Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

SMS marketing is the once overlooked new kid on the block.

If you’re running an online store and looking for a way to drive more sales and increase your abandoned cart recovery rates through text marketing, take a look at 7 Shopify apps that can help you.

Why You Should Use Text Marketing for Your Online Store

If you're not using SMS marketing for your online store, you are missing out on 90% of your potential revenue. Don't believe us? Check out the stats: almost 90% of carts end up abandoned - which means, you are leaving revenue on the table if you are not actively trying to get those shoppers back on your platform.

Through personalized text messaging, you are able to encourage purchases with the help of a small discount, and add an extra conversion point. As one of the marketing tools getting more and more momentum, its strongest selling point is that it offers high impact with minimal investment. Texts, unlike other tools like email, acts like a personalized connection to the consumer between them and the brand.

Cartloop

Cartloop is a conversational text messaging platform that revolutionizes the eCommerce space by enabling brands to build stronger customer relationships and driving growth for our users. We focus on what text marketing has so far largely ignored: actual conversations.

More than a messaging platform, our 2-way communication system is powered by both people and AI. For consumers, we are their very own shopping assistant, which allows us to become a communication interface between them and their favourite brands. We want our users to drive results and their customers to be always in the loop, safer when shopping online, knowing their favourite brand is just a text message away.

When customers abandon their carts, one of our eCommerce experts reaches out to them via text message. From then on, a conversation ensues. We uncover real-time feedback on why shoppers are abandoning their carts. The kind of feedback such as: “the delivery takes too long”, “there was a problem with the payment method”, “the shipping cost is too high” is not available through regular surveys, nor is it observable through typical analytics tools.

This reduces the number of support tickets, thus improving the customer experience as well and props customers to return to their cart and complete their purchase. In this period when support teams are facing surges in volume, we prevent shoppers from opening new tickets by solving their needs in real-time. The nice part is that shoppers are also happier because they quickly get their questions answered and support issues solved within the span of a couple of text messages.

Attentive

Attentive is a personalized mobile messaging platform that helps retail & e-commerce brands acquire, retain, and interact with mobile shoppers. While they're not a conversational marketing platform and focus on bulk, automated SMS, Attentive does offer some key features to help you integrate with various platforms and sync your marketing tactics.

Unlike Cartloop, Attentive is a self-managed platform. While at Cartloop you benefit from a fully managed service, Attentive does get the closest to this with their dedicated client team that works with companies to ensure they leverage the benefits of the platform.

Features

• Triggered  messages
• Campaigns
• Segmentation
• A/B testing
• Time zone targeting

Postscript

Postscript is a complex but user friendly platform for text marketing. Its top feature is list segmentation, which allows you to target your customers according to purchases on Shopify. They support both SMS and MMS capabilities and the live chat function lets you recover abandoned carts via SMS.

However, unlike other tools on this list, Postscript targets Shopify and ShopifyPlus stores. If your online store was built on a different platform, this won't work for you.

Features

• List segmentation
• Sales dashboard
• Ad retargeting
• Automated SMS marketing
• Targeted campaigns
• Growth features

SMSBump

SMSBump is an enterprise grade SMS platform designed for eCommerce businesses. An all-in-one eCommerce marketing automation app available for Shopify, BigCommerce and OpenCart, it gives you a direct approach to text messaging as a fast and effective channel to reach customers.

While uniquely targeting SMS, the tool offers many features and you can send both bulk SMS and MMs as well as perform A/B testing or share discount codes. It also integrates nicely with other tools not in the Shopify ecosystem, like Woocommerce or Bigcommerce.

Features

• SMS segmentation
• Custom flows
• SMS automation
• Link shortener
• Campaigns
• A/B testing

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a comprehensive platform that offers a large variety of tools. In the past year, they've also introduced SMS marketing.

This is the best feature of Klaviyo - SMS is seamlessly integrated into a platform that doesn't require a third-party system for email automation, and, as such, you can cover an omnichannel approach to email, SMS and other marketing tactics - all under one roof.

Klaviyo is also TCPA compliant, which means you can easily make sure that you stay compliant and send messages to the people that actually want to hear from you. The platform also gives you different options to help you grow your subscribers list organically. Items like popups help you convert your online shop visitors, thus giving you the opportunity to engage with them on the channel they use the most: text marketing.

One key item to keep in mind is that the platform targets advanced marketers or companies with higher budgets devoted to marketing.

Features

• SMS campaigns
• Automated segmentation
• Pay-as-you-go price model
• Signup forms

Omnisend

Compared to Klaviyo, Omnisend targets a relatively different audience, as they are mostly geared for beginners, or, those at the beginning of their DTC journey. While they don't have popups features, Omnisend offers landing pages that help convert visitors into subscribers.

With Omnisend, you can bulk SMS, but also automated workflows with integrated different channels. Omnisend allows you to mix channels and send your messages through customers’ preferred media. In this case, you can boost your overall campaign engagement as well as save on spending per message.

Omnisend works on Shopify, Shopify Plus, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, Magento and other ecommerce platforms.

Features

• Segmented SMS/MMS campaigns and bulk SMS blasts
• Automated workflows via SMS only or with other channels integrated
• Advanced segmentation
• Personalization
• Signup forms and landing pages to capture phone numbers
• 24/7 Support

Privy

Privy added SMS capabilities to their list of tools after starting with email and popups. As a natural addition, their SMS features focus on recovering lost revenue from abandoned carts.

Privy integrates with Shopify but also Bigcommerce, Magento, Woocommerce or Volution.

While not as advanced as the others above, Privy is a simple and easy way for emerging stores to tap into SMS marketing and see how

Features

• Post-signup texts
• Shopify Cart integration
• List Growth Tools

‍

Key Takeaways

If you want your customers to love your text marketing, send your messages sparingly and as needed: when a customer abandons their cart, when they ask you a question, or, when you have a personalized promotion worth sharing.

This is the core of what we do at Cartloop: building true relationships with our customers. Our goal is to create opportunities for shoppers to engage with online stores and let them see the human, empathic side of their favorite brands, not just sending promo codes.

Don't believe us? Give it a try! Sign-up for a free 14-day trial at Cartloop, and see for yourself. No strings attached. If you don't like it (although we know you will), you still get to keep the profits. Doesn't get better than that, does it?