The top 10 SMS integrations to un-silo text marketing and build better omnichannel experiences
As a marketer, your ability to see the full picture can make or break your brands—especially in a tough market.
Without a single source of truth for customer data, you’re more likely to make poor decisions about what’s working, what’s not, and where to invest.
In no channel does this happen more than SMS marketing.
SMS is a newer channel, and many marketing teams have yet to integrate it into their full tech stack. Instead, ecommerce brands often use single-point solutions that stitch together data across SMS, email, and website in an attempt to create a holistic messaging experience for the customer.
That’s not the case for the 13K+ businesses that now use Klaviyo SMS in coordination with Klaviyo’s email marketing technology, form builder, and powerful data foundation.
That’s the power of Klaviyo—all those best-in-class tools pass all data into Klaviyo so that you can create those segments that feed into your SMS personalization strategy.
In this tech stack model, where customer data, communications, and engagement are housed in a single source of truth, brands lean on point-and-click integrations to further personalize both email and SMS automations.
“If you don’t have the data to do segmentation, then you can’t personalize anything,” points out Brandon Amoroso, founder and CEO of Electriq. “That’s the power of Klaviyo—all those best-in-class tools pass all data into Klaviyo so that you can create those segments that feed into your SMS personalization strategy.”
But how does it work? Here, we walk you through:
- What are SMS integrations?
- The top 10 SMS marketing integrations
- Why you shouldn’t operate SMS marketing in a silo
- FAQs about SMS integrations
What are SMS integrations?
An integration is essentially a connection between one technology system and another which combines the disparate data from each system into a legible, comprehensive whole.
SMS integrations, then, are connections between your SMS messaging technology and your existing tech stack which enable the systems to share data and provide updates to one another in real time.
SMS integrations help marketing teams save time and drive more revenue by:
- Using advanced segmentation to send more targeted SMS campaigns, like creating a segment of VIP customers and giving them early access to an exclusive product drop
- Centralizing customers’ responses to messages and offering top-tier support, so when customers text you with a question about sizing, your agents have all the context they need to respond quickly
- Streamlining workflows by connecting to the important tools you’re already using, like helping customers reactivate canceled subscriptions or apply a discount to their next order via text
There’s no need to stitch data in this model, nor switch from solution provider to solution provider.
Instead, you can monitor all of your SMS communications in a single place, scale SMS automations with compliance to TCPA regulations, view data from across all the integrations rolled into your single source of truth, and continue to build out your all-important single customer view.
Top 10 SMS marketing integrations
Here, we’ve compiled the top 10 ways to use integrations with Klaviyo SMS. As some of the most popular ecommerce integrations in the industry, these SMS integrations enable your team to use all the best-in-class tools you’re used to—without worrying about data inaccuracies or procurement issues along the way.
1. SMS integrations for personalization
You work hard to attract customers, and you have to work even harder to retain them. Consumers gravitate toward brands that feel like they listen to them, understand them, and pay attention to their specific wants and needs.
In fact, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize them, remember them, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
Zembula empowers brands to create hyper-personalized content with their data. Partnering with Klaviyo SMS lets brands do something truly unique—send deeply personalized texts with images and gifs that are made just for them.
That’s where ecommerce personalization comes in. In both email marketing and SMS marketing, personalization is a key way for brands to contextualize the customer experiences they deliver, according to each individual person’s profile.
Connecting Klaviyo SMS to a platform like Zembula gives your team the power to create unique, deeply personalized SMS experiences across every campaign—from product announcements to abandoned cart alerts and loyalty updates.
“Zembula empowers brands to create hyper-personalized content with their data,” explains Robert Haydock, CEO and co-founder of Zembula. “Partnering with Klaviyo SMS lets brands do something truly unique—send deeply personalized texts with images and gifs that are made just for them.”
Here are a few ways you can use Klaviyo SMS and Zembula together:
- Encourage browsers to come back and buy by texting them a personalized image of the exact product they left behind.
- Drive repeat purchases with dynamic SMS imagery that includes special offers tailored to each individual shopper.
- Keep customers informed about their loyalty program status with personalized images and gifs.
Amoroso recommends integrating Rebuy with Klaviyo SMS in order to text customers with links to unique landing pages that pre-populate items from their previous orders.
“It’s really great for customers who ordered multiple SKUs in a prior order,” Amoroso explains. “Instead of dropping me on the website, making me go find those products and re-add them again, I’m now being sent to the landing page that has my previous cart pre-populated.”
