May 6, 2026

Why Add an SMS Marketing Strategy to Your Sales Funnel?

In 2023, an SMS marketing strategy represents an increasingly popular method of attracting paying customers, and word is spreading fast. Why? Well, how about an impressive average response rate of 45% or an ROI of $71 for every dollar you spend? These benefits and more have increased its popularity as a marketing channel, however, it remains a largely untapped resource.

The great thing about a platform like Klaviyo is that it allows you to engage in both email marketing and SMS marketing campaigns. While email and SMS marketing may seem quite similar, their use cases can be very different depending on who you’re marketing to. For instance:

When you engage in a Klaviyo SMS marketing strategy, you’re not venturing into a saturated marketing arena - as may be the case with other channels. Here, you’re positioning yourself to take advantage of the fact that as few as 40% of customers are subscribed to between 1-4 brand SMS marketing lists.

Where Best to Use SMS Marketing?

Across the average marketing sales funnel, there are a number of areas in which an SMS marketing strategy comes into its own. At every touchpoint, you’ll find natural opportunities to re-engage with clients, such as:

Obtaining immediate interaction with customers via a 2-way welcome series SMS flows - instantly making customers feel valued.
Delivering high-urgency messages to customers, such as abandoned cart reminders and notifications of exclusive or time-sensitive offers.
Maintaining customer satisfaction with informative delivery updates & appointment reminders.
Retaining customers with win-back texts.

The great thing about SMS messaging is that’s delivered directly into the hands of customers, allowing them to receive up-to-the-minute information about your products and services.

Keeping Tabs On Your Performance

When employing this channel, it’s still important to track the impact of your SMS business marketing strategy, as you would with any other form (e.g. social media marketing, email marketing, etc). Despite the fact that so many other seemingly trendy messaging platforms exist, 55% of users still use their phone’s native messaging function i.e. text.

Klaviyo is a platform that offers functions that allow you to track the number of important metrics that will tell you how well things are going. They include things like:

SMS Revenue per recipient
Deliverability rates
Unsubscribe rates
Placed order rates
Click rates

Essentially, you’re tracking how successful you’re being at getting your SMS messages delivered to the phones of your subscribers. The targets you’re aiming for will be largely dictated by the products you sell and the industry you occupy. But what happens when you’re not hitting those targets? What then?

Assessing Your Klaviyo SMS Marketing Strategy

If you’re not getting the click rates and revenue you want from your SMS campaigns, it’s likely time to turn the focus inwards. By benchmarking yourself against your competitors, you can get a clear insight into whether you’re being successful…or not. As such, there are three main levers that all types of businesses can use to assess their progress:

Customer numbers - just how many subscribers do you have?
Purchasing frequency - how often is each customer buying from you?
Average Order Value - how much are customers buying, on average?

Of course, the aim is always to meet and, indeed, exceed your targets, however, modern marketers need to keep an eye out for problem areas in their marketing funnel so that they can correct their course if necessary. Those red flags include problems like:

When you witness any of the above occurring during the course of your SMS marketing strategy, you’ll need to take the appropriate action. So, let’s now take a look at some specifics.

How to Boost Your SMS Subscriber Numbers

So, we’ve looked at the WHAT and the WHY. Now we look at the HOW. Here we examine the practical steps you can take to boost the numbers at the top of your sales funnel - by acquiring SMS marketing consent from your existing email marketing base.

Checkout Consent - as per the new privacy guidelines, consent for SMS marketing needs to be provided. What better way to get more subscribers on board than to obtain permission at the checkout when the trust they have for you is at its highest?
Pop-up Incentives On Your Website - another great way to add fresh people to your Klaviyo SMS marketing strategy is to add a pop-up on your website that offers an incentive to subscribe. It could be a product discount or free products/services. Whatever works for you.
Offer Exclusivity - sometimes, all the allure you need to attract new SMS subscribers is the promise of a ‘first look’ at new product launches. This works particularly well with customers who are invested in your products but, as yet, have not become SMS subscribers.
Promote SMS Via Your Email Messaging - if you have a growing email subscriber list, these people have already shown an interest in what you offer. This represents one of your biggest assets, as you can simply promote the benefits of also becoming an SMS subscriber via your email flows.

What you have to keep in mind is that SMS offers a different experience when compared to email marketing, so it’s important to; a) stick to the promises you made in your SMS, b) offer a great introduction to the new channel, and always, carry out continuous testing to find the right blend.

Optimizing Returns For Your SMS Business Marketing Strategy

SMS marketing can offer BIG returns, but as we’ve seen here, success is not guaranteed. It’s a channel with so much potential, but you have to know how to access that potential, and it almost always requires hard work, analysis and an understanding of how customers think.

As customer acquisition costs grow, businesses of all sizes need to nurture the relationships they have with their customers in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

SMS will surely continue evolving and has the potential to offer a new dimension to the shopping experiences people have. Live, person-to-person messaging looks set to become something of a norm in the near future, so it’s a channel worthy of consideration for brands everywhere.