If you’ve been toiling over the marketing efforts for your Shopify store, you’ve probably taken a look at SMS marketing. It’s the practice of sending out marketing messages to your current and prospective customers via text message, and the goals are to build loyalty, educate and — of course — sell.
Sound familiar? It’s the same kind of marketing you’re probably already doing with email. They’re incredibly similar.
Like email marketing, SMS is an owned marketing channel, meaning the marketer controls the list of numbers and distribution. Depending on their goals, a marketer can send one-to-one or one-to-many messages. They can also be single campaigns, such as a flash sale or parts of an automated drip campaign.
But there are a few things that SMS campaigns offer that email campaigns simply don’t. They include:
- Higher engagement rates: SMS open rates are significantly higher compared to email open rates. Since SMS requires customers to opt in, the ones that do are far more likely to want to hear from you.
- Easy to produce: SMS messages are direct and succinct. You only require a few lines of text to get the message across to your audience as oppose to long, drawn-out emails.
- Stronger customer relationships: SMS campaigns help build more personal and loyal relationships with your customers. They’re easier to respond to than an email, encouraging immediate, one-on-one dialogue.
As you’d imagine, for Shopify businesses, these are immense benefits. It’s crucial for your ecommerce store to establish and nurture these kinds of relationships with your customers.
Thankfully, there are several great solutions for setting up an SMS solution for your Shopify store. We’ve ranked the 18 best SMS marketing apps for Shopify in 2021.
1. Klaviyo Email Marketing and SMS
Klaviyo is one of the leading ecommerce marketing platforms in the Shopify app store, with over 50,000 stores using it for managing their email and SMS marketing efforts.
Klaviyo is our top pick for SMS marketing because it makes SMS automation and segmentation easy, so you can send personalized messages to your valued customers.
Klaviyo comes with powerful integrations for dozens of tools, including Facebook, Recharge, Swell Rewards, Zendesk, Smile.io and more. It offers a plethora of targeting and personalization options, with the option to use data to personalize product recommendations and create dynamic content. This makes it an indispensable tool for a variety of marketing communication needs.
This tool is more advanced than some of the others on this list, so we would recommend working with a professional to get the most out of your SMS campaigns.
2. Postscript SMS Marketing
Postscript‘s solution is entirely focused on SMS marketing. No frills or gimmicks with this app: it’s designed to do one thing and do it well. The tool allows you to create targeted SMS campaigns and engage in two-way conversations with your customers.
With just a few minutes of setup, this tool syncs with your store data and enables powerful SMS marketing automation features, like shipping notifications, abandoned cart recovery messages and loyalty offers.
3. Privy
Privy offers a suite of tools for converting customers, email and SMS marketing and pop-ups and banners for catching customers before they leave. It’s a no-code solution, so you don’t need to know any technicalities to get it up and running.
Privy offers plenty of options for engaging and saving customers, including spin-to-win wheels, banners, flyouts and announcements. It truly is a full suite of communication and on-page marketing tools.
4. Omnisend Email Marketing and SMS
If you’re looking for one of the most user-friendly marketing tools, Omnisend might be just what you need. While Omnisend does feature plenty of SMS options, it’s more of an email-focused solution.
Its no-code email and SMS design tools are exceptional, allowing you to create stunning marketing emails in no time. And it offers plenty of ways to organize your email lists with segments based on customer behavior, making it an excellent tool for stores with a focus on email.
5. SMSBump SMS Marketing
SMSBump is a powerful, yet easy-to-use, SMS marketing platform. As one of the more popular SMS solutions on Shopify, it offers a full range of features, including AB split testing, SMS subscriber list management and messaging based on time and data.
The app also has detailed metrics and analytics for tracking orders, clicks, amounts spent and more. It works well with a slew of messaging and email platforms, so integration is a breeze.
6. Intellipse
Intellipse isn’t a tool specific to Shopify, but it’s an incredibly powerful SMS marketing solution. It’s a platform that’s backed by Google, so you know it’s going to be powerful and effective.
Instead of offering basic prompts and responses over SMS, the tool uses sophisticated AI technology to engage with and conversate with your customers through text messages, helping them with their questions and driving more sales.
