Welcome!

Today you'll learn how to use SMS in addition to your existing email setup without burning money and without annoying your customers.

We've been using Omnichannel Marketing for the past few years and this lesson/course is based on our learnings from a few hundred projects as an agency as well as from data from 1.500 brands.

IMPORTANT: The costs for SMS credits vary HEAVILY from country to country.

For businesses in the US, SMS are usually a no brainer as 1 SMS costs 1 credit.

However, coming from Germany, SMS is an absolute disaster here. 1 SMS costs 12 credits making it near impossible to be profitable, even with healthy margins.

Also, if you use emojis, and/or exceed character limits, these can double. For the US you'd pay 2 credits per send, and 24 in Germany. So be aware of this.

Here's the full cost breakdown: Klaviyo SMS Billing

Goal:

After this post, you’ll know:

• Which SMS strategy you should be using during BFCM
• Why you shouldn't layer SMS with emails
• Where and how to use SMS in your flows & campaigns

and more...

My Rule: The cheapest medium always goes first. If you're using email & sms in tandem, please make sure to always try to get the conversion with emails first. There is no valid reason to send both messages at the same time - so if you can pay less for a conversion, then do so.

Why should you add SMS to your strategy?

The average email today has an open rate of about 30% within 4 hours.

The average SMS today has an open rate of 98% while 90% are being opened within 3 min.

This statistic alone shows just how powerful SMS really is.

Pros:

• It's less crowded because fewer business do it
• Most people check it more frequently than emails

Cons:

• It costs significantly more than an email
• It's a lot harder to get a phone number than it is to get an email

Now, at least from my experience, it's worth the extra effort and money every single time.

Here for example, we have a brand that captures both the emails & phone numbers a the checkout:

This is the full flow and while the 2 emails are only attributing about $1.200 total, the SMS is killing it with $2.3K alone.

How should you get started?

1. Capture more phone numbers. (Checkout, PopUp, Campaign Form, etc.)
2. Implement it more in all Flows & Campaigns

Where and how to use SMS in your flows & campaigns?

SMS can be added to every flow and campaign and usually perform better than the email anyway. However, as you read in the beginning, we always send the cheapest message first.

Only if the customer doesn't convert, THEN you send out the next message with another medium - like SMS.

Hierarchy: Email -> SMS -> WhatsApp -> Push -> Postcard

You can give customers a window of about 2-5 hours to convert before sending the followup with a 2nd channel.

Exception: If someone CAN'T receive email marketing, you can skip emails and go right into the other channels in that order.

You can see an example in the screenshot above and yes, you can use SMS literally everywhere.

Flows: Abandonment (Site, Browse, Cart, Checkout), Winback, Sunset, Post Purchase, etc.

Campaigns: Educational, Entertaining or Promotional (however, if you have to be cost Conscious, you should probably start with promotional first and then add the others later.)

Which SMS strategy you should be using during BFCM

Time limited offers & Early Access (e.g. Flash Sale, Only available for 2 hours)

Here you can layer the SMS with the Email as you want to reach everyone at the same time and they should all have an equal shot at buying your offer.

Casual Sale start & reminder emails (e.g. Our sale starts now, don't forget to use this offer)

Here you should wait 2-5 hours before sending the additional SMS.

To plan your campaigns, please consider checking out the campaign planner here in skool.

BFCM Strategy Checklist:

• Add an SMS to each flow after the 1st email. Delay should be 2-5 hours.
• Add a conditional split before every 1st email asking for "can't receive email marketing" and "can receive sms marketing" and build out the SMS string.
• Add an SMS to each campaign you're about to send with the rules mentioned above. So if you have 3 limited time offer email campaigns planned, add 3 SMS to complement those.