Instead of dropping me on the website, making me go find those products and re-add them again, Rebuy sends me to the landing page that has my previous cart pre-populated.
“That’s much more effective than just dropping someone on the homepage, or on a product page, to get them to re-order,” Amoroso adds.
Other great personalization-focused Klaviyo SMS integrations include:
2. Help desk and support SMS integrations
Customer expectations are higher than ever before—so high that even one negative experience can lose you that customer for life.
Shoppers who have had a negative experience are also more likely to talk about it, leave a negative review, and share that experience with their network—and a “satisfied” customer generates 14x more revenue for a business than a “somewhat dissatisfied” customer.
With all the Gorgias integrations, my team doesn’t need to jump between tools. This has helped us dramatically improve customer satisfaction.
Integrating Klaviyo with your help desk platform—like Gorgias or Zendesk—helps you improve customer satisfaction by providing top-tier support across channels.
“With all the Gorgias integrations, my team doesn’t need to jump between tools,” says Amanda Schermerhorn, director of operations at Darn Good Yarn. “This has helped us dramatically improve customer satisfaction.”
Inbound messages in Klaviyo automatically create tickets in Gorgias or Zendesk, mitigating any back and forth between systems for your support agents. This means you resolve issues much faster and keep a complete record of customer interactions both in your help desk and within Klaviyo profiles.
You can use help desk apps like Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, and Gladly with Klaviyo SMS to manage all customer communications in one place and power highly targeted campaigns, such as:
- Driving incremental revenue by promoting new products or a flash sale to customers who report positive support experiences
- Excluding customers with open support tickets from promotional text campaigns
- Texting discounts to win back customers who report poor support experiences
3. SMS integrations for affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing can be one of the best ways to scale your business. More than 40% of brands cite affiliate marketing as their most successful customer acquisition channel, and 54% of brands rank it in their top 3 channels.
In order to manage a successful affiliate program and maintain its success in the long term, companies need to partner with as many top affiliates as possible—no easy feat, considering top affiliates are usually bombarded with endless offers from different companies.
To stand out, it helps to personalize messaging while making it easy for affiliates to run campaigns. That’s where an affiliate marketing solution like Refersion comes in.
By pairing an affiliate marketing solution like Refersion with Klaviyo SMS workflows, you can streamline targeted communications that nurture relationships with affiliates and empower them to succeed. Here are a few examples:
- Tailor welcome flows for new affiliates when they join your program and introduce them to your brand.
- Text important onboarding information, like best practices for how to talk about a new product line.
- Send exclusive commission incentives to make affiliates feel like true insiders.
Klaviyo customer Blenders Eyewear, founded by surf coach Chase Fisher, leans on their affiliate program to build valuable relationships at scale.
Blenders took the same model that helped Fisher sell his first pairs of Blenders and opened it up to customers and brand enthusiasts, creating a “boots on the ground” community of influential ambassadors called the Street Team.
Armed with Blenders love, active social media accounts, and exclusive eyewear perks, members of the Street Team generate a continually growing percentage of Blenders annual revenue.
“Klaviyo enables us to connect with our Street Team, get them onboarded, educate them, and help them stay motivated along the way,” says Marygrace LeGros, Street Team manager at Blenders Eyewear.
The Street Team gets first access “to everything that’s going to be coming out soon, like new products and promotions,” LeGros explains. “They’re in the know before our regular customers are, which makes them feel like insiders—which they are—and gets them excited to promote.”
4. SMS integrations for influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has been on the rise for at least the last 5 years, largely because 92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people—including influencers—over branded content like blogs or paid ads.
Pairing Klaviyo SMS with a platform like Gatsby for influencer marketing and community management helps you easily create and manage SMS campaigns that foster trust with some of the most important advocates of your brand.
“Gatsby’s integration into Klaviyo empowers merchants to scale their influencer marketing using personalized email and SMS messages,” says Brett Bernstein, founder and CEO of Gatsby.
Gatsby’s integration into Klaviyo empowers merchants to scale their influencer marketing using personalized email and SMS messages.
“Because influencers typically publish content from their phones, our Klaviyo SMS integration is extra special, sending influencers a well-timed thank you message to their same mobile device right after they publish,” Bernstein explains. “This is a powerful strategy to build top-of-funnel interest, getting all your influential customers that are most passionate about your brand spreading awareness.”
