Happy holiday shopping with SMS from Plivo

Happy holiday shopping with SMS from Plivo

Christmas comes early this year — not on the calendar, but for retailers hoping that widely reported supply chain issues won’t keep them from being able to stock their shelves. Given the possibility that retailers won’t have enough goods to ensure a happy holiday for everyone, smart shoppers are likely to be out early — so now’s the time to consider how to let customers know how to get what they want from your business.

To find out how shoppers want to communicate with retailers, Plivo commissioned The Harris Poll to conduct a survey among more than 2,000 US adults aged 18 and older. We found that nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) are open to receiving communications from retailers they shop with or want to shop with.

Click here to access the survey results report.

About 3 in 4 (74%) Americans we surveyed would opt in to receive text messages from retailers — and when we zeroed in on people who plan to shop for the holidays, we found that 83% were open to receiving SMS text messages from retailers, with the top notification types being shipping and delivery notices and updates (54%) and coupons (52%).

That preference for SMS text messaging confirms what we’ve seen elsewhere, including these statistics from TechJury:

• 66% of Americans check their phones 160 times a day on average.
• SMS has a 98% open rate.
• More than 60% of people read their SMS messages within five minutes.

All of these statistics show that text messaging is a tool you can’t afford to ignore.

Add SMS via a cloud communications platform

While businesses may see the value of adding text messaging to their applications, they may be baffled about where to start. The answer is a cloud-based communications platform, also known as communications platform as a service (CPaaS), that provides a set of APIs that your developers can use to add the ability to send and receive messages to your existing applications.

Of course CPaaS platforms vary, so to take advantage of the power of SMS, you should look for a communications platform with a reliable network of high-quality carriers, a presence in every market you serve (with local phone numbers), and a simple, well-documented API that makes it easy for developers to add SMS messaging to your applications. Plivo not only provides all that, we walk our customers through the complex world of regulatory compliance for things like sending rate limits, data privacy, and sender ID regulations. Put all of that together and you can see why Plivo is the top cloud communications platform in customer satisfaction on G2.

Want to see for yourself? We’ve written use case guides on how to implement more than a dozen common business tasks, including sending SMS messages, with coding examples in seven common development languages. You can test any and all of them for free by creating a free Plivo account.

If you’re not already using SMS to communicate with your market, we’ve got some useful holiday gifts for you. You can read about the power of using SMS for marketing. We’ve also written a white paper on how to optimize your SMS communications, and an SMS best practices guide for more insights and tips. If you have questions on other topics, we encourage you to talk to one of our experts. They can help you ensure that both your customers and your business get what they want this holiday season.

*This survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Plivo from August 10-12, 2021, among 2,082 U.S. adults ages 18 and older, of whom 1,222 plan to shop for the holidays this year. For complete survey methodology, contact press@plivo.com.