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Advanced SMS Strategies for Boosting Customer Retention

Increase your number of repeat customers by building SMS strategies that engage, delight, and foster trust.

A magnet drawing in icons of customers, hearts, smiley faces, etc.
January 15, 2025
Kathleen Crampton
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Reading time about 10 min

In an increasingly competitive business landscape, retaining customers is equally important as acquiring them. After all, other companies are constantly vying for consumers’ attention, making solid customer retention strategies crucial for the success of any business.

Retention marketing is different from marketing to new leads. While you still might utilize similar tactics for both strategies, your focus with retention marketing will be on engaging existing customers and nurturing them through custom life cycles that motivate them to make repeat purchases.

Maximize every touchpoint- including texting- to effectively engage with your customer base. Whether in the retail space, service-based industry, or beyond, learn how to use SMS marketing for customer retention with this detailed guide, covering engagement tactics, retention workflows and strategies, best practices, and everything in between.

 

Key Benefits of SMS for Retaining Customers

You’re likely to already have a well-functioning email customer retention strategy, but that’s not where your marketing efforts should end. Leverage SMS marketing for an all-encompassing, comprehensive retention strategy that meets customer expectations. Although reaching your audience through email is effective, there are key ways that texting stands out:

  • Higher engagement. Texting has a 98% open rate, much higher than emails. When your contacts open your messages, that means there is a better chance that they’ll take action. It sounds simple, but high open rates can become repeat customers and increase sales.
  • Immediate and convenient. Consumers increasingly want a communication method that serves their busy lives. A 2023 survey shows that consumers continue to view texting as a more convenient, efficient, and faster way for businesses to reach them. But convenience and immediacy aren’t only beneficial for customers; these chief aspects of SMS marketing help businesses gain customer insights and feedback quickly, helping inform customer retention strategies.
  • Customer service in real-time. Texting allows companies to interact directly and quickly with customers — and vice versa. And with consumers more likely to stick with a brand that offers stellar customer service, this real-time engagement can be the way to your customers’ hearts (and pocketbooks).

Building Effective SMS Marketing for Customer Retention

To increase customer retention with SMS text marketing, you need to know where to start. And that’s with understanding who your customers are, their needs, and where they are in the customer life cycle. No effective SMS customer retention strategy can be built without getting to know your audience and tailoring messages accordingly.

Illustration of icons of customers being sorted into various buckets

Segmenting Contacts for Relevant Messaging

Before utilizing SMS engagement tactics to retain customers, you need to segment contacts in your text marketing platform. Customer segmentation helps you differentiate between new leads and existing customers while allowing you to drill down to specific groups. Customer segments can range from more static traits, like age, gender, and location, to variable characteristics, like purchase behaviors and product/service preferences.

Organizing your SMS contacts informs how your business communicates with customers.

 

Tailoring Messages for Different Customer Retention Stages

With a well-organized contact list, you can begin reaching your audience with individualized messages relevant to where they are in their journey with your company. Marketing efforts aren’t one-size-fits-all, so it is important to develop a custom life cycle that aligns with your business and its unique customer stages. For example, a subscription-based company will likely have a different life cycle than an online retailer.

Use your customer life cycle as your North Star when creating SMS retention strategies, as this should inform how and when you engage with your audience. Tailor messages to meet customers where they are and nurture them along the buying journey, such as sending follow-up texts after a contact’s first purchase or a re-engagement message if someone hasn’t purchased in a while.

 

Understanding Customer Needs through SMS Analytics

Customers don’t have to say anything to tell you how they feel — sometimes, their actions speak louder than words. Gain critical insights into your customers’ needs by leveraging SMS analytics.

Your text marketing solution should empower you with robust analytics—and EZ Texting delivers! Monitor vital metrics like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, response times, opt-outs, and even the performance of specific customer segments. Use this data to uncover trends, refine your messaging, and optimize campaign performance. For example, if an engaged audience suddenly stops responding, the insights can help you pinpoint and address potential gaps in your outreach strategy. Data-driven decisions lead to smarter, more effective SMS marketing!

SMS Engagement Tactics for Customer Loyalty

Engagement tactics are the cornerstone of SMS for customer loyalty. Without engaging and delighting your audience, they’ll be less likely to stay with your brand, let alone promote it to their social networks. Create loyal customers by personalizing messages, developing incentive-driven retention workflows, and incorporating conversational texting.

 

Personalize Messages

There’s a better chance that contacts will interact with your messages and then take action if they’re personalized. Here’s what this can look like for your business:

Share Sample Text Message
  • Include the customer’s first name. One of the easiest ways to capture a customer’s attention is by including their first name in your text messages. Doing so helps them feel more valued and less like just another number.
  • Incorporate relevant details. Remember the customer segmentation you did? When messaging each contact group, use relevant information specific to them, such as mentioning a past purchase, referencing a location, and so on.
  • Use their preferred language. While your texts should always align with your brand voice, the language can be tweaked to each customer group, such as using slightly more formal language for customers in an older generation or incorporating a casual tone and lingo for a younger generation.

With text retention marketing, personalization doesn’t have to mean adjusting each message for every customer—that would be exhausting! It simply means that you’re showing the customer you care by speaking to them like the valued people they are.

