– Around 20% of people opted into SMS, indicating a preference for email over phone numbers.
– 20-25% of people dropped off immediately, even with the option to skip the phone number collection step.
– Of the remaining 75-80%, more than 70-75% provided up to 4 data points after skipping the SMS step, suggesting that people are willing to provide information if asked the right questions.Collect phone numbers further down the customer journey and focus on gathering more valuable data relevant to a purchase, rather than prioritizing SMS opt-ins.Using a two-step opt-in for email and phone number collection? We added a “skip for now” button to the phone number collection step and then asked more questions. Here’s what happened:
– Approximately 20% of people opted into SMS.
– 20-25% of people dropped off immediately, even with the option to skip present.
– Of the remaining 75-80%, more than 70-75% provided us with up to four data points after skipping the SMS step.
This means a few things: the reasons for providing a phone number just aren’t there; people, for the most part, still prefer email to phone numbers; people really want to tell you why they are signing up; and if you ask the right questions, people will answer.
I don’t have anything against using SMS, but it really needs to be collected further down the journey and likely in relation to order details and shipping, as those are more useful.
So what happens when you don’t get all the way through a signup with some of the current providers? They show pop-ups to everyone over and over again, which serves to just annoy your customers. Often, the promised discount code isn’t issued if they don’t finish the form, resulting in a bad customer experience.
By and large, the narrative that getting even some SMS numbers is better than none may be correct, but trading a high drop-off rate when there is more valuable data to collect relevant to a purchase, I don’t think I can make that trade-off.
But SMS is driving me so much money! Attribution is another problem, where most SMS opt-ins require someone to take an action that triggers a 30-day attribution window. Unfortunately, data shows that nearly 98% of people who sign up and convert will do so within that same window. And when signing up for SMS, nearly all the coupon codes are generic.
So, I have to ask the important bits: how do you know it was the channel? How do you know they weren’t already just higher-intent people likely to convert anyway? #ecommerce #marketing #datahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco