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.
Point solutions vs. all-in-one platforms
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.
More benefits of a unified approach through an SMS and email marketing platform
Consolidating email and SMS marketing creates a synergy that amplifies the effectiveness of both channels. This unified approach offers several other key advantages besides those we’ve already covered:
- Improved data visibility: Eliminate the chances of double-counting conversions and gain clear cross-channel performance insights—this was something Tata Harper struggled with.
- Unified compliance management: Streamline consent tracking and preference management across both channels.
- Adaptive frequency optimization: Adjust message cadence across email and SMS based on individual engagement patterns.
- Cross-channel content repurposing: Identify high-performing design elements and copy from one channel and strategically test them in the other.
- Holistic customer lifecycle mapping: Visualize and optimize the entire customer journey across both channels in a single view.
The unified approach laid a foundation for performance wins at Tata Harper. After consolidating their email and SMS marketing in Klaviyo, they achieved 43% growth in total attributed revenue in Q1 2024.
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.
1. Harnessing unified customer data for precise segmentation
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.
2. Cross-channel behavior analysis for improved targeting
Look beyond single-channel behaviors to understand your customers’ full interaction patterns. This might involve:
- Channel preference scoring: Develop a scoring system that weighs engagement across both channels to determine individual customer preferences.
- Cross-channel conversion paths: Analyze how customers move between email and SMS before making a purchase to optimize your message sequence.
- Time-based interaction analysis: Identify patterns around when customers engage with each channel throughout the day or week.
You might discover that a segment of customers often browses products via email links but completes purchases after receiving SMS reminders. This insight could inform a new browse abandonment flow that switches from email to SMS after 24 hours.
3. Dynamic content creation across email and SMS
Use your unified data to create dynamic, personalized content for both channels. This might involve:
- Adaptive content: Design content modules that automatically adjust based on customer data, regardless of the channel.
- Cross-channel content synergy: Ensure that your email and SMS content complement each other, telling a cohesive story across channels.
You could create a dynamic product showcase that adapts to show bestsellers from a customer’s favorite category in emails, while sending SMS alerts when those items go on sale.
After switching to Klaviyo for both channels, KURU Footwear experienced a total of 51.3% YoY growth in BFCM revenue from email. This growth came from their ability to create more cohesive customer experiences across email and SMS, leveraging the unified data and functionality provided by a consolidated platform.
Candle brand Otherland also uses multi-channel segments for customer research. They use data from their scent quiz, which feeds directly into customer profiles, to segment subscribers based on preferences and buying intent. This allows them to send highly relevant messages via both email and SMS.
These examples highlight how brands can leverage consolidated channels and unified customer data to create more effective, personalized marketing strategies spanning both email and SMS.
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?
Nail the cadence: how to make SMS and email work together
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.
Cross-channel attribution models for accurate ROI
Accurate ROI measurement in a multi-channel environment requires sophisticated cross-channel attribution models.
This is a challenge Tata Harper knew intimately. Prior to consolidating their efforts on Klaviyo, their email and SMS platforms had different attribution models, so revenue often got double-attributed to both channels—which made it tough to pinpoint top-performing strategies or measure how well the channels worked together.
Klaviyo’s attribution credits the last interaction before a purchase, and its cooperative multi-channel attribution model ensures that email and SMS impacts aren’t double counted. When you consolidate your email and SMS in Klaviyo, the platform checks all of a customer’s recent engagements and credits the sale accurately.
In turn, you’ll be able to easily identify and prioritize the messages that convert for different channels.
Identifying high-impact message sequences
To identify high-impact message sequences and combinations, leverage Klaviyo’s flow analytics. This allows you to test and compare different sequences of email and SMS interactions that lead to conversions.
For example, you could use a 50/50 randomized conditional split in a flow to test different message combinations. You might discover that an email showcasing new products followed by an SMS with a limited-time offer two days later is particularly effective for re-engaging dormant customers.
For even deeper insights, Klaviyo CDP offers additional capabilities. You can use the funnel analysis to track customer behavior after receiving specific messages or subscribing to particular channels. You can also review the product analysis to determine post-purchase product up-sell or cross-sell recommendations, to leverage in your multi-channel strategy for even higher impact.
Proozy’s high-volume approach
Proozy’s experience illustrates the power of optimizing send times and frequencies across channels. The apparel, accessories, and footwear brand sends up to 7 segmented email campaigns per day, complemented by 1–2 daily SMS messages. By using AI to generate content, they’ve achieved significant time savings and improved engagement rates.
This high-volume, data-driven approach has allowed them to maintain consistent, relevant communication with their customers across both channels, driving substantial engagement growth.
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:
1. Designing advanced, multi-channel automated flows
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.
2. AI-powered content creation and optimization
Employ AI tools to streamline content production, such as:
- Smart subject line generation: Use AI to create multiple subject line variations for A/B testing.
- Content summarization: Automatically generate concise SMS versions of longer email content.
3. Efficient campaign management at scale
Develop strategies to manage high-volume campaigns effectively, such as:
- Streamlining your content strategy: Develop a unified messaging approach that aligns email and SMS campaigns while respecting each channel’s unique format and constraints.
- Automating your QA processes: Implement pre-send checks for brand consistency, link functionality, and personalization across both channels.
- Using the advanced flow preview feature: Use Klaviyo’s unique profile journey preview tool for flows, allowing you to visualize how customers move through multi-channel sequences before launching campaigns.
4. Integrating additional channels
Expand your consolidated approach to include other channels, such as:
- Strategic push notifications: Integrate mobile app push notifications with your email and SMS strategy, carefully spacing out push and SMS messages due to their similar nature on mobile devices.
- On-site messaging: Integrate website pop-ups and banners that align with your email and SMS campaigns.
Social media retargeting: Use your consolidated customer data to create highly targeted social media audiences.
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.