Just how effective are email, SMS and push notifications in ecommerce? Omnichannel marketing platform, Omnisend has analyse nearly 600 million messages issued by ecommerce businesses in 2023.
In a press release, Omnisend reckons the messages resulted in more than a million sales in South Africa and helped to earn Omnisend’s customers more than R1.2 billion.
“With the endless number and inconsistency of paid channels, it’s difficult to maintain them, especially for those with limited budgets,” said Greg Zakowicz, ecommerce marketing expert at Omnisend.
“That’s why it’s important to stay focused on marketing tactics that work. Omnichannel marketing using email, SMS, and push messages increased the conversion rate by nearly 500%. Add automation to the mix and the results are even better.”
Action-triggered messages performed up to hundred times better
Interestingly, researchers found that action-triggered (or automated) emails, SMS, and push notifications performed much better than scheduled messages. Automated messages included those sent to customers when they abandoned their cart, registered for a newsletter, or when their favourite item came back in stock.
For automated emails, the click-to-conversion rate improved from 3% to 19%, and for SMS, it increased from 0.4% to 8%. Automated push notifications saw their conversion rate jump from 3% to 20%.
Click-to-conversion rates check the rate of sales from people who click on a message.
Pets and animals, smoking and vaping, and science top three industries for email marketing in South Africa
South African industries with the highest click-to-conversion rate in 2023 were Pets & Animals (21%), Smoking & Vaping (16%), and Science (14%). The lowest click-to-conversion rate was held by Jobs & Education (0.07%), Computers (0.07%) and Internet (0.5%).
“The varying results among industries can be impacted by many factors, including the number of sent messages, the contents of emails, or the percentage of automated messages,” Zakowicz said. “One thing we know is that brands that combine email, SMS, and web push messages into their marketing campaigns, and use behaviour-based automation generate more sales.”
How brands can evolve their omnichannel marketing strategy in 2024
- Start exploring other channels of communication. If you only used email to communicate with your customers before, SMS and push notifications are a good place to start expanding your portfolio. Finding the best channel to talk to your customers will help you generate more sales and increase your conversion rate.
- Use automations. Whether it’s email, SMS, or push messages, automated messages significantly outperform scheduled campaigns. If you’re unsure where to begin, we’d recommend starting with the most effective automated messages: cart abandonment, browse abandonment and welcome messages.
- Focus on growing lists through different channels. Growing your email, SMS, and push message lists helps brands maximise their ROI by keeping order data from all channels in one place and allows them to market to an unsubscriber of one channel (like email) via another (like SMS).
- Optimise email templates for conversion. If you haven’t yet done so, take this moment to analyse your email templates and add items that can help turn email openers into buyers. You could make your email campaigns more effective by promoting value-adds such as free shipping, return policies, satisfaction guarantees, and customer service availability. Adding social proof highlights, such as product review star ratings and customer testimonials could also be helpful.
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