The blog emphasizes the importance of SMS marketing analytics for Shopify store owners, explaining how it helps in optimizing text marketing efforts. It introduces various metrics like Interaction Rate, Reply Rate, Delivery Rate, Conversion Rate, and others, explaining how each can be measured and utilized to improve marketing strategies.
Think about it – how many SMSes do you receive on a daily basis from brands and online stores? SMS has become one of the key channels for brands to communicate with their customers.
And with increasing competition in SMS marketing, it’s extremely important to keep a close watch on how your Shopify SMS marketing campaigns are performing.
What if you’ve spent thousands of dollars on a campaign that gets you just a couple of clicks?
That’s why it’s time to turn to analytics and to learn how to track your SMS marketing campaigns.
What is SMS marketing analytics?
SMS marketing analytics is the method of measuring and optimizing your SMS marketing activities. When you plan your SMS marketing campaign, you should know what you’re trying to achieve through the campaign – your end goals. The process of measuring those goals and the progress of your SMS marketing campaigns is called analytics.
For example, if the end goal of your SMS marketing campaign is to generate traffic for your website, you should measure how many subscribers clicked on your call-to-action link in the SMS. Here, the click rates would be one of your SMS marketing metrics.
Why is SMS marketing analytics important?
To understand your customers better
Analytics helps uncover valuable data about customers. For example, how many of your customers cared to open your text message, if they interacted by clicking on the link in the SMS, replied to your SMS, unsubscribed from your list, views, clicks, conversions, etc.
You could gather the above information and more through analytics and use it to understand your customers’ behavior. This data can also help you segment customers. Such customer segmentation can help you create more personalized and targeted SMS marketing campaigns.
To optimize your SMS marketing strategy
Once you have your SMS marketing campaign data, you’d be in a position to make decisions around it. For example, here are some ways marketers optimize SMS strategies:
- Decide whether or not to continue a campaign based on its performance
- Try A/B testing by tweaking text content or marketing offers
- Change content or marketing offers based on customer queries
Analytics helps you set up better automations
Once you have the data and know what works, you can create targeted campaigns and automate them.
SMS marketing automation would include actions such as real-time replies to customer queries, automated messages through the sales journey – from the thank you message to delivery updates, etc.
Automation can help you set up promotional campaigns, send regular sales follow-ups and alerts, request feedback, enable two-way conversations, and win back abandoned cart sales.
This way, automation helps improve customer experience, it increases sales, saves you time, and is more cost effective than hiring multiple staff to perform tasks that can be easily automated.
How to track your SMS marketing metrics?
One of the biggest challenges of SMS marketing analytics is the amount of data. No matter how skilled your Shopify store marketers are, to manually gather data and analyze it would be a nightmare.
The solution – eCommerce analytics tools or Google analytics. However, there’s nothing like a
fully automated Shopify SMS marketing tool. The tool should be able to help you with data aggregation, analysis, and optimization.
TxtCart is one of the most preferred Shopify SMS marketing tools. The app’s dashboard gives you a view of all the numbers from your SMS campaigns.
A look at TxtCart dashboard:
10 key SMS marketing analytics metrics to measure
1. Interaction rate
When you run a campaign and send text messages as part of it, you could expect various ways in which your subscribers would interact through the campaign.
Subscribers could take actions such as open the SMS, share the SMS, click on a link, or reply to your message if it’s a two-way SMS campaign, etc.
Interaction rate measures how many customers from your list took an action after receiving your SMS. By tracking the interaction rate, you could know whether or not your SMS campaign is working. If it’s not working well, you could make changes to improve it.
How to measure: Total clicks or replies / Total delivered messages X 100
2. Reply rate
At times, your main purpose for running an SMS campaign would be to collect responses. For example, when you send out a feedback request message and want subscribers to respond to your message.
The reply rate is the percentage of people who responded to your message. But measuring this metric is only possible when you allow two-way conversations. This means, when you enable the feature where customers can respond to your SMS via the same channel.
This is a key metric that tells you how engaged your subscribers are, how effective your messages are, and if your call-to-action is powerful enough.
