SMS marketing is the practice of sending promotional and transactional text messages to customers and subscribers who have opted in to receive them. In e-commerce, SMS is the highest-engagement owned channel available: average open rates exceed 90% (versus 25-30% for email), and messages are typically read within three minutes of receipt. For Shopify brands, SMS is most powerful as a complement to email - not a replacement - serving time-sensitive communications where immediacy matters most.
Transactional SMS - order confirmations, shipping updates, delivery notifications - are expected by customers and generate the highest engagement of any message type. They set expectations, reduce inbound customer service contacts, and create natural touchpoints for cross-sell follow-ups.
Promotional SMS - flash sales, product launches, limited availability alerts - leverage SMS's immediacy for time-sensitive offers. A text message announcing a 24-hour sale, sent at the right time to an engaged segment, consistently outperforms the same offer sent by email in terms of immediate conversion rate. The key discipline is frequency: SMS is more intrusive than email, and over-messaging causes list churn and opt-outs faster than any other channel.
Automated flow SMS integrates text messages into the same behavioural automation infrastructure as email. An abandoned cart flow that leads with email but follows up with an SMS for non-openers typically recovers more revenue than email alone. A post-purchase flow that includes an SMS review request at exactly the right post-delivery moment generates significantly more reviews than email requests alone.
Klaviyo is the dominant SMS platform for Shopify brands, handling both email and SMS within a single automation and segmentation infrastructure. Attentive, Postscript, and SMSBump are pure-play SMS alternatives with strong Shopify integrations. All require explicit opt-in consent (a legal requirement in the US under TCPA and in the EU under GDPR) and support keyword-based opt-out (replying STOP to unsubscribe). Growing an SMS list requires dedicated collection points - popup incentives, checkout opt-ins, post-purchase prompts - that are distinct from email capture, since not all email subscribers consent to SMS. A healthy SMS list for a Shopify brand is typically 20-40% of the email list size, with significantly higher engagement per message sent.
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