Ecommerce SMS Marketing: How to Reach More People in 2025

Ecommerce and SMS.

They go together like peanut butter and marshmallow fluff.

(Who else has ever tried a fluffernutter sandwich?— although if I’m honest I wasn’t blown away when I had it; don’t hate me, New Englanders. 😅)

For many ecommerce businesses, SMS has become an essential tactic to grow their business, thanks to the billions of smartphone users worldwide.

For example, according to one survey, 77% of customers feel they are likely to have a favorable opinion of a company offering SMS.

So the question is… are you taking full advantage of SMS marketing for your own ecommerce business?

This article examines the enormous potential of ecommerce SMS marketing—and how it might significantly increase your online sales.

Let’s get into it!

Media from Giphy and credited to Dreamworks.

What is ecommerce SMS marketing?

SMS marketing (text message marketing) is the activity of delivering notifications or promotional messages via text messages to interact with consumers and advertise goods, services, or events.

Ecommerce SMS marketing, then, is engaging in SMS marketing in order to promote an ecommerce business’s brand or products.

Ecommerce SMS marketing can include sending messages such as flash sales, promos, inventory updates, new product launches—and other similar messages.

Businesses and organizations that use SMS marketing often acquire their target market's phone numbers before delivering relevant and timely messages. Due to SMS's character limits, the messages are usually brief.

Why use ecommerce SMS marketing? ROI, reach, audience engagement

We've already mentioned some of the core ecommerce texting benefits, but let's dive deeper into the topic and explore all the advantages in greater detail.

High Open Rates

SMS is a direct and highly personalized form of communication—which is perfect for ecommerce businesses that are trying to showcase products to large numbers of customers.

When the message arrives in an inbox, it will be mixed in with those from your customer's closest friends and family. Unlike emails or push notifications, which are frequently disregarded, consumers are accustomed to reading and responding to text messages.

People sometimes check their phone up to 96 times per day by one report.

Another study found that SMS has a read rate of 55% and a “view rate” of 100%. Contrast that with email marketing, which has an overall average open rate of 25%.

High Engagement

Since more people view and open their text messages as opposed to other marketing methods, more people will engage with your messages—and, therefore, more people will engage with your products.

Getting more people engaged means more people will be interacting with the items you offer, which (obviously) translates into more sales for you.

Case in point? One report found that 72% of respondents purchased after receiving a text message.

Lower Price

SMS marketing is excellent for ecommerce companies with limited resources. The cost of your SMS messages will vary depending on your text message marketing platform. Plans at Mobile Text Alerts start at $20 per month.

When you put up typical automation like welcome series, abandoned cart notifications, and cross-sells, you can let them run for a period of time before you need to look at the stats and figure out what you can do to improve. Unlike marketing channels like influencer marketing or digital advertising, you are not required to pay for your customers' attention while you’re doing this.

Reduced Cart Abandonment

By connecting with consumers directly and sending out reminders and incentives at the right times, SMS marketing may be a successful technique for decreasing cart abandonment.

Why? Because you’ll be reaching people directly and personally, so (as mentioned) they’ll be more likely to engage with what you’re promoting.

Loyalty Nurturing

You need to establish connections with your audience to build loyalty. SMS is one of the few ecommerce marketing methods that enables direct connection, even allowing direct communication and engagement across B2B ecommerce platforms (which can help foster long-term relationships with customers). Compare this to a hypothetical conversation with a chatbot on a website.

The way you talk differs even when you get past the bot and reach a live human. Instead of providing insightful advice or helpful information, the chatbot's agent often assists with a problem. We expect dialogues and information exchange via text messages to help us become better versions of ourselves, not only to solve problems.

Easy Communication with Customers

Following the previous point, you can manage everything in a single place, responding to inquiries, closing deals by SMS, or passing correspondence to your support email. So, ecommerce SMS is more than a chatbot. It is a robust marketing solution that enables SMS conversations. It solves issues, fosters loyalty, and increases sales.

"Why use ecommerce SMS marketing?” with the points above

How does ecommerce SMS marketing work?

Setting up SMS marketing for ecommerce involves just a few steps. Here's a general guide to help you get started:

Define Your Ecommerce Goals

Clearly define your objectives for SMS marketing. Examples include…

Increasing sales
Driving website traffic
Promoting new products
Boosting customer engagement

Your goals will determine what kind of content you'll focus on and what strategies you’ll employ.

Build Your Subscriber List

Your success with SMS marketing directly depends on expanding your text marketing list. There are several options available, which is fantastic news.

For example, you could add a phone number box to any email forms or pop-ups on your website. Another option is a "text-to-join" phone number collection. To subscribe to future communications, users must text a word or phrase known as a "keyword" to your phone number.

As you start your ecommerce texting efforts, you may need to offer an incentive to get people to join your list. Give them something valuable, like a free digital item, a discount on a purchase, or some kind of VIP treatment.