Here are a few examples of how you can use Klaviyo SMS with influencer marketing integrations:
- Create customer segments based on Instagram or TikTok follower count, and make it easier to scale your social community, track user-generated content (UGC), and measure the impact of your ambassadors and influencers.
- Deliver special rewards and referral codes based on follower count.
- Create a time-sensitive influencer campaign for a product drop to drive more buzz.
- Text influencers reminders to publish content, or send an automated thank you and reward when they mention your brand on Instagram or TikTok.
Other great SMS integrations for building and managing your influencer marketing campaigns include Upfluence and GRIN, which enable you to identify your most influential customers, start a conversation, and nurture these relationships with SMS.
5. Survey and quiz SMS integrations
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that send personalized offers and recommendations. But how can you really get to know shoppers who are visiting your website, and use that data to drive revenue?
One great way to collect zero-party data is to use a short ecommerce quiz or survey that asks consumers about their likes, dislikes, and preferences. With each question, you can narrow down products to match shoppers with the best recommendations for them.
Use a quiz solution like Octane AI alongside Klaviyo to both capture subscribers and learn more about them. In addition to enriching your existing customer profiles, this kind of SMS integration enables you to:
- Build new audiences for marketing and social targeting based on quiz or survey data, like a segment of shoppers whose favorite color is purple.
- Send more targeted flows based on quiz or survey data, like using people’s favorite ice cream flavor to build a welcome flow that’s hyper-personalized.
- Create more personalized up-sell, cross-sell, and abandoned cart emails, informed by data you collect directly from consumers.
For a quiz tool to work with SMS marketing, you simply need the quiz to be mobile-responsive. Many brands even make these quizzes specifically with mobile-first audiences in mind, and promote them on TikTok and other mobile-first channels.
Jebbit is another solid choice for using quizzes to capture more qualified leads, enhance customer profiles, and personalize your SMS marketing. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for forms, surveys, and quizzes, Typeform and Digioh are both great integrations to use with Klaviyo SMS.
6. SMS integrations for loyalty and referral marketing
Offering incentives is essential to cultivating profitable, long-lasting relationships with your customers. And loyalty and referral programs are, in turn, crucial to keeping your existing customers close to your brand.
Plus, they make shoppers excited to buy.
Using a loyalty platform like Annex Cloud or LoyaltyLion with Klaviyo SMS allows you to create segmented audiences of your most loyal customers, then power hyper-personalized text campaigns that delight and reward them.
From SMS and emails to your help desk, integrating your loyalty program at every stage of the customer journey motivates customers to have an engaged and long-term relationship with your brand.
“LoyaltyLion and Klaviyo make an incredible duo for your marketing stack,” says Beth Wells, senior partner marketing executive at LoyaltyLion. “From SMS and emails to your help desk, integrating your loyalty program at every stage of the customer journey motivates customers to have an engaged and long-term relationship with your brand.”
LoyaltyLion’s integration with Klaviyo SMS, in particular, “creates powerful personalization at scale,” Wells explains. “Send the right loyalty texts at the right time to encourage repeat purchases and increase your customer lifetime value (CLTV).”
Here are a few more examples of how you can use a loyalty solution alongside Klaviyo SMS:
- Create personalized customer segments based on loyalty measures, like points or VIP tiers, and send those customers exclusive product offers.
- Update customers on their loyalty points via text and let them know how close they are to the next rewards tier.
- Ask top-tier customers to refer their favorite product of yours to their friends.
With a loyalty and referral platform like Stamped.io or Friendbuy, meanwhile, you can:
- Drive awareness for your referral program by sending texts that thank advocates for sharing on your behalf.
- Remind brand advocates to continue sharing by texting them their unique referral link.
- Text referred friends with a coupon code, giving them a special incentive to buy.
7. SMS integrations for collecting reviews and UGC
Reviews and authentic user-generated content (UGC) help shoppers buy with confidence by providing better insight into your products and services.
The numbers prove that consumers prefer making informed decisions: People who read honest reviews are 4x more likely to convert into paying customers and have an average 28% higher basket value.
