There are many ways to make a splash during Black Friday with SMS – Vibes can tell you how.

The 2023 holiday season is upon us and the outlook is bright: researchers predict overall retail spend to increase 4.5% to a whopping $1.3T.

Yet if we’ve learned anything these past few years, it’s that no holiday season for retailers is ever the same. Ongoing inflationary pressures, labor shortages, and other challenges are certainly taking a toll, and if you want to be sure to convert shoppers this year instead of losing them to your competitors, the ways you previously cut through the clutter may no longer work in your favor. This includes your strategy around mobile marketing.

There are 3 key trends that will impact your mobile marketing approach this year:

1. It’s not just about Black Friday. . And one of those fundamental changes is it’s not just about Black Friday anymore – activity around this day and other key days like Cyber Monday are increasingly dispersing to surrounding days.
2. Holiday seasons are starting earlier. Statista found over half of consumers started their holiday shopping earlier in October 2022, up from 45% in 2021. This trend is only predicted to continue this year.
3. SMS market saturation. While text message marketing is having a resurgence thanks to things like data crackdowns and AI, as a channel SMS is becoming more saturated. Merely sending a message on Black Friday may no longer be as impactful.

So what’s a marketer to do next?

Know How and When Your Customers Engage with Your Brand

Make sure you understand your audience first. In order to break through the noise, you have to understand when your audience is in the mindset to shop and understand where they are in the shopping journey.

The mobile channel’s ability to collect behavior-based interactions and use it to engage 1:1 with a brand’s customers is practically baked into its DNA.

One key behavior SMS messaging can effectively evaluate is tracking when SMS subscribers engaged with a message. Findings from recent research conducted on the best SMS send times show that sending before noon the day of a sale isn’t always a retailer’s best bet.

Somebody, somewhere decided 10am local time was the best time to send a message – it’s amazing how many messages go out right at 10am. Don’t do that if you want to stand out, which is the point of SMS! It does a great job of getting a person’s attention, but if you’re one of five messages I’m getting in a span of 5 minutes, it’s not going to be as effective.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Celia Fleischaker, Chief Marketing Officer at isolved  

5 New Rules for How SMS Fits Into The Holiday Marketing Playbook

 Here are 5 ways you can set yourself apart and stand out.

1. Be intentional with what days you send your messages.

We’ve never had a holiday season with this many brands utilizing SMS marketing. That means consumers are going to see an unprecedented number of messages at key times during key days. If you want to stand out from the crowd, it’s important to know those days and avoid them.

Intentionally thinking just as much about October, November and December can be just as or more important than solely relying on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the only days to drive strong sales. So as you think about if you do or don’t send your messages on Black Friday this year, keep the following in mind:

• Sending your text messages earlier in the season will help you properly target and personalize holiday content that gets you into the shopper’s consideration set
  • Recent research that Vibes conducted estimates that Saturday, November 11th and Tuesday, November 14th will be strong days for customer engagement via SMS.

• Sending your text messages slightly later in the season to avoid getting buried in what could be a very crowded SMS inbox.
  • The same research by Vibes estimates December 2nd and 3rd – the weekend after Cyber Monday – will see higher engagement than Black Friday.

2. Also be intentional with what time you send your messages. It can be as simple as not picking a round number (e.g. 12:14p vs. Noon) that can catch more eyes that otherwise may have missed your message among 4 others they also received on the hour.

3. And keep in mind how often you send your messages. Some of the most successful retailers during the holiday season increase the number of messages they send – with some sending multiple messages in a single day. This is because they have learned when their audience is in the mindset to shop, and target them appropriately in these moments.

 If it makes sense with your audience to send multiple messages on a certain day, this is the time of year to do it.

4. Be creative with your content. Be sure that you’re sending content that’s different from that of your competitors, whether it’s what you focus on promoting or how you bring it to life.

 MMS is one exciting and customer-friendly way to stand out. When considering if you send an MMS vs. an SMS, here are a few ideas based on the top-performing holiday MMS messages from Vibes customers last year:

• Showcasing a preview of upcoming sales to help subscribers start preparing for the abundance of deals becoming available on Black Friday (and sending the message the weekend before or any day up to the Wednesday before Black Friday)
• Visually highlighting an added benefit that catches shoppers’ eyes, like Free Shipping on qualifying or all orders
• Animating a gift guide preview that shuffles through the different gift guide categories

5. Use Mobile Wallet to make your most valuable messages even more effective. Last year it was reported that Black Friday saw a double-digit increase in foot traffic to 73M shoppers – proving that brick-and-mortar shopping is back in action.

In order to respond to this industry shift, along with the fact that consumers still demand convenience with their shopping experiences, using Mobile Wallet makes it easy for shoppers to redeem an offer, or earn points / redeem rewards if they’re part of your loyalty program.

Marketing Technology News: Why AI Will Eventually Replace UIs