Dialing into SMS Marketing with Attentive

With email open rates on the decline and Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework (ATT) limiting attribution data, getting the attention of audiences and measuring efficacy has become increasingly difficult. 

SMS marketing can be an effective workaround to these problems. 

According to Forbes, text message open rates can reach 98%, making SMS a great way to capture attention. However, this is also why it’s important to deliver value with every text that you send. Let’s dive into how to do this with Attentive.

What is Attentive? 

Attentive is a SMS marketing platform that has proven itself effective at all stages of the customer journey. It’s a great way for brands to connect with their audiences and enables two-way conversations with customers, deepening individual connection and loyalty. The texts can be up to 160 characters long and can also include links, images, gifs, videos, audio, and personalization. 

How do you use it?

Consumers must opt-in to receive SMS marketing. This can be done from a variety of sign-up units that brands can build. For example, you might create a 10%-off bubble on a landing page that then expands to a fullscreen sign-up unit, or you can create a unique landing page to include in your next email blast. Creating giveaways that encourage users to sign-up for texts to enter is also an effective way to collect the necessary data and consent. 

Once you have acquired your leads, it’s important to create custom journeys. We recommend starting with at least Welcome, Abandoned Cart and Browse Abandonment journeys. Attentive’s seamless integration with Shopify makes it easy to personalize these experiences with product macros. So, if a user is browsing a “red chair”, they can receive a reminder to go buy that particular product.

Marketers can layer on the automation and personalization with Attentive’s Dynamic Segments, which allow you to build groups of recent buyers, high intent buyers or even buyers in particular zip codes. For example, you can create a segment of users who recently bought a product for the first time, and then engage them with a topic like “care tips'' for the item they just purchased, by adding a branch in your post-purchase journey for this segment. Even better, these segments dynamically populate and automatically update. 

Best Practices

When getting started, we recommend paying close attention to the following:

1. Message Frequency: Send at least eight texts a month.
2. Time of Day: 1:00pm - 5:00pm, after 6:00pm and not before 9:00am. 
1. It’s also recommended to use Smart Sending to cap frequency and Quiet Hours.
3. Day of the Week: Attentive Recommends weekend texts to drive stronger CTRs and weekday texts to drive a stronger revenue/message.
4. Smart Segmentation: Exclude users who have already purchased when sending out texts.

How We Use SMS Marketing to Drive Revenue for Island Creek Oysters

We use Attentive as part of our work with Island Creek Oysters, with the primary goals of acquiring new customers and driving repeat purchases. Since we started using Attentive, we’ve increased their subscriber following by 67%. Here’s how:

1. We started off by sharing a Contact Card with our subscribers as part of our Welcome Journey, to make the texts feel more organic. This also lets users know who the text is coming from.
2. We then created an opt-in at checkout to build our contact database. When users are on the checkout page, they can opt-in for “news and promotional offerings” via text.
3. To increase our subscriber base even more, we tested an email blast with a unique landing page to sign up for text. We A/B tested this with a 10% off offer and no offer. The 10% proved to be superior.
4. Holiday campaigns have been a notable success for Island Creek and Attentive. We’ve been running A/B tests for pre-order campaigns as well as one-time “last call” campaigns. During these periods, customers are often on the move and putting finishing touches on plans at the last minute, and they appreciate the ease of ordering on the fly.

This just scratches the surface of how SMS marketing can help grow your brand, let us know if you want to learn more.