Text message marketing is powerful stuff.
As paid channels become less effective—and first-party data becomes even more precious—a growing number of brands have embraced text message marketing as a highly personalized way to connect with customers and boost revenue.
But the road to text-led revenue isn’t as simple as some text message vendors might let on.
To effectively persuade customers to sign up for owned channels—and extract the maximum value from those relationships—you can’t hedge your bets on SMS solutions that keep texts in a silo.
Future-focused brands need a solution that treats text messaging as a mobile-first revenue channel.
Enter Text-to-Join.
With Text-to-Join, organizations can encourage customers to opt into their SMS programs via text.
This is especially relevant for B2C retailers and eCommerce businesses. When you need multiple ways to incentivize customers to opt into your marketing channels, whether in-store or online, text messaging is an ideal solution when it’s deployed the right way.
By making it easy for customers to opt-in through a convenient medium, organizations that leverage Text-to-Join are positioned to grow their subscriber lists and meaningfully integrate their SMS marketing plays with other channels and campaigns.
Our latest product release enables them to do just that.
Similar to website opt-ins, it’s important to create a seamless and compliant experience for your customers, so they easily understand how to sign up and what your text messaging program encompasses. Here are two ways to get started with Text-to-Join:
Once you have set your keyword and ensured your opt-in experiences are compliant, you can begin devising the right Text-to-Join strategies for your brand. When done right, Text-to-Join can help your brand turn single channel customers into omnichannel customers while driving more revenue in the process.
With traditional marketing channels becoming more expensive and delivering less ROI, taking full ownership and advantage of first-party data is paramount.
Not convinced? Consider these facts:
Given increased costs and dwindling returns, shifting revenue goals to owned channels is critical to driving sustained growth, even if third-party conditions improve.
When marketers fully own and control growth and communication channels, they can reduce costs while delivering targeted, behavior-based messaging to the customers most likely to act.
Most text message marketing vendors lack sufficient tools for list growth, focusing primarily on SMS as a channel.
While this typically involves funneling customers into SMS flows, this approach isn’t enough to turn your text message marketing into a top revenue channel.
To achieve that, you need to:
With Text-to-Join, an organization can grow its text list in its owned assets like stores and product packaging, turning single channel customers into omnichannel customers. Research from Google shows that omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who only shop through one channel, further underscoring the importance of this strategy.
By scaling revenue across both channels, you’ll avoid channel cannibalization and increased costs while focusing on the right audience for each.
Lack of segmentation is another common limitation among text vendors.
Without adequate segmentation tools, retailers must rely on “batch and blast” tactics, sending the same message to everyone in their text message program regardless of demographics, behavior, or intent.
Naturally, this is less effective than triggering messages based on behavior or other characteristics. On an inherently personal channel like SMS, it’s safe to assume that the messages that speak to a customer’s individual behavior will perform best.
With persistent identification powered by Wunderkind, Text-to-Join’s automated messaging can help your team preserve resources while enabling marketers to deliver hyper-relevant, behavior-based messages at scale.
Because most text message vendors focus solely on text, many retailers find it difficult to coordinate the customer experience across channels—particularly text, email, and their website.
This lack of coordination doesn’t just create friction internally, it also creates considerable friction for customers who may receive multiple (sometimes conflicting) marketing messages across various channels.
Whether a business over-messages customers across channels or spams them with irrelevant promos (it’s usually a mix of both), disjointed experiences can only accomplish two things: creating a negative impression of your brand and accelerating churn.
Beyond harming your subscriber list, it also increases the odds of paying for conversions you were already poised to earn, often at the risk of cannibalizing revenue from one channel to another.
As a new and relatively expensive channel, it doesn’t make sense to use text message marketing in a silo or apply tried-and-true playbooks for other channels.
Transforming text message marketing from an isolated channel to a revenue-generating one means choosing a solution that:
Thanks to our Identity Network, Wunderkind doesn’t rely on cookies. Our platform persistently remembers opt-ins and can track their behavior across channels—a differentiator that makes it possible to strengthen the relevance and personalization of your brand’s outreach.
In the great war for attention, text message marketing has the potential to make businesses stand out—and generate more revenue—in all the right ways, but only when they get texts right.
Wunderkind scales one-to-one emails and texts to become a top revenue channel for over 700 of the leading eCommerce and retail brands. With the power of one partner across channels, Wunderkind can help you build a cross-channel strategy that drives up to 25% of total digital revenue. How’s that for channel coordination?
Get more revenue from your owned channels with expert advice from the Wunderkind blog.