 

Offer Incentives

Increasing subscribers and retention text marketing go hand in hand — the same goes for any business model. To increase subscribers and boost loyalty, companies should offer incentives that reward customers for continuing to support the business.

For subscription-based companies, incentives could include a free trial, referral program, special discounts on extra merch, early access to new product drops, and so on — all to keep those monthly or annual subscriptions coming and keep your customers engaged.

Other businesses may want to use these incentives: loyalty programs, seasonal promotions, free shipping, and more.

 

Use Conversational Texting for Customer Support

Customers don’t just want nice perks and personalization; they also need timely customer support. This is where conversational, or two-way, texting shines.

With conversational texting, your business can receive and respond to inbound messages from contacts. Instead of waiting for often slow email turn-around times or the dreaded phone call, customers can ask questions about products/services, shipping, delivery, pricing, and more — all within minutes. This is a key SMS engagement tactic for improving customer retention through outstanding customer support.

Developing Retention Workflows & Strategies with SMS

Automation is the backbone of any SMS marketing strategy. After all, with an expanding number of contacts in various stages of the customer life cycle, it’s essential to set up automated SMS retention workflows to ensure each group receives the right targeted messages at the right times. Setting up SMS workflows removes the need for additional human intervention, giving more time back to marketing, sales, and customer support teams.

 

Setting Up Trigger-Based SMS Marketing Campaigns

You can set up automated SMS workflows that are triggered for various scenarios, such as:

  • An abandoned cart 
  • Completing a purchase 
  • Booking an appointment or reservation 
  • Text subscriber list opt-ins

Text automation software should also allow you to set and adjust specific parameters as necessary. For example, you might set a time-based parameter, where a series of messages is triggered when a certain amount of time has passed after a purchase. Sending re-engagement texts is an important aspect of customer retention strategies.

 

Automating Customer Feedback Collection via SMS

Incorporate continual customer feedback collection into your SMS retention strategy with targeted workflows. Collecting feedback not only boosts engagement but also gives your customers a voice.

Send post-purchase surveys, ask for feedback after a person’s interaction with customer support, and even share annual polls and surveys to gain a birds-eye view of what your audience thinks of your brand. All of this can be automated through your text marketing platform.

SMS Best Practices for Customer Retention

In addition to optimizing your SMS marketing tools and engaging customers with slam-dunk retention strategies, you must ensure that your business follows these SMS best practices.

Side-by-side images of a person texting, and a customer service rep typing

 

Consider Frequency and Timing

Avoid over-messaging. If customers feel they’re being bombarded with marketing messages, they may be more likely to opt out of your subscriber list. Keep your valued customers by valuing their time.

A good rule of thumb is sending about one to two weekly messages (not including appointment or reservation reminders, shipping updates, and the like). And as far as timing, try to stick to business hours. In fact, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) stipulates specific “quiet hours” for business marketing texts.

 

Ensure Compliance with SMS Marketing Regulations

You need to be aware of some legal restrictions when sending business marketing texts. For example, you’ll need to follow guidelines from the TCPA, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), and the CAN-SPAM Act.

Additionally, ensure that your business’s phone number has undergone A2P registration, a relatively new industry standard. Doing so not only helps to maintain compliance but also improves deliverability, thereby improving the customer experience.

 

Manage Opt-Outs

With these advanced SMS customer retention strategies, we bet contacts won’t opt out of your list. But if they do, your business needs to respect their wishes. Some text marketing platforms automate the opt-out process. For instance, EZ Texting’s SafeSTOP feature instantly removes contacts from your subscriber list when they text “Stop.”

Plus, Smart Contacts organizes and updates your contact lists automatically, making managing subscriber preferences easier and keeping your campaigns targeted and effective. Incorporating these necessary guardrails into your workflows keeps your company compliant and fosters trust with your audience.

 

Remember that Customers Are More Than Numbers

Increasing your rate of repeat customers through texting means building effective marketing strategies, implementing proven engagement methods, and developing retention workflows. However, SMS marketing for customer retention also requires acknowledging that your customers have real needs, preferences, and desires. They’re not just data — the fuel that keeps your business thriving.

Build Loyalty Through Smarter SMS Marketing Strategies

By leveraging SMS as a powerful tool for customer retention, your business can create lasting connections beyond the first purchase. From personalized messages and tailored workflows to real-time customer support and insightful analytics, the right SMS strategies can turn one-time buyers into loyal advocates.

When you’re ready to start your text marketing journey, sign up for a free trial with EZ Texting.

FAQs

SMS campaigns help with customer retention through higher engagement, immediacy and convenience, and real-time customer support. By using targeted, automated SMS retention workflows and other valuable SMS tools, you can boost engagement, send timely and relevant messages that align with customer life cycle stages, and encourage brand loyalty.

The best frequency for sending SMS to retain customers is about once or twice weekly. Test this frequency with your customers and adjust, as needed, based on their preferences.

You can personalize SMS messages according to customer segments by drafting messages that are relevant to that segment, such as sending texts based on where that customer group is in their journey with your brand. For example, you could create a contact group called “Loyalty,” and then send SMS messages only within that individual group.

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