SMS marketing campaigns have rapidly grown in popularity for DTC brands in 2021. The rise of automated text marketing has empowered teams to create next-level interaction and engagement with buyers that are just not attainable with email.
Text messages have significantly higher open rates when compared to email campaigns. Gartner reports that MMS and SMS messages have open rates of 98% and response rates of 45%, while emails have only 20% click and 6% response rates. It is easy to see why Shopify stores started investing in SMS campaigns with these numbers.
Considering what Shopify apps you want to implement for SMS campaigns, finding the best for your store can be hard. Maybe your primary concern is developing great abandoned cart reminders or looking for a more comprehensive marketing platform.
To help you start your search for the perfect SMS marketing platform for your goals, we have put together a list of our top five choices for the best SMS marketing apps that integrate with Shopify!
Postscript – Best Overall
Do you dream of a tool with deep analytics, automated SMS campaigns, and list growth functionality? We were, too, until Postscript bundled all these features into one TCPA-compliant package. Sleek and streamlined, this app is easy to use and functional. Postscript includes an automation template library and text marketing examples from successful campaigns!
Postscript SMS campaigns are powered by up-to-date analytics from your Shopify merchant data, helping you send messages to the right buyers at the right time. This data allows you to create segments for your automated SMS campaigns and monitor how these campaigns perform! Truly an all-in-one tool for those looking to pursue SMS marketing as a Shopify store.
Key features
- SMS Segmentation: Target your marketing for custom campaigns and cart recovery
- Automation Workflows: Trigger workflows for abandoned cart messages and new product purchases automatically as they happen
- TCPA Compliant: Prevent your company from serious legal risk
- Shopify Data Dashboard: Auto-syncs with your store’s information, helping Shopify store owners see analytics and segment their customers on-the-fly
Key integrations
- Gorgias & Zendesk: To help expand your customer support by responding to all replies on a single customer service platform
- Klaviyo: Easily share lists and marketing information between your SMS subscriber list and your email marketing lists
- Aftership: Further your Shopify SMS marketing by adding SMS alerts to update customers on their shipping status
- Swell: Build a customized referral and loyalty program through SMS
What Postscript does best
Postscript’s ability to help you create segments and filters is unbelievable, making building a targeted campaign a breeze. Listen here to see how Wassim Dakik, the Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Postscript, suggests you use Postscript filters to ensure messages are sent to the exact right recipient, as well as about automation workflows and conversational SMS tactics.
Where Postscript could improve
We are excited to see Postscript grow its integration library over time, allowing more teams to seamlessly add it into their current stack!
Pricing
Postscript’s pricing scales depending on how many messages you want to send a month. Postscript charges by the message and discounts that bundle price. For example, 50,000 messages a month is priced at $500 ($0.0099 per message), while 500,000 messages a month are priced at $4,500 ($0.0089 per message).
Why Postscript is the best overall Shopify SMS app
There are dozens of Shopify SMS apps to choose from these days. But Postscript is #1 in our eyes. It’s rivaled only by Attentive. Postscript offers the most robust feature set, and their implementation services make it easy to get started and create SMS campaigns that don’t annoy your customers.
Their affordable pricing makes them an excellent fit for any Shopify store. Whether you’re just starting or looking to scale your Shopify store, Postscript has the features you need to grow and turn SMS into your best-performing channel.
Privy Text – Best for just starting out
Privy takes a different approach, providing you with the tools to grow your email and text contact list through user-friendly popups, interactables, and prompts. You can easily market the Klaviyo and Mailchimp integrations to those contacts! These mobile-friendly features make the buyer’s experience as seamless as possible.
Privy also allows you to send large coupon and promotional campaigns directly to your list with SMS, automate cart and purchase follow-up messages, and run A/B tests. Privy does focus a lot on its email marketing functionality, which you can also take advantage of if you want to grow your entire marketing platform.
Key features
- Broadcast Texts: Send promotions and coupons directly to consumer phones
- Automated Triggers: For after sign-up messages and abandoned carts
- List Growth Tools: Integrated popups, banners, and other resources to help grow your SMS list
Key integrations
- Wix: Beyond Shopify, Privy can also integrate with Wix
- Klaviyo & Mailchimp: Sync contacts between mail providers
- Postscript: Yes – Privy can integrate with our first suggestion! You can use Privy to create custom forms to collect subscribers, then interact with them through Postscript.
What Privy SMS does best
Privy has easy-to-use, customizable tools for helping you grow your marketing lists more easily, something we think they do a great job at. Mobile-friendly spin-to-win wheels, flyouts, announcement bars, and more are super handy when first trying to grow your contacts!
Where Privy SMS could improve
Privy doesn’t scale well into larger pricing, with 5,000 contacts pricing in at $225/month. As you grow, Privy is an excellent option for increasing your marketing lists but lacks some of the nuances of its partners that are geared at larger businesses, such as customization, templates, and deep analytics.
Pricing
Starts at $10/month for up to 100 textable contacts and $45/month for up to 500 text contacts and 3,000 texts
Why Privy SMS is suitable for stores just starting out
For Shopify stores that are just getting started, Privy is a great cost-effective option that helps you build your email and SMS lists. Privy has all the basics you need to collect emails and SMS opt-ins, but its ability to use that information is not as robust as Postscript or another platform.
As your store grows, you can upgrade to a more premium option like Klaviyo or Postscript. Since Privy integrates with more prominent SMS apps, migrating to a new platform should be smooth. Attentive recently acquired Privy, so the future integration between both platforms should make data transfer relatively smooth.
Omnisend – Small brands before they upgrade
Omnisend is a text and email marketing platform that helps you increase your sales quickly. It focuses on easy-to-use tools such as pre-built automation workflows and easy no-code editing so your team can get it up and running in no time. Their automation workflows range from cart and product abandonment to winback and reactivation emails, helping you gain new subscribers and keep the ones you have!
Like many other brands, they have SMS and email marketing list growth tools like popups, landing pages, and a wheel of fortune. Omnisend also has segmentation capabilities, helping you separate high-value customers from your likely-to-churn customers. Take advantage of their 24/7 support, and quickly get your marketing project off the ground!
Key features
- Automation Library: Includes pre-built automation workflows for different parts of the customer journey
- Contact Segmentation: Segment based on lifecycle stages, message engagement, and other data
- Grow Your Marketing List: Through popups, landing pages, and a wheel of fortune feature
Key integrations
- Aftership: Let Omnisend automated tracking number information, URLs, and shipping updates
- Okendo: Create customer-generated content like reviews and product photos
- Zapier: Create cross-app automation workflows to take your automation to the next level
What Omnisend does best
What Omnisend excels in is its ease of use. With plug-and-play features, this is great for the team that doesn’t have time to do more robust things like entirely customize automation workflows and deal with more complex features.
Where Omnisend could improve
Customization certainly has its limits. Omnisend cannot support custom reports (which bigger stores need).
Pricing
Omnisend costs $59/month with unlimited emails, 2500 contacts, and 3,922 SMS/month. For groups looking at larger contacts, the price can get steep – for 10,000 contacts and 10,000 SMS/month, it costs $150/month.
Why Omnisend is good for small brands
For a small brand that has managed to grow and bring in dozens or hundreds of orders a month, Omnisend is an excellent option. It has everything you need to scale your store as you focus on hitting seven figures in revenue and migrating to Shopify Plus. Omnisend lacks features required for larger brands, but a smaller brand has the features they need to run its store successfully.
To sum it up, Omnisend is a great option until you meet the requirements for Shopify Plus. Once you’re a Shopify Plus store, other platforms are better suited for SMS.
Klaviyo SMS – Keep everything on one platform
Klaviyo is the most prominent email marketing app on Shopify. And their native SMS features give you everything you need to leverage the combo of email and SMS. With Klaviyo’s extensive integration library, you can better handle your data across multiple platforms and get a true view of your analytics. Use your Shopify and other integrations to segment your buyers and create customized and tailored promotions powered by data.
