Unifying email and SMS: strategies for the modern marketer
The benefits of channel consolidation go beyond just efficiency. Fragmented marketing tech stacks hinder growth for SMB and enterprise brands.
This guide tackles the complexities of unifying email and SMS marketing efforts. It offers advanced strategies for brands to achieve true omnichannel optimization beyond basic integration.
We’ll examine how leading brands use unified platforms to enhance personalization, work more efficiently, and increase returns on their marketing spend across channels.
The case for consolidating email and SMS marketing
Chief among the hurdles separate email and SMS systems create for marketers is data silos, leading to disconnected customer profiles.
Data silos make it impossible to create a unified view of customer interactions across channels. This not only doubles the effort it takes for a marketing team to build out the experience in multiple systems, but also means the end result is inconsistent experiences. Customers receive disjointed messaging that fails to account for their full engagement history.
Luxury skincare brand Tata Harper faced these exact challenges before consolidating their marketing efforts in Klaviyo. Their team struggled with performance analysis and creating cohesive customer journeys across email and SMS. “It was just a clunkier experience,” says Alexandra Barlowe, DTC email and SMS marketing director at Tata Harper.
Moreover, managing multiple platforms requires duplicative efforts in campaign creation and list management—all of which may result in a marketing team spending excessive time reconciling data from different systems, reducing their capacity for strategic planning and creative work.
While point solutions like Attentive excel in single-channel optimization, they fall short in creating cohesive customer journeys. Their narrow focus often leads to a messaging strategy tied to a single channel, resulting in a fragmented customer experience.
By contrast, Klaviyo’s all-in-one platform enables true cross-channel optimization by offering a more comprehensive solution. It doesn’t just combine SMS, email, and behavioral data. It ingests all your customer data from any source, including information from 350+ integrations.
This wealth of data is then consolidated into unified customer profiles, giving brands a complete view of their customers. Klaviyo empowers marketers to create highly personalized, data-driven campaigns across channels, leveraging insights that would be impossible to gather from siloed systems.
Beyond that, the platform also enables marketers to create sophisticated, data-driven flows that can intelligently route messages between email and SMS channels. By leveraging engagement data, brands can set up conditional splits within their flows to determine the most effective channel for each customer.
For instance, for low-intent actions like site abandonment, a brand might start with an email, followed by an SMS only if necessary. For high-intent actions like cart abandonment, they might begin with an immediate SMS, then follow up with email.
Tata Harper customized their flows based on channel preference to assess customer engagement patterns and select the appropriate channel for each message. This approach allowed them to communicate with customers through their most responsive channel.
Optimizing cross-channel customer journeys
Consolidating your email and SMS channels is just the first step. The real challenge lies in using this unified approach to create customer journeys that are not just integrated but truly optimized.
Here are 3 steps for transforming your consolidated channels into a powerful engine for customer engagement and revenue growth.
Begin by creating a comprehensive map of your customer touchpoints across both email and SMS. This might involve:
- Listing all interactions: Catalog every point where customers engage with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support.
- Assessing channel effectiveness: For each touchpoint, evaluate whether email, SMS, or a combination would be most effective.
- Analyzing current performance: Review your existing data to understand how customers currently engage at each touchpoint.
- Identifying optimization opportunities: Look for areas where combining channels could enhance the customer experience.
For example, you might discover that your post-purchase support, currently handled via email, could be more responsive with the addition of SMS for time-sensitive issues.
Advanced segmentation and personalization strategies
With your channels consolidated and customer journeys optimized, it’s time to use your unified data for precision targeting. Advanced segmentation and personalization strategies can significantly boost engagement and conversions across both email and SMS.
Your consolidated platform gives you a full view of each customer. Use this to create hyper-targeted segments based on:
- Combined engagement metrics: Create segments based on both email open rates and SMS click rates to identify your most responsive customers.
- Purchase behavior across channels: Segment customers who have purchased through email promotions but not SMS, or vice versa, to tailor your approach.
- Content preferences: Analyze which types of content drive engagement on each channel to create interest-based segments.
For example, you could create a segment of “high-value SMS responders” tailored to your brand’s specific metrics.
A brand with an average order value of $100 might define this segment as customers who have made purchases totaling $200 or more from SMS campaigns in the last 180 days, but haven’t engaged with emails in the past 30 days.
Naturally, you should adjust these numbers based on your brand’s unique sales cycle and average order value.
Optimizing send time, frequency, and attribution
Fine-tuning your messaging cadence and accurately measuring its impact are crucial next steps in your consolidated email and SMS strategy. Carefully balancing frequency across both channels and optimizing send times can significantly boost engagement and conversions. But how do you do it?
Effective cadence management requires a nuanced understanding of your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
Start by analyzing your current engagement rates across both channels. Look for patterns in open rates, click rates, and conversion rates at different frequencies. You might find that some customer segments respond well to daily SMS messages but prefer weekly emails, while others engage more with biweekly communications on both channels.
To find the optimal balance, implement a graduated frequency testing program by taking the following steps:
- Create control and test groups within your segments.
- Gradually increase message frequency for test groups across both channels.
- Monitor engagement and conversion rates closely.
- Identify the point of diminishing returns for each segment and channel.
Scaling and automation with a consolidated platform
As your unified email and SMS strategy matures, the logical next step is scaling your efforts. A consolidated platform enables advanced automation and efficient management of large-scale campaigns. Here are some ways to maximize your platform’s capabilities:
Create sophisticated flows that span both email and SMS. This might involve:
- Trigger-based sequences: Design flows that switch between channels based on user actions. For example, initiate an abandoned cart sequence with an email, followed by an SMS if the recipient doesn’t take an action within 24 hours.
- Cross-channel optimization: Use logic to avoid redundant messaging. For example, you might skip follow-up abandoned cart emails for customers who purchased from your last SMS. This can help keep customer acquisition costs low.
- Dynamic content blocks: Use dynamic content in both email and SMS to ensure consistent messaging and deliver personalized experiences across channels.
Key takeaways
Consolidating SMS and email marketing can significantly boost your revenue growth. As you implement these strategies, remember 3 key goals:
- Unify your data: Create a single customer view across both channels.
- Optimize channel selection: Use data to determine the best channel for each message.
- Automate and scale: Implement advanced flows that span both channels.
By focusing on these areas, you’ll create more engaging, personalized experiences that drive customer loyalty and increase revenue. Start consolidating your SMS and email efforts today to unlock the full potential of your marketing strategy.