SMS Marketing Statistics

Retail Sms Marketing – How Big Is Your SMS List?

Retail Mobile Marketing

Are you a retailer that is trying to figure out how many customers will opt-in to your campaign, or maybe looking for some sort of benchmark for the retail industry to compare against how many SMS subscribers you have? If so, you’re in luck, as we’ve got the numbers for you!A recent survey by the folks at Cellit has the answer, or at least a good answer if you already have an email marketing list. They found that a retailer can expect to have an SMS database equal to 2-10% of their email marketing database. We think you can do better than average though, so we recommend the following strategies for all retailers when looking to grow their SMS databases.

Reduce Your Churn – What is churn? It’s when customers opt-out of your SMS database, which is not a good thing, it really sucks! While churn will always happen when you send text messages to your customers, if you can send text messages at just the right time, you can reduce the amount of list churn you experience. The average opt-out rate for retail SMS marketing is 3.7%, which means for every 1,000 text messages, you’ll lose 37 mobile subscribers. What’s crazy though is the difference between the opt-out rates for retail SMS campaigns sent during the week, when compared to campaigns sent during the weekend. On average the opt-out rate for retail SMS marketing campaigns during the week is only 1.8%, while it was a staggering 8.5% over the weekend. You can use this data to help reduce your churn, therefore keeping more SMS subscribers in your marketing database.

Offer an opt-in incentive for new subscribers – This strategy works so well for retail SMS marketing, that we wouldn’t even recommend launching a new retail mobile marketing campaign without this component. Don’t believe us, check out how this retailer generated 5,000 customers opt-in, all within the first 24 hours of their campaign. Pretty good huh? Why not try this for your own retail SMS marketing campaign? 

Are you a retailer looking to build a bigger than average SMS marketing list, or even grow your existing retail customer database? If so, get in touch with the retail text messaging experts at Tatango.

Looking for more examples of retailers using SMS marketing, see this list we put together of the top 10 retail mobile marketing case studies.


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