The Challenge

Our partner,  a leading ecommerce household furnishings player, generally relied on email as their primary communication channel. Their Chief Marketing Officer wanted to see if using SMS campaigns for sales could help the company convert online leads more effectively and drive greater revenue from an upcoming 4-day promotion.

Email has long been the primary channel of communication between ecommerce brands and their customers, but over the past few years, response and engagement levels have been consistently dwindling. With spam comprising 53.5% of all email traffic worldwide, brand messages easily get lost in the barrage of emails consumers receive.

(Source: Spam Statistics: spam email traffic share 2018, Statista)

The Opportunity - SMS campaigns for sales

The company was interested in SMS because of its promising engagement metrics. SMS offers open rates of up to 95% and click-through rates of up to 80%. When compared to email, text marketing also delivers:

• 4x better opt-in rates,
• 4x higher open rates,
• 15x more clicks, and
• 22x more conversions

(Source: “Email Marketing Benchmarks”, MailChimp, updated 03/2018; “Ecommerce Email Marketing: Industry Performance Benchmarks”, Alicia Thomas,  Klaviyo, 02/15/2018 | “What is the open rate of SMS Text Messaging?”, Christopher S. Penn, Shift Communications, 09/29/2015 | “How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost and Determine Benchmark by Industry”, Shalyn Dever, ChatterBuzz Media | “Email marketing vs. Social Media – is there a clear winner?”, Jacinda Santora, OptInMonster.com, 08/04/2019)

(Want to learn more? See: SMS vs Email Marketing for Ecommerce in 2019)

Why is SMS marketing more effective than email?

As a direct result of inbox filters and excessive spam mail, consumers have become less receptive to receiving offers in their email accounts. Since SMS is native to ophones, texting is now the primary mode of communication. This makes SMS more effective for promotional campaigns and special discounts, as brands can ensure that their customers never miss a good deal or offer.

Brands can leverage this engagement to make sure that consumers get timely notifications for confirming their orders, acknowledging payment, and tracking their deliveries. SMS is also useful in helping brands recover their abandoned carts more effectively.

The Solution

Voyage helped an ecommerce client build a text marketing campaign as a part of a 4-day sale, generating $360k in revenue through SMS. This represented 30% of the total revenue generated from the brand’s website during the sale. Our client used the Voyage dashboard to build optimized and targeted messages for their audience based on the analytical insights generated on the platform, earning nearly $6.55 per message. These returns were considerably higher than the ecommerce industry benchmark of $0.08 revenue per recipient.

The company was able to get nearly 10k customers to opt-in to receiving SMS, and the company's 'secret sale' helped drive 1400+ orders at a 16% conversion rate. They are looking forward to building on the campaign's success and using SMS to drive more revenue in future campaigns.