I have been part of an SMS marketing platform for 10 years and thousands of eCommerce owners and marketers have used our platform to connect with customers and prospects.
Below, I'll walk you through all the details on how you can use SMS to boost your sales in 2025.
Let's jump!
What is SMS marketing in e-commerce?
E-commerce SMS marketing is the process of marketing your e-commerce stockholder database business or products via SMS.
SMS Marketing for E-Commerce
This can come in a variety of forms, from sales to abandoned cart notifications or more general business promotions.
SMS marketing is typically done through SMS marketing platforms or APIs. It involves a short and easy process of registering your eCommerce brand with mobile operators (via your chosen SMS provider). Going through this registration process helps ensure that everything is in order with mobile operators so that they don’t block your messages as spam.
SMS marketing also involves getting consent from your audience before texting them. SMS platforms offer you mechanisms that allow you to add contacts to your text message subscription list easily (even automatically). For example, it can involve your subscribers texting a particular word to a particular phone number, and their phone number is automatically subscribed to your text message list.
To convince people to subscribe to your e-commerce texts, you often offer incentives such as discounted products or free shipping.
There are many reasons to use SMS for marketing, especially for eCommerce.
High reading/viewing rates
As mentioned above, SMS has read rates of 55% and “view rates” of up to 100%, unlike, for example, emails which are largely ignored or end up in “Promotions”.
What this means is that, at a minimum, your recipients will see the preview of every message you send. This way, they will know that you sent them a message and will see the beginning of the message.
Personality
SMS marketing through an SMS platform or API means that your text messages are delivered personally and individually to each recipient, even if you are sending mass text messages.
This means your messages can come across more personally.
SMS platforms even allow you to easily engage in two-way conversations with an online inbox similar to the email inboxes you're used to.
Universality
There are nearly 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, according to some estimates. In addition, people spend an average of 4.5 hours per day on their phones engaged in activities other than vocation.
And this is true from teenagers (and even younger ones) to older adults. This means that using SMS as one of your marketing tools helps you ensure that you have a way to reach a wide range of people in your potential eCommerce audience.
Immediacy
SMS is not only widely used, but it also provides an avenue of immediacy and urgency, possibly more so than any other marketing channel out there.
That’s because as soon as the text message is delivered to the recipient’s phone, they typically receive a notification right away. And this kind of timeliness can be very important for common e-commerce use cases, such as flash sales (more on that below).
