How to set up SMS Notification for your stores

If you are a busy online store with a bucket load of order hour by hour. I understand you are struggling to manage communication with your customers regarding any change in each order or customers account. In this blog, we mention the benefits of using Magento 2 SMS Notification for your websites. Let explore whether you should equip your stores this useful tool or not?

Table of Contents

• Email Marketing and its defects
  • Low opened rate
  • Useless without internet connection
  • Go to spam box easily
• Why SMS is more effective than Email marketing?
• Highlight Features of SMS Notification module
  • Sending SMS to buyers and stores by schedule
  • SMS of account registration
  • SMS of new orders & billing documents
  • Send out product and price statuses via SMS
  • Promote customers’ sharing and subscribing by SMS
  • Send error alert to admin instantly
• Detailed features of Name Your Price module

Email Marketing and its defects

Low opened rate

Using email marketing is popular in e-commerce industry. Since it is cheap and everyone has an email address, you think that you can easily reach customers and let them notified of all the updates related to their account and orders. The fact denied it, however.

From a report of MailChimp, there is only 17.35% of e-commerce emails get opened by customers. In other words, among five customers you only can reach less than one who are potential customers. The number is painful but true. Business should be aware of this when over use email marketing without smart strategy.

Useless without internet connection

Utilizing messages as the notice conveyance is normal; however; it stays a few drawbacks. The primary issue is the Internet association. Without the web (in rustic territories or without 3G/4G), it is difficult to get to the email box or receive email notification.

Go to spam box easily

Usually warning messages sent to clients can be dropped in the spam box out of the blue. This causes issues for the two merchants and purchasers. At one end of the spectrum, online stores cannot send necessary information to target customers. On the other end, buyers miss the store in-time notifications, some is beneficial for them, such as personal promotions and rewards.

Why SMS is more effective than Email marketing?

SMS has an indispensable role in E-business these days for some reasons. Firstly, people prefer to use mobile as it is portable and functionable, sometimes, totally can be replaced for desktops. Furthermore, online business runners, on the other side, also create different functions suitable for mobiles users. For example, you can see how checkout page on mobile can be optimized for best customer experience here.

Utilizing SMS contents for client care is a splendid method to enhance eCommerce efficiency for certain reasons:

• SMS order notifications have a stunning open ratio of over 98%
• More than 90% of SMS get read within 5 minutes. Your clients will value the real-time alerts
• Sending SMS for purchase updates demonstrates your big care and build great trust in customer mind.
• No need the Internet connection
• With such a significant number of online stores imparting exclusively through email, SMS is an incredible route for your clients to recognize you.
• Keep store administrators alert about mistakes

SMS Notification will keep clients and store administrators refreshed about exercises by means of instant messages effectively. SMS is the more successful data move strategy as opposed to email in term of the higher reaction and read opportunity. Usually, individuals are bound to open their SMS box than email box which requires the Internet association.

Highlight Features of SMS Notification module

Sending SMS to buyers and stores by schedule

Connecting with the most used SMS service providers including Twilio, Amazon SNS, the extension helps to automatically send text messages to both store admins and their customers. However, the schedule of these two types of message directions is different.

On one side, customers are notified instantly about activities done by themselves on your store such as registering a new account, making a new order. On the other side, the SMS notifications related to any store reports are sent to admin mobiles in a frequency such as daily, monthly, weekly and monthly. With a huge number of customers and transactions on e-stores, sending messages to admins at a certain time is more reasonable, which is similar to a report on everything.

Admins can configure the module to receive the report messages, for example, in:

• Every 8 am daily
• Every Monday weekly
• Every 1st of a month

SMS of account registration

In terms of customers, they can receive two emails after register an account on your store. The first one is the confirmation email which is used to verify that the customers have just signed up an account on your store properly. Right after they confirm it, customers continue to get a welcome SMS, which proves that they had register successfully and become your store member now. Regarding admin, they also receive the reporting SMS of newly registered accounts by the schedule they set at the backend which often automatically sent after a period of time.

SMS of new orders & billing documents

Similar to new account registration, both customers and admins can receive the SMS of new order and related documents created.

Customers will get text messages right after they created an order. Then comes the invoices, credit memos and shipments SMS notification sent to buyers mobile. This helps them update and recheck all the information related.

For store admins, the report of total quantity of new orders, invoices, shipments, credit memos will be delivered daily, weekly or monthly based on backend schedule configured.

Send out product and price statuses via SMS

Update stock status for customers who are subscribing and having concerns will be the best way to drive sales to your stores. Why is that? Let take it simple understanding: you give customers the thing they want at the right time.

When buyers are interested in certain products at the store, they are highly concerned about their stock status and price status as well. Therefore, update customers on such information instantly via text messages will be beneficial to both customers and online shops.

Promote customers’ sharing and subscribing by SMS

There is no doubt that in this digital world, friend referral is one of the most effective sms marketing tactics that helps spread your brand awareness dramatically to the community who might be your potential customers. Hence, utilizing SMS for this program is advisable for online stores.

Allowing buyers to share a product link to friends, wishlists, subscribe store’s newsletter not only shows your better care to customers, which is the demand for sharing and listening to their stories. Moreover, it also keeps stores in customers’ mind better and longer.

It can’t also help to remind you about the economic benefit of this SMS. Due to customers’ sharing and subscribing to your stores, you gain a great chance to expand the brand and increase sales.

Send error alert to admin instantly

Errors occur to store site related to cron and sitemap generation are updated to store admins instantly. Both cron and sitemap play important roles to any website, so SMS text to notice errors is a good way to help store admins to get alert about these issues to solve in time.

In detail, when any errors of cron and sitemap occur, there are general SMS messages informing store admins to check the problems. This type of notification is more urgent and effective than email.

Detailed features of SMS Notification module

For store admins

General

• Turn on/off the module
• Allow verifying customers’ phone numbers by OTP code
• Choose OTP format: Alphanumeric, Alphabet, Numeric.
• Choose OTP length
• Fill in the phone number of sender
• Choose SMS Service Provider: Twilio and Amazon SNS
• Enter Account SID, Account Token if choose Twilio
• Enter Access Key ID, Secret Access Key if choose Amazon SNS
• Fill in the testing recipient’ s phone number
• Test SMS function at backend
• Confirmation SMS of customer’s account registration
• SMS of successful signing up account
• SMS of new customers orders
• SMS of new invoices created
• SMS of new customers shipments created
• SMS of new credit memo
• SMS of customers contact delivery
• Notify admin if customers share product links
• Notify admin if customers share their wishlists
• Notify admin of subscribes/ unsubscribes newsletters

Admin Notification

• Choose the schedule to send SMS: daily/ weekly/ monthly
• SMS of total new accounts
• SMS of total new orders
• SMS of total new invoices
• SMS of total new shipments
• SMS of total new credit memos
• SMS of total new contacts from customers
• SMS of currency update
• SMS of cron error
• SMS of sitemap generation

For customers

• Notified of all actions on their account
• Always updated with the latest events of stores
• Reach customers better, avoid missing cases
• Boost up customer loyalty and engagements
• Have great experience in-store service

Wrap it up

Via this blog, you might know why there are so many businesses use SMS for notice customers and themselves of orders and account updating. By Magento 2 SMS Notification extension, customers can be notified instantly via SMS about their order/ invoice/ shipment/ credit memo generation and other activities as sharing, subscription. Also, Magento 2 admins receive SMS alerts about store activities and common errors frequently.