 4.6 times per order? Instead of sending customers to a landing page with just their tracking status, create a landing page that gives them an update on their order along with product recommendations.

Malomo integrates with Attentive to enable brands to drive traffic from their post-purchase SMS campaign flows to Malomo’s beautiful, high-converting tracking pages. Shopify merchants can create pre-built SMS notification flows triggered by real-time carrier updates.

• Create pre-built SMS notification Journeys triggered by real-time carrier updates from Malomo
• Increase engagement and repeat purchases by driving SMS traffic to high-converting tracking pages
• Turn operational SMS messaging into a revenue generating initiative

Summary

SMS marketing presents ecommerce marketers with valuable opportunities to increase sales, grow their customer base, and drive revenue. Start using Attentive to grow your brand and improve the customer experience at all points of the customer journey. Once you have your Attentive integration set up, Malomo's other integrations, like with Justuno, allow you to further customize your SMS strategy to drive opt-ins and growth!

To learn more about how Malomo integrates with Attentive and improves the post-purchase experience, schedule a demo today.