How to measure: Number of replies / total number of delivered messages in a campaign x 100
3. Delivery rate
At times, some SMSes may not get delivered. This could be due to a network error, invalid phone numbers, incomplete phone numbers, spam filters, etc. Delivery rate is the number of SMSes of a campaign that get delivered.
By tracking the delivery rate, you can get a sense of the quality of your SMS database. If the delivery rate is poor, you could work on improving your list by cleaning and updating it.
How to measure: Number of delivered texts / Total number of texts sent X 100
4. Conversion rate
When you run SMS marketing campaigns, your conversions would depend on the goal of your campaigns. For example, it could be in the form of sign ups, purchases, abandoned cart recoveries, among others.
Conversion rate is one of the most important SMS marketing KPIs as it enables you to track the performance of your campaign and the results you could expect from it.
To calculate the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of messages sent and multiplied it by 100. You’ll have the campaign conversion rate.
SMS conversion rates are usually much higher than other channels such as email because SMS open rates are high – 98% of text messages get opened.
How to measure: Number of conversions / Number of text messages sent x 100
5. Customer acquisition cost
Customer acquisition cost is the amount of money that you spend to acquire a customer. If your acquisition cost is high, it could mean many things. Maybe your customer segmentation was wrong and hence you were targeting the wrong customers.
When you target the wrong customers, it’s a cost to your business. Moreover, this cost increases your customer acquisition cost.
How to measure: Total expense of the SMS campaign / Total number of new customers
6. Unsubscribe rate
It’s common for customers to unsubscribe from SMS lists. The reasons could be any: they’re no longer interested in your brand, they had a bad experience on your site, their message box is getting spammed, they’re receiving messages multiple times, etc.
The unsubscribe rate tells you the number of customers who unsubscribed from a campaign. If the rate is high, it’s not a good sign. You’d have to review your campaigns, tweak the content, try out different sent times, etc.
How to measure: Total number of opt-outs in a campaign / Total number of subscribers at the beginning x 100
7. Campaign return on investment
Whether you spend a lot on your SMS marketing campaign or little, you’d want to know the returns on your investment.
How to measure: Total sales – total investment / Total investment
8. List growth rate
To run successful SMS campaigns, you’d need to have a solid subscriber list. Your list growth is also a metric you should measure. This metric tells you how fast your list is growing. You could calculate your list growth rate on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis, or as and when you require to.
But why is this metric important? This metric can help you keep a track of the average value a customer brings to your business.
How to measure: New subscribers – unsubscribers / total subscribers during a pre-defined period
Struggling to grow your SMS list? Read this article.
9. List size
Another metric to keep a track of is your SMS subscriber list size. The number of your customers would be constantly changing.
However, the number of customers you have isn’t your list size. The list size would be different because it’s possible that many customers opted out of the list, many numbers changed, etc.
List size tells you the strength of your SMS subscriber base. The purpose of this metric? Well, the bigger your list, the bigger your sample size to test SMS campaigns.
How to measure: The total number of subscribers in your list is your list size
10. Click-through rate
When you send a text message to your customers, one factor that’s key in the message is the call-to-action. If it’s a marketing SMS campaign, you’ll most probably add a link in your message.
The click-through rate of your SMS campaigns is the number of people who clicked on the link in your text message.
You can measure total click, which is the total number of clicks on the link throughout the campaign. You can also measure individual click, which is the number of times an individual subscriber clicked on the link.
One of the most important SMS marketing KPIs, this metric is one of the most important indicators of the success of your SMS marketing campaigns.
How to measure: Total number of subscribers that clicked on the call-to-action link / Total number of delivered text messages in a campaign x 100
Wrap-up: Using SMS marketing analytics
So, are you ready to get ahead of your competitors in the SMS marketing game? Now that you know how to track SMS marketing campaigns, all you need to do is set up and automate your SMS campaigns with an efficient tool – TxtCart.
From pre-built templates to powerful features like segmentation and SMS marketing analytics, the app comes for it all, along with a team of ecommerce experts who help you drive the best of results from the marketing channel.
