Build Meaningful Connection to Scale Your Impact
5 Tips for Mission-Driven B2C Brands to Master Your Email and SMS Strategy
As a mission-driven company, you have a story to tell.
The work you do matters and, to be able to achieve your mission, it’s vital that people know your organization’s story.
One of the best ways to connect with your community of supporters is through direct communication with people interested in your mission through email and SMS (text message) marketing.
Once someone has decided they trust your brand enough to share their contact information, this is the golden opportunity to cultivate a genuine relationship.
However, these channels are only as impactful as you make them.
People don’t need weekly text messages from most brands, even ones they love. In fact, they likely find it annoying.
Also, while most people love a good deal, your content should be about so much more than offering promotions.
Finally, if you alienate someone to the point they hit “unsubscribe” — the damage is done and you’ve likely lost your direct line of communication to this person for good.
To drive sustainable growth, it’s important to develop a strategy that aligns with your company’s values, resonates with your ideal customers, and creates an engaging experience.
To get your email and SMS strategy off to a hot start or take your marketing to the next level, here are five tips —featuring “best practice” case studies from mission-driven companies — to ensure these channels amplify your impact.
1. Build a powerful customer experience with automation.
When you think of automation, you may think of technology being used in an impersonal way. However, when it comes to email and SMS marketing, automation can be used to create meaningful, memorable brand experiences (while also freeing up time for you to focus on other strategies to make a positive impact).
Cultivating a relationship over time is important to building brand loyalty, and one strategy for building meaningful relationships is automating your emails and SMS messages to send at “just the right time.”
We recommend tailoring automations to send relevant content to your audience when a subscriber takes a specific action. For example, when a customer is shopping on your website and places something in their cart but doesn’t check out, you can set up an automation to send them an email reminding them to finish checking out (if they want to, of course).
If you haven’t set up automation before, we recommend you start by creating a welcome flow. Used when a customer signs up for your newsletter, a welcome flow can help you tell your brand’s story in a thoughtful and engaging way. You can craft the stories you share with your subscribers and set the tone for future emails.
For example, here is a great example of an engaging introductory email from MPOWERD, a Certified B Corporation:
This email uses great imagery, shares a quick introduction to why their products are helpful, and rewards people signing up for their e-newsletter, which is best practice.
2. Segment your audiences to create personalized experiences.
Another way to make a positive impact with your email and SMS marketing is by personalizing your marketing content for your various unique audiences.
It’s important for you to learn about your subscribers and create specific segments of potential customers with similar characteristics and/or behaviors such as their buying patterns, interests, location, etc.
Custom campaigns and flows based on segmentation allow you to create tailored experiences and ensure they get content from you that speaks directly to their wants and needs. For example, Marine Layer sends a different welcome message based on whether someone signed up to receive their emails on their website or in their retail stores at checkout:
This approach allows people to feel like your brand is truly speaking to them, ensuring they are left with a more positive experience and increasing their chances of becoming repeat customers.
Fair Anita gets to know their customer base better by providing a style quiz directly on its website homepage.
Based on the results, they are then able to tailor their marketing content and product promotions based on their customer’s unique preferences. Plus, this gives them insightful data for future product development to ensure they are creating jewelry that their community of potential customers actually wants.
3. Build relationships at scale by using your email and SMS channels in tandem.
If you’re looking to leave an impression on your audience, it’s worthwhile to explore how you can pair your email strategy with SMS. It’s another powerful tool to stay top of mind with your customers — especially since SMS has an estimated 98% open rate!
With such an incredibly high open rate, SMS is powerful. However, to quote the great Stan Lee in his Spider-Man comics:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
It is important to be careful with SMS and only send engaging content a few times a month. Otherwise, you risk alienating your customers because they feel bombarded with messages. Once someone has unsubscribed, you’ve lost a valuable opportunity to directly build a relationship with them.
Experts at Klaviyo, a leading e-commerce-focused SMS and email marketing automation platform, recommend sending a maximum of six SMS campaigns per month. Frequency should be informed by the product(s) you’re selling.
For example, brands with more affordable, everyday items that need to be replaced every few months can be in touch more often (ex: nail polish, clean beauty, cleaning products), while products purchased less frequently (ex: bedding/bath, clothing) should space out their touchpoints.
Each marketing channel has different frequency recommendations:
- Emails can be sent more frequently (often 1–2 times per week) because they are less intrusive.
- Be more careful with the frequency of your SMS (text message) content — use this medium sparingly and with intention. We often recommend sticking to a monthly cadence, unless there is a holiday (ex. Black Friday) or special announcement (ex. new product release) to make.
If you haven’t launched an SMS strategy, the best way to get started is to follow Bombas’ lead and add a phone number capture field on your email capture form.
If possible, we recommend offering some form of an incentive to sign up for email and SMS such as free shipping or a certain percentage off.
4. Optimize your impact using A/B tests.
Once you have your overall email and SMS strategy created and implemented, the next step is to begin identifying how to optimize your customer experience.
The best way to do that? A/B testing.
A/B testing allows you to test the impact of different variables and provide greater clues as to what strategies drive results. Common A/B testing strategies include sending the same email but at different times, altering the email subject or preview line, using emojis, changing the type of imagery used in the body of the email, and much more.
Through this approach, you’re able to identify the type of content your audience finds most compelling based on real data from your customers. Then you can use this data to your advantage and shape your email and SMS strategy based on these preferences.
For example, here’s a sneak peek of an A/B subject line test conducted by Peacock Alley, a luxury bedding and bath company.
Their goal was to determine whether adding an emoji in the subject line would lead to higher open rates.
It’s important that you A/B test every few months, as you want to stay on top of any potential change in interest for your audience and clients. Through ongoing testing, it ensures your content is never out-of-touch and uninteresting.
5. Improve and maintain your deliverability.
Deliverability should be a top priority when developing and honing your email and SMS strategy. Developing thoughtful content your customers care about will ensure that your emails and SMS messages are actually being received by subscribers.
When you send email or SMS content that is ignored or is considered spam, it impacts your brand’s ability to email anyone (i.e. your messages will start getting banished to the dreaded spam folder or blocked by phone carriers), so it’s important to build a positive sender reputation.
It’s also worth noting that if you develop a bad sender reputation, it’s similar to ruining your reputation in the real world — it’s really hard to undo the damage. Given this, consider developing an email and SMS strategy that is about more than just sending discount codes.
Create content that your customers will engage with by telling brand stories, asking for customer input using surveys, setting up contests, and announcing new product launches. When subscribers engage with your content, that improves the deliverability of your messages to all future subscribers.
We’ve found that welcome flow messages and shopping cart abandonment messages typically have the highest rates of engagement from subscribers because they are set up to send insightful content at the right time. Given this, take time to thoughtfully craft these flows.
This article from Noel & Co. was originally published at https://goodcarts.co. B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
