23 April, 2021—Cartloop's co-founder and COO, Lisa Popovici met with Daniel Budai, CEO and Founder of Budai Media, on a special episode of The Ecom Show Podcast.

They spoke at length on what eCommerce businesses should focus on this year if they wanted to build trust, improve the lifetime value of their customers, and foster familiarity.

We'll zone in specifically on the 3-minute rapid insights from this awesome podcast.

Lisa shares how brands this year can focus on these crucial areas by:

• Leveraging conversational text messaging
• How to provide stellar customer support and lastly,
• What merchants should look out for in a conversational SMS marketing platform.

Link to the full 30-minute episode at the end of this article.

Rapidfire SMS Insights To Build Meaningful Customer Relationships in 2021

Daniel: What would you advise to eCommerce businesses this year— what should they care about in 2021?

Lisa: Yeah that's a great question. I would definitely focus on learning who your customers really are.

Because a lot of brands think they know their customers but they actually don't. As I told you, they focus on..(for example) if we talk about cart abandonment.

If they see a huge cart abandonment rate one day, they just wanna get as many carts recovered as possible. But the next day, the cart abandonment rate the next day can be the same or even higher.

And what (should) you do then? Doesn't it seem like there's a problem there that's upsetting those shoppers?

You have to dive deeper and see what the problem is.

And you can only do that by talking directly to the shopper.

Even if you don't use SMS, provide the best customer support possible, good service, do customer interviews.

To just know your customers better and then you can segment and find out:

• Why they opted in to your email or text
• Why they arrived on your website
• What are they looking for
• What are their expectations

And then segment those customers accordingly. And another thing that I just want to mention and then we can wrap things up.

Regarding SMS, if you are looking to start SMS marketing I would look into a solution that provides local dedicated phone numbers.

As you know or perhaps you've heard, shared codes that were used by a lot of SMS tools are being banned.

So what we do is that every single brand will get dedicated phone numbers for their shoppers.

So let's say there's a shopper from the US, he or she will be receiving a text from a US local phone number and that phone number will be allocated to that shopper and to that brand.

So if that shopper wants to contact that brand even in 6-months or further down the line, he can go to that phone number and text that same person.

A constant number to text at any time, so it will be a seamless 1:1 conversation between the shopper and their favorite brand.

And this is a huge differentiator that helps (brands) with improving that familiarity, that trust, and loyalty and increasing that customer lifetime value.

So yeah, I think it's very important for merchants to look at this aspect when they wanna start SMS.

Wrapping Up: 3-Minute Rapid Insights

Summarizing the key takeaways from this 3-minute segment of Lisa's interview above:

• Get to know your customers this year by taking a deep dive into your customer insights

• How? Get to the root of any underlying issues by talking directly to your customers, i.e why they're abandoning their online shopping carts
• Choose a suitable channel such as customer support, provide great customer service, conduct interviews, or text your shoppers
• Choose an insights-driven approach to segment your customers based on purchase history, product interests, site engagement activity
• If you're looking to try an SMS-first approach this year, make sure your SMS marketing platform provides local 10DLC numbers
• Personalization and a humanized approach to speak diectly to your customers will be a huge differentiator for brands this year

Want more conversational SMS insights that you can learn and implement this year?

Tune in and listen to the full 30-minute podcast episode here on Episode #47 of The Ecom Show Podcast.

5 Conversational SMS & Customer Relationship Resources You Might Enjoy

• 12 DTC Brands Share Why Customer Experience is The Future of Marketing in 2021 and Beyond
• 25 eCommerce Experts Share Why Conversational Marketing is The Next Big Thing in 2021
• Case Study: How This Australian Skincare Brand Uses Mobile Messaging To Provide Real-Time Recommendations and Drive 30x ROI
• Behind the Scenes of Conversational SMS Marketing
• SMS Short Code vs SMS Long Code: Which is Better?