Overview

Although SMS marketing is not a part of email marketing, we still wanted to include it as you can easily use it to generate more sales with almost no extra work.

If you use the Omnisend Pro plan, which we recommend, you will get some SMS credit each month included in the plan, equal to the price of your monthly plan. How much each SMS will cost you depends on the country that your recipients reside in.

You can also use other platforms, that are specific for SMS marketing. There, you will usually get cheaper prices for texts, but we really like that we can manage them from one platform and use them in the same automation flows as emails, so you can have full control over when they are sent and how they work together with emails.

The biggest downside of SMS marketing is that it is relatively expensive, compared to email marketing, as you pay for each text that you send. But…

The biggest upside is that you can expect open rates of up to 90%, which is incomparably high, compared to email marketing. That way, you can really get your money’s worth out of it.

Simple rules to follow for effective email marketing:

• Use them in automation flows, but not too aggressively. Only in more sales-oriented flows, such as abandoned carts for example. You can see our exact suggestions in Chapter 6. EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATIONS BEST PRACTICES
• Send them out as campaigns/newsletters as well, but nowhere near as often as email marketing campaigns. We usually send only 4-8 SMS campaigns in a YEAR. Only for your biggest sale campaigns, such as Black Friday, etc. If you do that, they will be cost-effective and your customers won’t complain about you being too pushy.
• When collecting phone numbers in your sign-up forms, it’s better to do it separately from email, to not overwhelm the customers. First, collect only email and in the next step of the form ask for the phone number as well and let them know they will get some extra VIP offers if they sign up for SMS marketing as well.
• Keep them short. You pay more for texts that are longer than 160 characters so go over that limit only if it will bring extra value to the recipients.