The complete SMS marketing guide for 2024 campaign success

You should already have a privacy policy published to your site that discloses how you handle customer data. Your privacy policy should be updated to include an accurate description of your SMS marketing program, along with how you store and use phone numbers and location data, and the types of messages you will be sending via SMS. Get more guidance on what to add to your privacy policy.

Disclosure language is critical to SMS compliance. In the US, you need to include it anywhere you’re collecting SMS consent. On sign-up forms, it’s best practice to place your disclosure language above the submit button to make sure visitors see it. This clearly communicates what the visitor is opting in to and that messaging and data rates may apply. Disclosure language should also link to your privacy policy and mobile TOS.

You can configure your SMS disclosure language in your account settings, and it will be added automatically to any sign-up form you build to collect SMS consent.

Your existing email audience is already a highly qualified group of buyers. Create a new single-step sign-up form that specifically targets anyone who is already subscribed to email. You should also add a form teaser to this form. Form teasers are small clickable widgets that show up in the corner of your website screen. They can help increase form submit rate by giving site visitors the option to reopen a form and sign up.

You should offer this group an additional sign-up incentive to get their consent for SMS marketing, such as:

• 10% off your next order
• Free shipping on your next order
• Enrollment into an SMS loyalty program that comes with exclusive benefits

If you send 2 campaigns a week, aim to send 1 campaign per week to your segment of all active SMS subscribers, and 1 to your 90-day SMS engaged segment.

We recommend turning on Smart Sending for all of your SMS campaigns (except for time-sensitive campaigns like big sale announcements). This will prevent over-messaging subscribers who may have recently received an SMS from a flow.

You can also target specific segments with tailored SMS campaigns based on previous purchase history, common behaviors, or churn risk to the business.

For example, SWAK Cosmetics built a segment of customers who previously viewed or purchased a specific lip gloss, then sent a targeted campaign to those customers highlighting that it is now available in new colors. Use similar context about your own audience to come up with ideas for content-targeted campaigns.

Sometimes text messages can’t be delivered to your subscribers. There are a variety of reasons why, and the reasons are usually temporary.

In order to protect your SMS message delivery rate, it is a best practice to build an SMS error segment to group all the profiles that have logged a temporary SMS error in the last 30 days. Excluding this segment from all your campaign sends enables you to maintain a strong message delivery rate.

Don’t worry about excluding these profiles from flows. Due to the trigger-based nature of flows, sending 1-off messages to an individual recipient whose carrier throws an error is less harmful to your SMS deliverability than sending a large quantity of messages to a bunch of error profiles at the same time.

To hit your revenue goals, you’ll need to look at the promotions and marketing activities you plan to carry out, and then decide which channels are best for communicating those messages.

While you can decide to combine email and SMS however you see fit, we recommend starting out with this framework:

• Newsletter content or content-based updates: These are things like blog posts, general brand updates, and other passive information that is not squarely focused on driving purchases. Send this via email only to keep your email engagement rates healthy.
• Minor promotions and sales: You can choose to either lead with an email and follow up with an SMS, or lead with an SMS and follow up with an email. For these types of more frequent sales, SMS is a great way to alert subscribers that a sale is about to end (e.g., “Last chance to shop these deals!”).
• SMS-exclusive perks and offers: Send these via SMS only to reinforce the value of subscribing to SMS. This could include giving early sale access or pre-order privileges to SMS subscribers.

Think about the really impactful marketing initiatives your brand runs every year, or even every quarter. You might run a semi-annual sale, offer Black Friday discounts, or release new products.

These are what we call “major marketing moments,” and they require a lot more customer messaging than smaller day-to-day initiatives.

For your major marketing moments, leverage the combined power of email and SMS. SMS subscribers are more likely to see a text message before they see an email. Seeing the same message in both places will also help reinforce the importance of your message.

In the Klaviyo campaign builder, you can easily add an SMS message to your email campaign. This will allow you to reach subscribers via email and SMS at the same time to alert them of your big news.

By creating a combined campaign, you’ll also be able to analyze attributed revenue individually by channel, as well as in aggregate for the larger campaign.

SMS stands for short messaging service, while MMS stands for multimedia messaging service. We’ve found that SMS messages typically perform the same or better than MMS messages (texts that also contain an image, gif, or video). While this isn’t always the case, 95% of A/B tests run in Klaviyo show that SMS outperforms MMS.

Emojis and MMS can inflate the cost of SMS, and they don’t necessarily yield better results. MMS messages cost more to send than SMS. Emojis are not sent as MMS messages, but they do shorten the number of characters you can include in your message from 160 to 70. If you want to test and find out for yourself what works, A/B test your SMS message with and without media content or emojis to see what works best for your use case.

Think about your own experience as a consumer in the digital age. If you receive a text message that begins with a link, red flags will go off in your brain that the message is probably spam. Put short, concise copy at the beginning of your SMS messages, followed by a clear call to action. Finish with a link and then opt-out instructions.

Using personal details in messages, like first name, tends to yield higher click rates for your SMS messages. If you collect first-party data in your sign-up form or elsewhere, such as preferences about products, shopping categories, or shopping intention, use that data to inform your segmentation and personalization strategy.

For instance, if Beantown Coffee collects coffee preference data on their form, they can send a targeted SMS campaign to iced coffee lovers when they launch a new coffee concentrate product.

Your SMS welcome series should accomplish 2 objectives: deliver the appropriate sign-up incentive you promised to the recipient and prompt the subscriber to add your number to their contacts. If you used an incentive to attract subscribers on your sign-up form, deliver that reward in the first message of your welcome flow.

If you followed our recommended sign-up form incentive strategy, you’ll have 3 different incentives that you have to deliver:

1. A 10% discount to new email-only subscribers
2. A 15% discount to new subscribers who joined email and SMS
3. A special incentive to existing email subscribers who joined SMS

In order to deliver the right incentives to the right recipients, you’ll need to edit the first part of both your email welcome series and your SMS welcome series to coordinate your incentive delivery.

Email welcome series

• Trigger: Someone is added to your main email list. Since your email list should be set to double opt-in, this flow will trigger once someone clicks Confirm in the subscription confirmation email.
• Time delay: None
• Conditional split: Can receive SMS
• YES path: Deliver a discount code for 15% off via email because the recipient is subscribed to both channels. You can deliver this code via email.
• NO path: Deliver a discount code for 10% off because the recipient is only subscribed to email.

SMS welcome series

• Trigger: Someone Subscribed to SMS Marketing
• Conditional split: Split the flow by the $source profile property to account for any difference in incentives that you might have between your “new visitor” form and “existing email” form. For instance, you may offer 15% off to new visitors for SMS consent, but free shipping to existing email subscribers if they sign up for SMS. Branching based on sign-up form source allows you to deliver on these different incentives within a single flow.
• Time delay: None
• First message: Deliver the appropriate incentive to each path. The YES path will receive the incentive for existing email subscribers who join your SMS list, and the NO path will deliver that same 15% discount code that you included in the new subscriber email welcome series.

The first message in a welcome series, regardless of channel, should be sent immediately upon sign-up. When someone signs up for email or SMS, they expect a definitive confirmation that they have successfully been added to your list. More often than not, you also owe them an incentive which they expect to receive right away.

In order to ensure immediate delivery, turn both quiet hours and Smart Sending off for this message only. Leave Smart Sending and quiet hours on for the rest of the messages in the series.