7. Aftership Order Tracking and SMS
Aftership is a tool for managing and tracking the customer experience post-purchase. You can use it to import all of your tracking numbers, showing you all of the details of your shipments in one place. You can also send a variety of delivery notifications and statuses, keeping your customer informed on where and what their order is doing.
If you truly care about the post-purchase experience of your customers, and you want to ensure they purchase from you again, this tool is indispensable. You can also integrate Aftership with other tools like Klaviyo if you want more robust messaging options.
8. ONE+ Sales Pop-Ups, Email, SMS
ONE+ offers a massive a complete set of marketing tools to help you engage with and win over customers. In addition to the usual email and SMS features, this tool offers things like gamification, live social proofing and even a fully-featured discount manager.
ONE+ is a solid contender, especially on the integration side of things: The tool can integrate with over 18 popular email apps and seven SMS apps, including SMSBump. If you’re looking for a single tool for all of your marketing efforts that offer tight integrations, this is the one.
9. Back In Stock: Customer Alerts by SureSwift Capital
Back In Stock is a tool to help alleviate stock issues. With it, you can add prompts to your Shopify site that activate when a product sells out, giving your customer the option to sign up to get an alert when your product is restocked.
It’s simple in its approach and setup but extremely effective.
10. SMS Text Messaging & Marketing by Lazer Technologies
Lazer Technology’s SMS solution is focused on SMS marketing, and it offers a ton of features for maximizing your returns. It’s one of the few tools out there that also offers MMS, so you can send your customers images with your messages.
It also offers message templates for easily sending out messages, as well as plenty of metrics, including ROI, click-through rates and revenue.
11. Email, SMS & Loyalty Rewards by Marsello
Marsello’s solution is an all-in-one marketing solution that covers everything you need, from email and SMS communication to loyalty and rewards programs.
The tool offers ways to collect customer feedback
through email capture forms, so you can ensure your campaigns are always fine-tuned.
12. LiveRecover SMS Cart Recovery by LiveRecover
LifeRecover is a tool focused on abandoned cart recovery. What’s special about this tool, however, is that they actually use a live sales team to connect with people who have abandoned their carts.
By engaging your customers with a live salesperson over SMS, the recovery rates are potentially astounding.
13. Firepush SMS, Email Marketing
Firepush offers an all-in-one tool for email, SMS and web push marketing. With this one, you can send abandoned cart messages, welcome messages, order confirmations and more.
14. AVADA: SMS, Email Marketing
AVADA‘s SMS and email marketing tool offers a slew of features for communication, lead collection and cart abandonment. This is a good plugin if you’re more focused on email marketing and you want to use SMS messages as a boost to that.
While its SMs features are a little scarce, the email features are robust, offering A/B split marketing, design templates, and a drag-and-drop editor.
15. Tone SMS Marketing & Support
This AI-enhanced tool from Attentive is an excellent solution for building relationships with your customers through SMS support. It provides a way for you to communicate in real-time, offering more customer loyalty, higher conversions and increased order size.
This tool also provides valuable insights into customer behaviors, and it integrates with a number of other service and marketing platforms, including Kustomer, Klaviyo, Zendesk and more.
16. Tobi. SMS Marketing Automation
Tobi offers a slew of SMS marketing features, including SMS-based cart recovery messages, promotional messages, order delivery updates, new customer rewards and more. It’s designed to be an all-in-one SMS marketing solution.
Tobi also uses intelligent data to track your customer’s behavior, allowing you to send messages when they’re most likely to buy, improving the returns on your marketing efforts.
17. Octane AI Quiz, Messenger, SMS
Octane’s AI-powered solution provides a platform for creating quizzes, interacting over Facebook Messanger and creating SMS marketing campaigns. It’s the only certified Shopify Plus solution for quizzes and Facebook Messenger.
Using AI, you can use this tool to create buyer profiles and personas, allowing you to target new customers and personalize your marketing efforts for maximum efficiency. Octane’s tool allows you to send messages for order and shipping confirmation, cart abandonment, customer support questions, and much more.
18. WhatsApp Chat Button & More
SAAS Grove’s WhatsApp chat tool is an excellent tool for communication with your customers. It’s easy to set up and install on your Shopify store and offers a host of features for quick communication.
Despite the name, this app actually works with a number of popular messaging services, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Snapchat, Line and Telegram. Best of all, it works on any device so communication between you and your customer is seamless, even when they’re messaging you from their phones.
