The guide to SMS marketing for B2C startups

To attract SMS subscribers, make it worth their while. Be thoughtful about where, when, and how you ask for sign-ups, and streamline the sign-up process with features like tap-to-text forms that send data from your ecommerce platforms straight to your CRM.

Here are a few smart ways to grow your SMS list:

• Choose a sign-up incentive. Our future of consumer marketing report found that the primary reason buyers sign up for updates from brands is for exclusive discounts, but you can also offer incentives like early access to sales, exclusive content, or free shipping.

• Optimize your website with targeted forms. Wherever you trigger subscriber forms on your website, ask for a phone number along with email. If you already have a contact’s email address, only ask for their phone number.

• end a “sign up for SMS” campaign to email subscribers. They’re already interested in your brand, and are more likely to be interested in hearing from you via SMS.

• Promote your SMS list on social media. Organic social is the top discovery channel for retail and ecommerce brands, according to the future of consumer marketing report. Post SMS subscribe links on your social channels, or encourage people to sign up for texts through Instagram stories.

• Collect proper consent. Email consent isn’t SMS consent. Choose tech with built-in SMS compliance features and use clear opt-in messaging. We recommend collecting transactional vs. marketing consent separately.

Once you have some SMS subscribers under your belt, leverage them as advocates by setting up referral programs to grow your list.

This is the first automated flow you should create. Your SMS welcome series is your opportunity to introduce a new SMS subscriber to your brand, while fulfilling the incentive you promised in your SMS sign-up form.

Welcome series content should balance education and promotion. Keep yours to 1–3 messages so you don’t overload your subscribers, and set up a virtual contact card so your customers can add you as a trusted contact. You should also turn off quiet hours for the first message in your series so that it goes out right after someone signs up for SMS.

70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute—and according to the future of consumer marketing report, the No. 1 reason consumers abandon carts is finding a better price elsewhere.

Abandoned cart flows are crucial to rescuing sales. Send an initial text within a few hours of an abandonment, personalized with the items the recipient was looking at. Then, follow up in another 48 hours with a limited-time discount to create a sense of urgency.

Creatively nurture loyalty and repeat purchases with post-purchase flows. These messages should contain valuable content, preferably personalized. For example, you could promote a complementary product to the one your customer just bought (“Enjoying your new serum? Customers who bought it love this moisturizer too”).

Use segmentation to target customers who are lapsed and haven’t shopped with you in some time, and send them special discounts to win back their business.

Once you’re more established, a loyalty or VIP program is an effective tool to drive repeat purchases. Hotel and wellness brands in particular have lower proportions of buyers who are currently enrolled in at least one program, suggesting a big opportunity for those industries, per Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report.

Automate loyalty program messages when members reach new tiers, with items they may be interested in based on past purchases, or with reminders when points are close to expiring.

Build excitement and interest leading up to a new product release, ensuring sell-through when the SKU actually becomes available.

Every year, tinned seafood brand Fishwife launches a limited-edition product around BCFM. They invite email subscribers to sign up for SMS to get an exclusive discount or early access, and announce the product on both channels. This multi-channel launch strategy has contributed to 138% YoY growth in YTD revenue from Klaviyo SMS.

SMS is well-suited for announcements that need immediate attention, such as flash sales or a weekly product drop—especially if they’re exclusive to SMS subscribers. This scarcity and urgency helps drive immediate action.

Apparel brand HOMAGE used SMS to tee up a major product launch for their retro starter jackets. By making SMS subscribers feel like part of an exclusive club and hyping up this fanbase with early access to the drop, they got 100 orders in the first hour alone. The campaign earned an RPR of $167.

We recommend a texting cadence of 2 major announcements a month, 2 follow-ups to those announcements, and 3 targeted campaigns to segmented audiences per month.

Here’s what consumers say about how often they want to receive texts from brands, according to our research with Recharge:

• A few times a week: 32%

• Once a week: 27%

• A few times a month: 16%

• Once a day: 13%

To determine the best frequency for your brand, segment your list and experiment with the balance between email and SMS (more on that next).

The best way to increase your SMS ROI is to leverage it alongside a strong email marketing strategy. Integrating email and SMS can often save you money because it enables you to make smarter decisions around which channel to use for which communication.

Email is ideal for longer-form communication that’s information or image-heavy, such as:

• Brand and product storytelling

• Messages from the founder

• User-generated content and social proof

• Newsletter, video, or podcast content

SMS is best for messages you want to be seen quickly:

• Flash sale announcements

• New product releases

• Holiday promotions and offers

• Transactional information about orders, like shipping and fulfilment information

A social media follower is more valuable as a subscriber to your owned channel. By targeting lookalike audiences based on your best customers with social ad retargeting, you’ll be able to gain more superfans at lower costs.

Use SMS to amplify social content—promote a contest, giveaway, or even user-generated content (UGC) associated with a certain hashtag list.

1 in 4 consumers who have a negative experience with a brand would go back after a great follow-up, per the future of consumer marketing report. That means customer service is essential.

As the lines between marketing and customer service continue to blur, SMS is a critical channel for meeting your customers with the information they need, where and when they need it. To build loyalty through personal interactions, use conversational SMS for customer support flows, FAQs, and preference collection.

As you gather behavioral data about your subscribers, use that information to personalize their desktop and mobile website experiences. You can customize the website experience by:

• Targeting email subscribers with SMS sign-up forms

• Targeting returning SMS subscribers with forms offering discounts

• Focusing exit intent forms only on SMS subscribers who are most likely to buy

This goes the other way, too. Align all of your SMS marketing messages with subscribers’ mobile website activity for highly contextual messaging.

Track how fast your list grows each month. If you’re growing slower than expected, reevaluate your list growth tactics. Are you targeting the right audiences (website visitors, subscribers on other channels, during check-out), promoting your list on other channels, and getting the right permissions? What about the expectations you’re setting about the benefits of joining your list?

Measure your SMS campaign click rate against benchmarks for your industry. To improve engagement, make sure you’re sending the types of messages people want to receive.

How many of your SMS recipients take the action you want them to? Conversion rate can be tricky to measure if you’re using a siloed SMS-only tool. Make sure your SMS platform is fully integrated with your marketing stack. Klaviyo reporting offers multi-channel attribution and real-time optimization so you can understand the true impact of SMS on revenue.

RPR is the total revenue generated from an SMS campaign divided by the number of messages sent, and it represents the true value of a campaign beyond engagement metrics.

Increase RPR by:

• Cleaning your lists

• Segmenting your audience so you’re only sending relevant messages

• Testing different offer and content types.

SMS can speed up time to purchase, so factor sales cycle length into your RPR calculations as well.

Per Klaviyo’s latest SMS marketing benchmarks, the average SMS campaign has an unsubscribe rate of 1.23%, while those in the top 10% are only 0.27%.

Numbers vary by industry, but if yours are far outside this range, take a second look at your SMS strategy. One counterintuitive tip: make it easy to opt out so your list doesn’t appear healthier than it is.