SMS marketing for ecommerce

Permission to email someone is not permission to text them. The opt-in has to be specific, recorded, and separate, with the terms visible at the point of sign-up rather than buried in a policy page. We set up the collection points properly: a phone field with its own tick box, a keyword opt-in where it suits, and a confirmation step that both proves consent and filters out mistyped numbers. Records are kept because if consent is ever questioned, the record is the answer.

In several markets, including the US, a business sending marketing messages from a standard ten-digit number has to register the brand and the campaign with the carriers before traffic is allowed to flow properly. Registration takes time, can come back with questions, and can be rejected if your website does not clearly show who you are and how people opted in. We start this early, prepare the supporting pages first, and set expectations that the channel is weeks away rather than days.

We map the customer journey and mark the points where a text is genuinely better than an email. Usually that is a short list: an abandoned checkout within the hour, a back-in-stock alert for something the person asked to be told about, a shipping update, and occasionally a scheduled launch. Everything else stays in email. Keeping the list short is what protects the opt-out rate, and the opt-out rate is what determines whether the channel still exists next year.

A plain text message fits 160 characters in one segment, and adding a single emoji or an unusual character switches the encoding and cuts that to 70. Longer messages are split and billed as multiple segments. So the discipline is real: name the brand so people know who is texting, say the one thing, add the link, include the opt-out. Link shorteners can hurt deliverability, so we use a branded short domain where the platform supports one.

Messages sent late at night lose customers and can breach the rules, so quiet hours are set per recipient time zone rather than per office. On top of that we cap how many marketing messages any person can receive in a period, across all flows, and the cap is enforced in the platform rather than trusted to whoever schedules the next send. Transactional messages such as a shipping notice sit outside the cap and are kept clearly separate from marketing ones.

Unlike email, each message has a unit price, and a picture message costs more than a text one. So we plan sends with the arithmetic visible: subscribers multiplied by segments multiplied by unit cost, against the orders the send needs to produce. That maths kills a lot of proposed campaigns before they are written, which is the point. It also makes the case for the flows, because a triggered message to one interested person costs almost nothing.