By connecting Klaviyo SMS to a platform like Okendo or Judge.me, you can gather more authentic reviews and send text campaigns that build trust with consumers, like:
- Asking customers to review your product or service once it’s delivered (bonus points if you incentivize them with a little treat, like 10 rewards points)
- Sending a refer-a-friend invitation to customers who’ve given you a 5-star review, so they can spread the word about your brand
- Reconnecting with shoppers who’ve left a negative review to try and win them back, or excluding shoppers who’ve left a negative review from promotional SMS campaigns
Using data from Okendo, natural dog treat brand WAG created segments in Klaviyo and targeted them with messaging tailored to individual customers.
The result: a 423% increase in revenue per recipient, according to Marta Skrabacz, digital marketing and ecommerce manager.
Other great reviews platforms you can use alongside Klaviyo SMS include:
8. Subscription SMS integrations
For subscription-based businesses, meeting customers where they are, in the channels they use the most, is essential to reducing churn.
Sometimes all a customer wants to do is skip this month’s shipment. If they don’t know how, they may make a hasty decision to cancel their subscription.
When subscribers try to cancel, making it easy to skip or reschedule a delivery via text helps improve retention—and can even increase CLTV by 30%.
You can take simple subscription notifications to the next level by integrating Klaviyo SMS with a solution like Recharge, which enables you to:
- Create personalized flows powered by subscription metrics, such as people who started a subscription, canceled a subscription, or have an expired subscription.
- Text Quick Action links that let customers easily perform a variety of actions, like reactivating their canceled subscription or applying a discount to their next order.
- Build customer segments for your top subscription customers, so you can send them special deals and offers.
- Prevent active subscribers from receiving marketing for items they already subscribe to.
Sam Alder, lead CRM strategist at Ragnarok, believes that “leveraging Recharge via an abandonment flow in Klaviyo is the most efficient way to maximize ROI in a short period of time for subscription businesses.”
In the UK, experts recommend using Recharge in coordination with Relo, which helps drive repeat purchases and convert one-time or occasional buyers into subscribers.
A lot of brands think, ‘Great, I’ve got this subscriber, and they’ll stay on now.’ But they don’t push for that second order. Using different channels to get that second order, and then get that third order—it makes sense.
Combining Klaviyo, Recharge, and Relo solves what Elliot Scott, founder and CEO of London-based retention agency ElliotDigital sees as a very common challenge for direct-to-consumer (DTC) ecommerce brands: post-purchase aftercare.
“A lot of brands think, ‘Great, I’ve got this subscriber, and they’ll stay on now.’ But they don’t push for that second order,” Scott points out. “Using different channels to get that second order, and then get that third order—it makes sense. It’s something brands should be testing and playing around with.”
Here’s what that might look like with Relo: “We trigger a text message when someone is, say, a week out from their next subscription order, with a link that says, ‘If you want to add something, you can add with two clicks,’” explains Jason Anderson, COO of Andzen.
Then, “it takes them to a custom cart page with a bunch of recommended products, where they can drag and drop a product to their subscription,” Anderson says. “So you’re getting those extra one-time orders, and you’re using the immediacy of SMS to encourage engagement.”
To use actual data to minimize the friction, to reduce the steps required within the customer journey to re-order—that’s a great way we use SMS.
The beauty of that process is how much time it saves, both for the marketer and the customer. “It takes away a lot of steps, so it’s great for conversions, and it drives a lot of traffic,” Scott explains. “The AI tells you when they’re likely to repurchase, so you’re more likely to drive a repurchase compared to just sending one flat email 30 days later.”
In the midst of an economic downturn, especially in verticals like consumer packaged goods (CPG) in ecommerce, high repeat purchase rates are more important than ever. “To use actual data to minimize the friction, to reduce the steps required within the customer journey to re-order—that’s a great way we use SMS,” Scott adds.
Here are a few additional options for subscription SMS integrations:
9. Shipping and logistics SMS integrations
Loyal, returning customers are the backbone of your business. And transactional texts like order confirmations and shipping updates can help foster loyal relationships with repeat customers—even those who might not otherwise appreciate SMS marketing.
If you want to move beyond the simple transactional SMS notifications that come with your ecommerce platform, connect Klaviyo SMS with a platform like ShipBob or Aftership.
With these kinds of integrations, you can use shipping data to power personalized, automated text flows, such as:
- Giving customers real-time delivery expectations by texting information about orders, tracking numbers, and even delivery delays or in-transit incidents
- Triggering a product review flow to prompt customers to leave feedback once a shipment is marked as delivered
- Sending a personalized text to first-time or VIP customers whose orders are delayed
“For our ecommerce tech stack, we use ShipBob, Klaviyo, Shopify Plus, Recharge, and Gorgias,” says Michael Peters, VP of ecommerce operations at TB12. “What I love is how they all work together to manage communications and the customer experience in a streamlined way.”
