When’s the best time to send a marketing text message for repeat purchases? You may be thinking:
- What days of the week are best?
- What hours of the day are best?
And that’s a natural place to start. But check this out - the “best time” to send text campaigns according to Google:
Doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?
I’m sure we can quickly agree when NOT to send customers a text:
- When they are sleeping
- On popular holidays
- Outside of business hours (if you want to be TCPA compliant)
- Too early (or too late) depending on time zones
- When people are usually busy (rush hour for example)
The above guidelines are fine, but those all just generalized rules. To launch an SMS marketing strategy that really drives repeat purchases, we need to get personalized.
If you’re running a CPG brand, you know how much repeat purchases matter. So stick around - we’re going to show you an easy way to nail text marketing timing using Repeat SMS.
It’s all about sending personalized reorder reminders when customers are in their prime reordering window.
And if you’re already running SMS via Postscript, great news! We’ve just created an integration that lets you send personalized reorder messages by Repeat alongside your existing Postscript SMS campaigns.
Let’s get into it!
Why personalized SMS timing matters
Call it a hunch, but I think one of the reasons it’s easy to get hung up on SMS timing is because email marketing has conditioned us to assume our audience isn’t paying attention.
Send an email on the wrong day & the wrong time and it’s sure to get completely buried in your customer’s inbox.
But there’s a major difference here that might shift your perspective: SMS audiences are way more captive than email audiences. First off, they’ve given you their phone number. That means they must trust your brand to some degree.
Second, check out these SMS marketing stats:
- Open rates can be as high as 98% for SMS vs 20% for email.
- 95% of text messages will be read within 3 minutes of sending.
Here’s my point. It’s not that you’re sending text message marketing on the wrong day of the week. The problem is the lack of personalization.
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes for a second. How long does it take you to read a message and decide it’s irrelevant. Half a second? If a message is irrelevant, does it really matter what time it was sent?
Behavior changes dramatically when you read a text message that’s relevant. Suddenly you are thinking, interacting, and taking action. It’s easy to see how a message from a friend could inspire that kind of response, but how about the average SMS marketing campaign?
Personalization is your ticket to making mobile marketing a lot more friendly. If you want to create an ecommerce SMS workflow that customers dig, personalized timing is step 1. So let’s figure out how to do that!
How to know the best time to send SMS reorder reminders
With all that in mind, when is the best personalized time to send an SMS to a customer? Here’s how we see it:
- Fine = Send a reminder after 14 days.
- Better = Send a reminder based on the average time reorder intervals.
- GREAT = Send a reminder based on product-specific reorder intervals.
Sending SMS using product-specific reorder intervals
When is the best time to send SMS marketing? It depends on the product.
Why? Because not every product gets used up at the same rate. And how do you figure out product-specific reorder intervals? There are two methods:
- Crunching the numbers and building automations for your entire catalog
- Using Repeat SMS!
Repeat: SMS reordering powered by logic, not guessing
Here’s how it works: Repeat looks at all the Shopify data for every product in your catalog, looks at the ideal reorder window, then sends customers an SMS at the ideal time.
The ideal time is based on what was purchased and when it was purchased. That means a customer who bought shampoo and moisturizer will get reorder reminders sent via SMS at different times!
All this happens in the background automatically with minimal setup required. The end result is a reordering experience that is simple, fast, and enjoyable for brands and customers alike.
Introducing the Repeat x Postscript integration
If you’ve already got a lot of SMS blasts going out with Postscript, then our new integration is sure to tickle your fancy. With Repeat x Postscript, you don’t need to worry about changing your existing SMS campaigns at all.
To start sending reorder reminders automatically, just head to your Postscript dashboard and set the automation trigger like so:
If we’re talking about the best time to send SMS, the answer is: whenever it’s personal. Of course, message timing is only half the battle when it comes to reordering. There are other factors too, like the actual text message itself for starters.
Then there’s the huge question about where to send them. Should you send them to a product page? You could… or you could send them to a pre-loaded shopping cart that converts like the dickens. Book a demo with our team today to learn more!