Klaviyo truly focuses on Shopify as a platform, with Shopify-specific pre-built templates and tools. Use their free account to test the waters and the out-of-the-box automation options to hit the ground running.
Key features
- Transactional SMS Flows: From order confirmations to welcome messages, automate your SMS workflows
- SMS List Growth and Consent: Use multi-step forms, click-to-text, and other options to gain SMS data with customer consent
- Smart Sending: Check to ensure you aren’t sending too many messages to any individual buyer
Key integrations
- Octane AI: Collect data, recommend products with quizzes and popups, personalize your marketing
- Okendo: Create customer-generated content like reviews and product photos
- Salesforce: Connect your customer lists and analytics
What Klaviyo does best
Klaviyo’s API and integration options are where it shines. Using other tools that fit your needs makes Klaviyo a simple addition to an already-established tech stack. From Facebook to Zendesk, Klaviyo can work with any tool you want to use!
Where Klaviyo could improve
There is a learning curve to starting with their editing tools, as they can be clunky and hard to use. Once you figure them out, they are powerful tools, but it may take your team some time to get the tools mastered.
Pricing
Scales based on need, with 500 contacts and 2,500 SMS messages costing $20/month, and 5,000 contacts and 35,000 SMS messages costing $225/month
Why Klaviyo is good & convenient
Klaviyo is the king of email marketing for Shopify stores. And its SMS features are great too. The best reason to use Klaviyo is that it allows you to manage everything related to email and SMS in one location. Klaviyo’s robust APIs and integrations make it easy to pull in data from multiple apps to allow you to build genuinely personalized SMS and email campaigns at scale.
You can’t go wrong with Klaviyo if you want to manage everything in one app. While there are some limited SMS features, most Shopify stores have the features they need to grow with Klaviyo.
Attentive – Enterprise-Level Scale
Attentive focuses on building your enterprises’ SMS capabilities. Attentive includes powerful tools such as multi-channel list growth, including mobile website two-tap technology, checkout sign-up, social media opt-ins, email subscriptions, and even in-person text-to-join campaigns. They also have robust customer views that allow you to look at their user profile to see a full picture of their information.
If you are looking for a client strategy team, Attentive takes care of that as well. They help guide you from implementation and support to check-ins to ensure that you reach and exceed KPI goals. They provide you with the tools to succeed through their Attentive University with training resources, guidelines, best practices, invite-only events, and examples of successful texts. Attentive also has a design team that can help advise you on branding strategies.
Key features
- Multi-channel List Growth: Through checkout, social media, or even in-person
- Segmentation: Use attentive tags to see when a product has been viewed or added to a cart
- Playbook: Resources such as best practices, examples, and guidelines lead you down the right path
Key integrations
- Gorgias: For customer service integrations
- Punchh: Improve new loyalty user acquisition
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Keep all of your sales data synced and collaborative
What Attentive does best
Attentive helps larger companies succeed through their impressive training offerings and consultation resources. If you want to spend more to get direct implementation support and assistance, Attentive is the best platform.
Where Attentive could improve
Dashboards could be a bit more robust when looking for specific reports. Attentive is also truly focused on larger brands. If you’re starting or your store is small, Attentive won’t be a good fit due to their pricing model.
Pricing
Starts at $299 per month, then a variable fee per message sent.
Why Attentive is good for enterprise-level stores
If you’re a 7/8-figure Shopify or Shopify Plus store, Attentive and Postscript should be the only platforms you consider. Attentive is relentlessly focused on helping larger stores be even more successful with their SMS campaigns. If you’re already using something like Privy or Omnisend for SMS, consider upgrading to Attentive when your store becomes a Shopify Plus store.
Conclusion
Using SMS to market to your buyers leads to higher open rates, more successful campaigns, and more sales. Directly communicate with customers about deals, offers, and new products to bring them back to your store and keep them engaged. Using related tools such as list-growing popups and incentives can help create more loyal customers who will keep returning to your storefront.
There are so many powerful Shopify SMS apps out there. We hope this tailored list helps you better pick what will be best for your team in the sea of options.