9 SMS audience segments to increase engagement and drive purchases

Thinking of launching an SMS program and want some motivation and direction?

Klaviyo and recurring payments platform Recharge recently conducted a global SMS marketing consumer survey of over 8,000 participants to learn more about how people are interacting with text messages from brands and how brands can optimise their SMS marketing strategy.

The results should be enough to motivate any brand to launch an SMS program:

• Text messages drive purchases. 72% of people have made a purchase after receiving a text from a brand.
• People who buy from text messages are buying more often. 86% of respondents made 2+ purchases in the last year from SMS messages, up from 55% in 2022.
• SMS can speed up time to purchase. 65% of people said a promotional text message prompted them to buy something sooner than they’d planned.
• They want to hear from you. 72% of global subscribers expect to hear from brands they’ve subscribed to at least once a week.

Here are the top 9 segments we recommend creating as you’re building your SMS marketing strategy.

1. All SMS subscribers

The first must-have SMS segment is a centralised, high-level look at everyone who has opted in to your SMS communication.

Chances are, your marketing platform automatically creates a list of all your SMS subscribers when you first enable SMS. It’s still imperative that you create this segment on top of that, for a few reasons:

• The “All SMS subscribers” segment will update dynamically, including suppressions, unsubscribes, etc.
• Your subscribers may be spread across several lists at once, so this segment will serve as your most accurate source of truth when tracking SMS list growth.
• Use this segment to send any SMS campaign that you want everyone to see.

2. Highly-engaged SMS

Batching and blasting will drive up your unsubscribe and spam complaints. That’s why you want to send most of your SMS communication to your highly-engaged SMS segment: subscribers who are regularly opening and engaging with your text messages.

Once you’ve created this segment, you can confidently send your best texts, knowing you’ve already established a relationship.

SMS segmentation tip: If you’re migrating from one marketing platform to another and you have a large SMS subscriber list, migrate your engaged segments in addition to your entire list. Your new platform won’t be able to track your engagement data until you start sending with them.

3. SMS engagement tracks

Unlike email, SMS has no warming period. But if you send most campaigns to your full list frequently, you may get more spam complaints, your sender reputation may suffer, and you’ll be subject to more carrier filtering.

That’s why it’s a good idea to build several different SMS segments based on engagement:

• 30-90 day engaged or newly subscribed: Send to this group every week.
• 91-15-day engaged: Send to this group every other week, and try to re-engage them with offers and by asking their preferences.
• 150-day engaged: Send this group only your largest sales.

SMS segmentation tip: Give all new SMS subscribers at least 90 days to engage before suppressing them.

4. Prefers SMS

Your subscribers who prefer SMS over email is another segment to build, for 2 reasons:

1. It helps you build an omnichannel strategy. Using email only for a big promotion can miss a lot of shoppers.

1. It saves you money. If you’re conservative with your SMS credits, knowing who prefers SMS over email will help make sure you don’t send someone messages in a channel they simply don’t check.

SMS segmentation tip: Make sure you collect preferences from customers when they’re first opting in to receive messages from you.

5. VIP SMS subscribers

Most brands treat any SMS subscriber as a VIP, and for good reason: if they’re willing to get messages from you on the same screen as the ones they get from their mom and their best friend, they’re worth investing in.

But creating a segment of your most valuable SMS subscribers—those who spend the most money, order most frequently, or meet a similar threshold that makes sense for your brand—will help you focus on your biggest fans.

Send this segment exclusive deals, sneak peeks, and promotions. And don’t be shy about letting them know how much you appreciate their ongoing support.

6. High-intent SMS shoppers

Anyone who has started a check-out at least once in the last 5 days but hasn’t finished a purchase qualifies as high-intent.

This segment can be particularly helpful when you’re running a sale over a long period of time and people are starting check-outs, but they’re not finishing. It can also be a great segment to test a campaign or flow with before you launch to a bigger audience.

If you’re conservative with your SMS credits and hesitant to add SMS to your abandoned cart flow, this can be a good way to test results while still encouraging your audience to complete a purchase.

7. SMS location-based

Location-based segments help ensure you’re sending personalised and relevant content to people who can take action on it. They can be helpful if your brand:

• Holds events
• Has a brick-and-mortar location (or several)
• Sells concert or theatre tickets
• Sells sporting apparel

8. SMS win-back

After you’ve been running your SMS program for a while, you can segment according to who you want to draw back into the fold. Once you have a group of subscribers who have decreased engagement, send them a discount or special offer to try to re-engage them.

If they still don’t engage, consider suppressing them.

9. SMS error

If you see a spike in failed deliveries, you need to identify why the send failed. Creating a segment for SMS errors can help you understand why they’re happening and prevent further deliverability issues.

SMS segmentation tip: Create this segment if you’re migrating over to Klaviyo from another platform. If your previous platform didn’t track why your sends were failing, Klaviyo will.

SMS: don’t waste the opportunity

Let’s face it: people are looking at their text messages more quickly and more often than their email inboxes. Just about everything you can do via email you can do via SMS, and your subscribers may just respond even better via text.

Don’t miss that opportunity.