How to Amplify Your Klaviyo Email Marketing with SMS

Email marketing should be a staple of any ecommerce business’s growth and retention strategies, and one of the leading providers for Shopify stores is Klaviyo. More than 19,000 stores use Klaviyo to create and manage email automation for everything from order information to abandoned cart messages and promotional campaigns. Tools like Klaviyo provide an excellent foundation for any Shopify business trying to better interact with their customers and scale.

However, email marketing is just one piece of the puzzle, and with open rates averaging around 20%, it’s important to have a strategy to reach the 80% of people who aren’t engaging with email.

SMS marketing open rates, on the other hand, often reach as high as 98%. More importantly, according to Campaign Monitor, clickthrough rate (CTR) for retail email decreased to 2.25% last year. That’s less than 10% of the CTR that SMS marketing is receiving. Just think about it — it’s as easy to open a text and click a link as it is to read an email subject line and click delete. Couple that fact with Shopify’s report that during Black Friday 2018, 66% of on-site sales occurred on mobile devices and it’s clear that SMS is beating email in an extremely significant metric.

Additionally, since SMS has more stringent compliance rules, it benefits from competing against fewer other messengers per consumer. That’s why it’s essential to incorporate an SMS marketing tool like Postscript into your marketing strategy — people shop on their phones.

Decreasing CTRs from campaignmonitor.com

None of this is to say that email marketing is dying; on the contrary, SMS and email complement one another brilliantly and an effective ecommerce marketing strategy should use them in tandem.

How? Let’s take a look at how you could optimize Klaviyo and Postscript’s advantages.

Grow Your SMS List

First off, if you’re just getting started with SMS marketing, you’ll need to build a phone list.  Klaviyo goes beyond the email call by letting you build website pop-ups. Pop-ups have been shown to be nearly 400% more effective as an opt-in strategy than static embedded forms.

Then, you can deploy it to your site without writing a single line of code (if you’re not the technical type) and let it go to work collecting phone numbers and emails. With an opt-in form on your site as well as in all your emails, you can capitalize on both your existing customer base and any organic traffic.

Klaviyo pop-up collecting both email and phone numbers

As you gather more phone numbers, Klaviyo can send compliant opt-in lists to Postscript that you can instantly use to run SMS campaigns and automations.  If you need help using Klaviyo’s pop-up builder, read more here.

Second, you can leverage your existing email list to do just that. Without changing anything about your regular email cadence or style, Klaviyo can help you build your phone list through opt-ins. Here’s what to do:

• Add an SMS opt-in to your regular emails inviting customers to give you their phone number to receive special updates or offers

• Keep this opt-in consistent across your email sends

A good example is the Buy Buy Baby weekly newsletter, which says ”Get 20% off any single item when you sign up for mobile offers.” Whatever works with your brand voice and messaging, just be sure to have a clear call to action.

Email newsletter with call out to sign up for SMS lists

Using SMS with Email Marketing

Once you’ve got a strong list, it’s time to start using Klaviyo and Postscript to their fullest potential. However, it’s important to find balance in your email and SMS strategies.

Allow customers to choose their preference

Some people love promotional emails, some people don’t. A business that values its users and their time will let them choose what they want to see. Audience segmentation is easy with both Klaviyo and Postscript.

In Klaviyo, you can create a list of customers that convert well via email.  These users can then be excluded from SMS automation. The user filter gives you the flexibility to include or exclude an SMS subscriber based on their Klaviyo list membership.

Klaviyo list User Filter in Postscript

Abandon Cart Flows

Did you know that 69% of online carts are abandoned by users? Abandon cart SMS, however, have been shown to generate an impressive 98% open rate and up to 25-50% conversion rates.

Setting up abandon cart workflows with Klaviyo and Postscript is simple and intuitive. Sending these messages via both email and SMS, you maximize the opportunity to recoup abandoned carts and potentially convince a customer to shop even more. Importantly, when you’ve integrated Postscript with Klaviyo, you stagger email and SMS automation to verify if customers have purchased via your email send before the SMS message goes out so customers don’t receive the SMS after purchasing.

For example, you can set an abandon cart flow to trigger via email at 1 PM, then stagger your SMS automation to send at 3PM, with an a cancellation trigger on product purchase.  Anyone who received the email at 1PM and converted will not receive the SMS message. This simple integration allows you to take on a crucial challenge to ecommerce businesses and turn it into a lucrative win.

Want to learn more about all that you can do with Klaviyo and Postscript? Read more here. Also, be sure to check out all of Postscript’s other time-saving, cost-cutting, growth-supporting integrations.