Choose Your Platform

There are multiple aspects you can think about when picking an SMS marketing platform to make sure you make the best choice for your company's needs.

But you don’t want to get too overwhelmed—many SMS marketing products are similar and almost all are ecommerce-friendly.

Here are some areas of consideration:

Features and functionality: Consider if the features provided by various SMS marketing systems meet your needs. Typical features include contact management, message personalization, automated campaigns, analytics, and integration possibilities.
Scalability: Take the platform's capacity for growth into account. Make sure it can accommodate your present SMS marketing requirements and that it can develop with your company as your subscriber list grows.
Deliverability and Reliability: Seek out a platform with a proven track record of offering dependable message delivery and high deliverability rates. To ensure your messages are delivered regularly, look for features like message queueing, backup choices, and associations with trustworthy telecom providers.
User-Friendliness: Take into account the platform's interface and usability. A user-friendly interface may save time and effort when planning and administering SMS campaigns.
Integrations: Examine the platform's integration capabilities with other tools and systems you employ, such as email marketing tools, ecommerce platforms, and customer relationship management software.
Analytics and Reporting: Data analysis is necessary for successful SMS marketing. To evaluate campaign performance, gauge engagement, and make data-driven choices, look for a platform that has powerful analytics and reporting features.
Pricing and Cost: Examine the pricing policies of various platforms and consider your budget. While some platforms have set monthly rates or provide tiered pricing depending on member counts, others charge based on the message volume.
Customer Assistance: Take into account the platform's degree of customer assistance. To help you in case of any problems or inquiries, ensure they have responsive and competent support methods, such as email or live chat.

Integrate with Your Ecommerce Platform

If possible, integrate SMS marketing with your ecommerce platform. With the help of this connection, you can automate SMS alerts for order confirmations, shipment status updates, and customized recommendations depending on client behavior.

Segment Your Audience

Organize your subscriber list into parts based on factors like customer preferences, purchasing history with your business, or demographics.

Why? Because segmentation makes delivering more individualized and targeted SMS messages possible, boosting efficiency. Here's how you can do it:

Obtain Customer Information: Gather pertinent information about your customers through surveys or questionnaires and from current sources. The following are some crucial data elements for segmentation: demographics, purchasing patterns, degrees of participation, preferences, and interests.
Analyze and Spot Patterns: Look for similarities in your gathered data. Look for characteristics that set your audience apart and reveal information about their tendencies, requirements, and preferences. You could discover, for instance, that clients from a particular area have different interests or that a specific age group responds better to various offers.
Unique Audience Segments: Create unique audience segments that represent various client profiles based on the insights you learned from your data study. Each segment needs to have traits or tendencies that set it apart as a target market. Consider categories like "loyal customers," "new customers," "high-value customers," or geographic location-based segments.

Create Compelling Ecommerce Messages

Your message should begin with a strong hook to immediately capture the customer’s attention. It may be a provocative query, a strong claim, or an alluring proposition. To demonstrate that you value the recipient individually, mention prior contacts or use the recipient's name.

You may encourage quick action by establishing a sense of urgency in your message. To encourage recipients to act quickly, emphasize time-limited offers, special discounts, or approaching deadlines.

Offer your audience something worthwhile. It may be a deal, a gift, exclusive content, or insider knowledge. Ensure that the value is clear and appealing.

Pick phrases that stir feelings and motivate action. To generate excitement, emphasize advantages, highlight special selling factors, and utilize powerful verbs.

Often, the goal in ecommerce texting is to showcase your products, so make sure you present them in an enticing way.

Implement Your Campaigns in Your SMS Platform

You’ll need to decide what type of campaigns you want to set up.

For example…

Drip campaigns for customers who take certain actions, such as purchasing a particular product
One-off promos or flash sales
Abandoned cart notices or other integrated workflows

Then you can set up your campaign within the SMS platform, or via SMS API or Zapier.

Monitor and Analyze the Results

Monitor the effectiveness of your SMS marketing efforts regularly. Consider open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. Make use of this information to improve your future campaigns and strategy.

Are more people buying your ecommerce products because of the text messages? Why or why not? What conclusions can you draw from what types of messages are successful vs. unsuccessful?

Comply with Regulations

Make sure that your SMS marketing efforts follow all applicable regulations, including those pertaining to registering your ecommerce brand with the mobile carriers ahead of time.

If you’re an ecommerce brand that sells a product of a sensitive nature (such as firearms or alcohol), you’ll need to take into account some special considerations—indeed, you’ll need to make sure the SMS platform you’re interested in actually supports your use case.

(See more information on compliance here.)

"How does ecommerce SMS marketing work?” with a flow chart connecting all the points above

How to integrate ecommerce SMS marketing with other channels

So how do you integrate SMS into your other ecommerce marketing channels?

