Establish your brand’s goals with text messaging
It’s important to communicate with your customers in a way that compels them to engage and convert, helping you foster deeper relationships and cultivate brand loyalty. Text messaging is an incredibly personal channel where every word counts. Start by focusing on your audience, how they engage with your brand, and the goals you want to achieve.
Consider the following questions:
- What is the goal of this message, and what do you want to say to your customers?
- Who is most interested in receiving this message?
- Will an offer be included?
- How do you want customers to perceive your brand?
- What are your brand’s style, personality, and values?
- How do you best serve your customers?
- What makes your brand unique?
Answering these questions will help you establish a strong foundation for the content, tone, and overall direction of your text messages. In the following video, we share 5 tips to make the most of your texts and drive your recipients to take action.
Prior to texting any subscribers, you must first collect consent and understand compliance. Head to our Help Center for more information on collecting consent and abiding by local regulations for SMS and collecting consent and compliance for RCS.
Create and iterate on your marketing strategy
Once you have a good idea of how you want your brand to be perceived, get to know your audience through personas, research, and A/B testing.
Personas, research, and testing help you determine what tone works best for your customers. For instance, if the vast majority of your client base is younger, they may prefer a more informal tone, with few emojis and text-speak sprinkled into the content. Otherwise, if you target a wide range of age groups, text-speak might not always be appreciated. A more formal tone may resonate best.
Build personas
A persona is a type of person or group of like-minded individuals within your brand community. Their differences may pertain to age, gender, interest, motivation, income, familiarity with your product, etc. You likely have a variety of personas to account for, and it is best practice to understand these audience members and target your communication to best suit their interests. Use this template to build out the personas within your brand community!
Conduct research
Do your due diligence to investigate and get to know your subscribers. Take a look at trends in your industry, collect customer feedback using forms or email buttons, or even launch a focus group of users to gain insight into what they are looking for. Ask your customers what works best for them, and use any resources you have at your disposal to research your audience as thoroughly as possible.
Continually test
Never underestimate the power of experimentation! By A/B testing your text messages, you can see which factors most likely drive subscribers to complete the call-to-action (CTA). You can A/B test your SMS campaigns and A/B test your SMS messages in flows to gain better insight into the content and timing that resonates best with your audience.
Send with intention
Intention changes the content of the message. Depending on your use case, decide how your messages should look and sound to your audience.
Personalized Recommendations
Personalize the messages you send to your customers by targeting relevant segments at the right time. Use customer behavior and purchase intent to make each message feel helpful and tailored. You can personalize messages by communicating using:
- Browsing behavior, such as products viewed or left in a cart, to send timely reminders and relevant follow-up messages.
- Past purchase history, such as suggesting complementary products related to what a customer has already bought.
VIP Messages
VIPs are some of your most active customers. Make the message feel personal by emphasizing that these customers are valuable to your brand. You can strengthen loyalty by communicating:
- A meaningful reward, such as special savings, a unique product, or a VIP-only perk.
- Recognition of the customer’s loyalty, including: “As one of our top customers…” or “Thanks for being a VIP.”
- Exclusive access to a sale or product launch before it’s available to non-VIPs.
Flash Sales
Flash sales should create urgency for customers. You can create urgency by communicating with:
- A limited-time window, so customers know exactly when the offer ends, such as “Labor Day FLASH sale” or “Save through Dec. 15 at 5 p.m. ET.”
- A clear CTA that tells customers what to do next, such as “Shop now” or “Claim your offer” with a button or link that leads toward your sale.
Order Updates
Post-purchase updates keep customers informed at key points, building confidence in the delivery experience. You can create a smooth and effective post-purchase experience by communicating:
- A confirmation that the order was received, including any relevant information, such as the order number and expected date of shipment.
- Timely shipping progress, including when the order ships and its expected delivery date.
- Once the product is received by the customer, send a request for a review in order to collect UGC (User-Generated Content) you can use to build social proof for your brand.
Complete this checklist before hitting send
After you’ve established your audience and drafted your text message, it’s important to double-check and complete the following:
Go back through your text message to fix any typos, ensure your CTA is clear, and send yourself a preview text, ensuring that your message looks as expected and your link directs recipients to the right place. If you are using SMS, make sure your recipients know who this message is from by toggling on your organization prefix.
Opt-out language is the phrase added to the end of a message that provides instructions for customers to opt out of further text message communications. Including opt-out language limits negative customer experiences and makes sure that your deliverability is not negatively impacted by carrier filtering.
Your opt-out language must include STOP in the message and is required in some jurisdictions. STOP is a keyword message that is automatically toggled on. When a customer responds to one of your messages with this keyword, their consent to receive text messages from your brand will be revoked.
All SMS compliance and consent regulations are also applicable to RCS. Opt-out requests apply across both SMS and RCS. When a recipient opts out of RCS, they opt out of all text messaging and cannot be contacted via SMS.
Note: If you send messages to customers in the UK, you must include an unsubscribe link for subscribers to opt out. When using Klaviyo text messaging, you can automatically add this to your messages via the option in the Compliance tab.
Once your text message is ready, remember that it’s best practice to send messages between 9 am and 8 pm in your recipient’s local time. When sending text messages in flows, keep the quiet hours feature enabled for all of your texts to make sure your message is sent at an appropriate time.
You should also employ Smart Sending for your text messages so you don’t disturb customers and bombard them with too many messages in a short timeframe. Similarly, planning out an omnichannel sending strategy helps you avoid over-messaging recipients, while also giving you the chance to send important message content to non-openers across channels and to analyze, understand, and improve your performance.