A Complete Guide to Omnichannel Messaging

Modern consumers experience brands across a multitude of mediums. The average person now has over eight social media accounts, a cell phone, an email address, and various other touchpoints companies can use to contact them. 

Across all these mediums, 90% of consumers expect their experience engaging with your company to be consistent—the same prices, messaging tone, imagery, and more, no matter where they encounter your brand. An effective omnichannel strategy seeks to meet consumers regardless of which platform and deliver the kind of consistent, clear messaging that keeps them interested in your brand.

Short Messaging Service (SMS) messages are the backbones of salient omnichannel marketing strategies—over 90% of consumers enjoy receiving texts from businesses, and over half say it's the best way to reach them. This guide will highlight the role of SMS messages in omnichannel strategies, explain some best practices for their use, and detail how to integrate them into your own marketing plan.

Table of Contents

The Role of SMS in an Omnichannel Strategy

Integrating SMS into Your Omnichannel Marketing Plan

1. Understanding Your Audience
2. Aligning SMS with Other Channels
3. Leveraging Rich Media and SMS
4. Gather Analytical Insights

Successful Omnichannel Campaigns with SMS

Best Practices for Omnichannel Success with SMS

Optimize Your SMS Marketing Efforts with Mozeo

The Role of SMS in an Omnichannel Strategy 

There’s no faster way to reach customers than SMS messages. Text boasts a 98% open rate, with 9 of 10 read in just three seconds. If you want to contact your customers in real-time, on their terms, and almost guarantee they’ll get the message, SMS easily beats out other channels. 

Furthermore, text messages are incredibly easy to personalize—an essential factor in today’s customer-centric era. Over 70% of consumers expect companies to personalize interactions—so if you aren’t already, you’re potentially putting off most of your clientele.

To customize messages, you can simply use a set template and work in the customer’s:

• Name
• Location
• Other relevant specifics

SMS is quick, personal, and essential to your omnichannel campaign. However, the question remains: how can you best incorporate text messages into your marketing mix?

Integrating SMS into Your Omnichannel Marketing Plan 

If you’re leveraging social media, your website, online ads, and other mediums to connect with your customers, congratulations: you’re already using a multichannel marketing approach to build your brand. 

Fortunately, you can easily integrate SMS messages into existing strategies without detracting from your other platforms. Since three-quarters of consumers prefer SMS for important interactions such as updates and alerts, they can complement your branding and advertising efforts on social media and other spaces without overshadowing them.

To elevate your multichannel mix into an all-encompassing omnichannel approach, begin by:

1. Understanding Your Audience 

SMS personalization begins with segmentation, which divides your total audience into smaller, similar groups to better target your marketing and messaging efforts. This allows you to craft catered messages that more profoundly resonate with recipients.

When segmenting your audience, you may want to consider dividing them by factors such as:

• Age
• Geographical location
• Prior purchasing habits
• Gender
• Other characteristics affecting buyer motivations and identities
  
  

Once your audience is divided into segments, customize (and personalize) your SMS strategy directly to that group.

2. Aligning SMS with Other Channels 

SMS is but one of many marketing channels you can leverage to reach customers and promote your products and services—even if it is the most effective. To successfully  incorporate text messages into your marketing mix, pair them up with the following:

• Email campaigns – Welcome emails are an excellent way to establish contact with customers: over 80% are opened, generating ten times the click-through rate (CTR) of other email styles. After this initial contact, however, email open rates tend to drop to less than 50%. So, to effectively combine it with SMS, first make contact through email, collect their number as soon as possible, and route all important interactions through text messages to boost your read and response rates. 

• Social media posts – Social media offers an effective way to get your brand in front of many consumers, but not necessarily a solid means of capturing their interest. Social media ads, for instance, boast a paltry CTR of 1.21% (versus SMS’s usual range of 20-35%). However,  this changes when you post short videos, which captivate 66% of consumers. Take advantage of this interest by posting promotional clips incentivizing viewers to sign up for your texting campaigns, creating a clear connection between your SMS and social media advertising. 

• Other marketing efforts – Whether on your website, in traditional print ads, or on any other medium, give your customers the option to contact your business via SMS to learn more about your offerings. As mentioned, SMS is the preferred method of business-to-consumer (B2C) communication for most customers, so persuade them to use it whenever they want to get in touch. 

3. Leveraging Rich Media and SMS 

Pretty pictures, vibrant videos, and glitzy graphics capture our imaginations and get us to pay attention to what’s in front of us. The majority of consumers are more likely to purchase from you if you enhance your text messages with photos and video clips. Consider converting those plain SMS messages to MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages.

4. Gather Analytical Insights

Besides reaching more customers, SMS can also provide valuable insights into their spending habits and other relevant information. To glean useful analytical data from your text messaging campaigns, track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as:

• CTR – As mentioned, most SMS messages result in clicks 20-35% of the time.
  
  
• Return on Investment (ROI) – Over half of small and medium businesses (SMBs) report $21-40 ROIs for every dollar spent on SMS campaigns. 
  
  
• Response rate – On average, SMS messages receive a response around 45% of the time.
  
  

Comparing campaign metrics to past performance will inform whether you should continue or reassess your strategy. However, if you're launching your first SMS campaign, you may need to collect data to establish baselines.

Successful Omnichannel Campaigns with SMS 

About a decade ago, GreenPal—a lawn care company with customers across the United States—had a major issue: no one was reading or responding to their emails. When their CEO Bryan Clayton researched why, he found most customers simply don’t check their inboxes. 

After switching to text messages for business and promotional communications, they’ve easily been able to keep in touch with their 300,000 clients and boost sales simultaneously. When asked about the effect of SMS on his business, Klayton said: “Without SMS, I don't know that we'd be in business because we just couldn't figure out another way to keep people in the loop.”

Clothing retailer Nordstrom also used text messaging to enhance business communications and improve customer satisfaction. When they learned that a third of customers liked receiving photos of clothing via text, they made regular MMS messages part of their campaigns. Likewise, they’ve always stayed with the times, adding features such as SMS delivery receipts and similar notices to serve their customers better. 

Best Practices for Omnichannel Success with SMS 

So, now that you’ve seen the benefits of SMS marketing, you want to work them into your omnichannel strategy. To make the most out of text messaging, be sure to:

• Send sparingly – Too many messages can come across as bothersome, desperate, and, at worst, spam. The United States Chamber of Commerce recommends sending two to six messages per month to keep clients engaged but not annoyed. 

• Personalize every message - We’ve already discussed the importance of personalization. Still, it’s worth reiterating: Customers expect it, so don’t send a single message without their name or other relevant information. 

• Get consent – Customers MUST opt-in to receive messages from you. Otherwise, you break federal laws and face up to $1,500 in fines per message.

• Reexamine and reevaluate – Monitor KPIs to track successes. After test-running an SMS campaign, evaluate its performance and use the collected data to make adjustments. 

Optimize Your SMS Marketing Efforts with Mozeo

SMS messages have the highest open, read, and response rates of any communication channel. They elicit exceptional CTRs, and consumers prefer them when interacting with businesses, making SMS instrumental to any effective omnichannel marketing plan.

Text messages enable quick personalization—a must-have in fragmented digital marketing landscapes where consumers assume every form of communication is an unsolicited ad. They’re also opt-in only, meaning they’re much less maligned than other promotional channels and don’t elicit the negative emotions often associated with embedded ads and cold calls.

Trust Mozeo for your messaging needs to power your SMS campaign and bring your omnichannel marketing strategy to life. Mozeo allows you to easily manage business messages and drive revenue by reaching more engaged clients. Explore Mozeo Messenger to get started today.