Below are some examples.

Most of these you can incorporate together without needing an official integration. But if you want to actually integrate directly with one of your existing tools (such as your email service provider), you can do that through an SMS API, or via the integration site Zapier.

1. Email Marketing

Email and SMS marketing are two peas in a pod (or to use the metaphor from the intro, two sticky substances in between bread slices).

And that’s especially true when it comes to ecommerce use cases.

Cross-promotion: Promote your SMS list in emails and vice versa.
Coordinated campaigns:
- Use email for detailed information and SMS for quick reminders or time-sensitive offers.
- Sometimes you can even send both email and SMS together for maximum reach.
Preference-based communication: Allow customers to choose their preferred channel for different types of messages.

SMS and social media can also be complementary cousins—which is important for ecommerce, since it often relies heavily on social reach.

SMS-to-social: Use SMS to alert followers about new social media content or live events.
Social-to-SMS: Promote SMS opt-ins through social media posts and ads.
Unified messaging: Try to keep consistent messaging across SMS and social media platforms.

3. Website Integration

For an ecommerce business, your website is often one and the same as your storefront and thus presents a strong opportunity for you to use SMS alongside it as parallel tools.

Collect Sign-Ups:
- Use website pop-ups to encourage SMS sign-ups.
- Embed a web sign-up form (provided to you by your SMS platform) that people can use to subscribe to your texts.
SMS-exclusive offers: Advertise SMS-only deals on your website to drive subscriptions to your text list.
Cart abandonment: Combine website tracking with SMS reminders for abandoned carts.

4. Loyalty Programs

Many ecommerce stores now track loyalty via a mobile app. But whether you use an app or a literal punchcard, SMS can help you make your loyalty program even more effective.

SMS updates: Send point balances and reward notifications via text.
Exclusive SMS offers: Provide special promotions to loyalty members through SMS.
Quick redemption: Allow customers to redeem rewards via text message.

5. Customer Service

Wait, I thought we were talking ecommerce marketing?

Yes, well, in many ways marketing and customer service go hand in hand so it warrants a mention here.

Omnichannel support: Offer SMS as a customer service channel alongside email, chat, and phone.
Status updates: Send order and shipping updates via text message.
Feedback collection: Use SMS to request and collect customer feedback post-purchase.

6. Paid Advertising

Paid ads can be a huge source of traffic for ecommerce businesses.

So how can SMS help with your pad ad efforts?

Retargeting: Use SMS lists for creating custom audiences in social media and display advertising.
Campaign reinforcement: Follow up on ad campaigns with SMS messages to interested customers.
SMS landing pages: Create dedicated landing pages for SMS campaigns that align with your ad messaging.

7. In-Store Experience (for Omnichannel Retailers)

Let’s say you're an ecommerce store that also has in-store options (or that has other brands with physical stores).

What can you do in those cases?

In-store SMS offers: Send targeted promotions to customers when they're in or near your physical stores.
Digital receipts: Offer SMS receipts for in-store purchases, building your SMS list.
Event notifications: Use SMS to inform local customers about in-store events or new product arrivals.

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"How to integrate ecommerce SMS marketing with other channels” including the points above as well as the bullet points listed for each

How to be compliant in your ecommerce SMS marketing

One big question with SMS is how you can be compliant when it comes to SMS marketing for ecommerce.

Because if you’re not compliant, it won’t matter how well your SMS campaigns are planned out and executed—your messages won’t actually deliver.

In other words your audience won’t even see your messages.

The biggest thing to remember is that you need to register your ecommerce brand.

You can do this just by filling out a brief form within your SMS platform’s online dashboard.
If your ecommerce store doesn’t have an affiliated LLC (i.e., if you’re a sole proprietor), there may be special considerations in regards to brand registration—make sure to let your SMS platform’s support know and they can help walk you through your options.
If the products you sell are of a sensitive nature, you’ll need to check whether the platform supports your use case (Mobile Text Alerts supports most legal use cases)—if your platform does support your sensitive use case, chat with a support rep and they’ll help walk you through your options

Other compliance issues you’ll want to consider:

Don’t text people who have unsubscribed (this is required, but SMS platforms typically remove subscribers automatically if they unsubscribe)
Don’t text people during nighttime or early morning hours in their local timezones (this is required as well)
Clearly identify who you are in your messages
Make sure people know how to opt out

What are some of the best ecommerce SMS marketing strategies?

So what can you actually do with SMS marketing in an ecommerce context?

We’ll get more into specific use cases later, but what are some broad strategies you can implement?

Here are some examples of strategies you can consider.

1. Automated Workflows

You’ll likely see more ROI on SMS marketing the more you can automate things effectively. If you can automate your lead nurturing, your promos, your order confirmations, your purchase follow-ups (etc.), you’ll be able to take advantage of using SMS without needing to go through as much hassle.