In addition to ShipBob and Aftership, Klaviyo integrates with several other top shipping apps:
If you’re looking for a full post-purchase platform to use alongside a shipping provider of your choice, Narvar is a great option for streamlining communications across shipping, order tracking, and returns/exchanges. With Klaviyo and Narvar together, you can:
- Keep customers up to date on the status of their order with shipping updates via text.
- Trigger SMS for product review requests, up-sell messages, and loyalty program invites.
- Encourage customers to exchange products for a different size instead of returning them.
10. SMS integrations for returns management
Delivering a great experience at every part of the customer lifecycle is crucial. This includes the return process. Refunds are expensive, but the real cost is the end of the relationship—potentially losing out on the value of a longtime customer.
Exchanges are 100% the most important thing we look to achieve with returns.
Using an SMS integration like Loop to create a better return experience, you can retain revenue on up to 40% of returns by turning them into exchanges.
“Exchanges are 100% the most important thing we look to achieve with returns,” says Omari Whyte, director of operations at Nisolo. “It creates a memorable customer experience and ensures people are able to find products they love.”
Integrating Klaviyo with a returns management platform enables you to:
- Update profiles with details on return behavior.
- Send personalized return updates or reminders via text, like a message reminding customers about a return that’s about to expire.
- Follow up immediately after a customer leaves an unsatisfactory review with options to exchange their product for a different one.
- Recommend products when a customer issues store credit, or send a discount for their next purchase when they issue a refund.
- Suggest chatting with a virtual stylist if sizing was the reason for their return, or text fit guides to make product recommendations.
Returnly is another option for using Klaviyo SMS to enhance returns. Offer first-time returners a bonus incentive for their next purchase, or help returners find their next product by sending them fit guides.
Why you shouldn’t operate SMS marketing in a silo
As Morgan Maguire, senior email marketing manager at The Stable, points out, “your audience is likely seeing and engaging with your brand across multiple channels. You don’t want to treat each channel as if it exists within a vacuum.”
Instead, text messages and emails, along with your ads, organic content, and more, should all belong to the larger omnichannel experience you’re curating for your customers.
“Consistent messaging across channels creates a more seamless experience for customers, which helps improve brand perception and loyalty,” Maguire explains.
Personalization is what really makes these experiences come together—and personalization shouldn’t require endless amounts of work.
Consistent messaging across channels creates a more seamless experience for customers, which helps improve brand perception and loyalty.
1:1 personalization is unrealistic for many marketing teams. But with 1:many personalization via segments and dynamic content blocks, marketing teams can create—and scale—a personalized experience for every customer.
To make that work, you need a single source of truth for your customer data, a single customer view, and accurate data piping to place your customers in the right segments and present them with the right dynamic content.
One small mix-up here can create an inaccurate and even jarring experience for a customer. This is especially true via text—a channel that’s more intimate than email.
Why risk it?
All of Klaviyo’s 300+ pre-built integrations, including the ones listed here, are designed to work across your entire funnel—so that you and your team can focus on building the best experiences possible.
Leave the complicated tech to the engineers. Explore more Klaviyo SMS integrations today.
Want to go beyond the basics? We cover everything you need to know to make sure you start from a place of value and end with loyal, lifelong customer relationships in this ecommerce SMS marketing series. Check out:
- What is SMS marketing?
- SMS marketing strategies
- SMS marketing examples
- SMS best practices
- Top SMS marketing software
FAQs about SMS integrations
What are the benefits of integrating SMS into your marketing strategy?
Integrating SMS into your marketing strategy reaps many benefits for your business, including higher customer engagement, the ability to reach customers and prospects instantly, more personal relationships with customers, and, because SMS is an owned marketing channel, fewer data privacy issues.
Can you integrate SMS directly with your website?
Yes, you can integrate SMS directly with your website. When you integrate your ecommerce platform, ecosystem, and historical data with an SMS marketing platform like Klaviyo, you can send highly personalized email and SMS communications that drive sales.
What is SMS API integration?
“API” stands for “application programming interface.” It refers to a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other—the part of a server that receives requests and sends responses to those requests. An SMS API integration, then, is a connection between an SMS messaging technology and another technology system that takes place via their APIs.