Txt ecommerce to 38767
Let's face it. The internet is saturated with other eCommerce sites selling the exact same stuff that you do. Maybe yours is higher quality or less expensive than the ones the other guys are selling. But ultimately, it's the same stuff to the customer.
Even though your customers have a wide variety of competitors to purchase the same stuff from, why do they buy from you? Sure, price is a usual suspect, but as any eRetailer will tell you, repeat sales often boil down to customer loyalty and first time buying decisions are often generated from the customer's first impression of YOU, not your product.
So, how do you wow existing customers so that they become a champion of your company? How do you engage potential customers so their first impression is positive? One way is to communicate with them on a personal level, in the format they want. It's called 1 to 1 marketing. You could send email, even a txt message, shoot you could send a letter - but wouldn't it be way cool if you could just TALK to them? You can - with ExactTarget's Voice Marketing platform.
This article covers 7 awesome ways that eCommerce sites can leverage ExactTarget's Voice Technology into their marketing and customer communication strategies. Wow!
1. 'Voice-to-a-Friend'
Your customers have all seen the standard send-to-a-friend form on product pages that sends information about the product to their friend. These are all-good by themselves, but what if we could type in our friend's phone number and have someone TELL them about the product? We can!
'Hey Bob, your friend Rob wanted to let you know that we have this new cool widget for sale on our site ______.com.'
But who should deliver the message? Read on.
2. 'Celebrity Product Endorsements'
Who better to tell your customers about your own product than someone who has no idea what it is!? We all know the power of celebrity. How cool would it be as a customer to receive a voice message from someone that I admire talking about how great your product is?
'Hey Bob, This is Michael Jordan. Buy these shoes and I think you could beat me in HORSE.'
What if we don't have any endorsement deals with celebrities? You could deliver the message from someone the subscriber could relate to. With ExactTarget segmentation technology, you could have a different spokesperson deliver the message depending on who the subscriber is. If the subscriber is a woman, she could hear a message spoken by a woman. You could even further segment by dialect. Californians could hear 'Hey bro'; Indiana - 'Hey dude'; New York - 'Capeesh'..... Capeesh?
3. Promo Code Via Phone
ExactTarget offers the only live offer engine in the industry. We can generate bar codes on the fly, mark an offer code as redeemed via interactions with your online payment systems, and even issue a unique code for each of your subscribers that tie directly back to them. That's all good, but we're talking about voice here people. Why don't you take those SAME codes, use our Text-to-Speech technology and excite your customers about receiving an exclusive code by calling them and telling them about it!
'Hey Bob. Use code ________ next time you buy something. You'll get 10% off.'
4. Shipping Alerts
'Hey Bob, your widget has just been shipped, just wanted to let you know personally.' - Nuff said.
5. Product In-Stock Notifications
Talk about awesome. You could leverage your inventory data, segment against subscribers who want to be notified when a product is back in stock, and send an email, sms or a VOICE message reminding them that they already made the decision to buy it:
'Hey Bob, remember that widget that you wanted to buy but wasn't in stock? Well, it's back in stock, and if you use promo code ________ we'll give you an extra 10% off if you buy today.'
6. Subscription Renewal Reminders
Personally remind your subscribers why they chose to subscribe to your offering in the first place:
'Hey Bob, your subscription for my thing is expiring next month. Are you planning on renewing? We sent emails to all of our non awesome customers but wanted to call all of the awesome ones personally.'
7. SMS to Voice (using voice and ExactTarget's SMS Application)
Here's a cool technique for offline conversions: SMS-to-Voice.
Your customers can text a keyword to your ExactTarget short-code and get a voice message sent to them instantly. In the middle there, ExactTarget can store their information, and even request for them to provide more of it via additional Text messages.
Many eCommerce sites market themselves on offline channels, but how can you convert those interactions? Maybe you can't convert them instantly, but you can start the conversation that does.
ExactTarget also offers a robust SMS API for custom integrations.
Automation
Did I mention that all of this can be completely AUTOMATED? Set it and forget it. Integrationless integration. It's a beautiful thing.
GIVE IT A SHOT
Txt ecommerce to 38767
So those were 7 awesome ways to wow your customers using voice. Do you have any ideas? Post them in the comment area below


In today’s 


The benefits of continued testing should never be forgotten. While testing a number of email campaigns in Gmail we discovered that support has been recently added for the CSS background-repeat property and the HTML cellpadding and cellspacing attributes. While this doesn’t amount to a fundamental shift in standards support, it is still a step in the right direction. Sadly, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows since Gmail appears to be suffering from the same lack of support for paragraph tags that affects Yahoo Mail.

Chad White was trained as a journalist and is the author and researcher behind the independent blog mentioned most frequently in our survey of go-to email marketing resources. Chad follows approximately 100 retailers at any time and looks at ALL of their email. Moreover, he has been doing this since 2006—he has definitely seen his fair share of email. His blog provides a virtual play-by-play of what retail email marketers are sending, from his “Subjectivity Scanner” posts where he recaps subject lines people are using, to who’s trying new stuff like embedded video or social media integration. If you are looking for examples with some insightful commentary, this is the place to go.
Mark Brownlow is a writer and academic type. In his own words, “Email Marketing Reports entered life in November 2001 because I was tired of decent folk sending spam because nobody helped them learn the basics of legitimate email marketing.” His blog is dedicated to education. His articles consistently provide a balanced view of hot topics in the email industry and while he often references other sites, articles and studies, he can always be trusted to the appropriate context before sending readers off to another site
Tamara Gielen (collaborator on the study) is the author behind BeRelevant! Currently an independent email marketing consultant, Tamara has been a email practitioner for years having worked client side for Cognos and eBay, and agency side for OgilvyOne. Tamara started the blog as a tool for her to keep track of articles and topics she found useful in her own work and the blog has the same feel today. Most of her posts are lists of articles, tools, studies, and any other resources you could imagine on email marketing. Consider this blog a filter for articles worth reading.
Jason Baer has been working in digital marketing since 1994 and was the founder of Mighty Interactive. The consummate entrepreneur, Jason is at it again as the founder of Convince & Convert, now a year old. Convince & Convert’s tagline is “social media and email consulting,” so while he focuses on social media first, don’t let that (nor his 6,000+ Twitter followers) lead you to believe he has moved on from email. His blog focuses on using technology to build community and he consistently provides sound advice on how to incorporate email into that process.
Smith-Harmon is an agency based in Seattle, WA dedicated to email marketing. They also happen to employ Chad White—so the Smith-Harmon crew is a deep well of expertise in email marketing. Their blog highlights different emails that catch their eye and typically focuses on the creative and aesthetic aspects of email. Even so, there is always an eye on the messages intent and execution. In short, the blog represents the personalities of the agencies founders, Lisa Harmon—the email industries queen of fashion, and Aaron Smith—the technical guy, but hardly a techie when it comes to style. 


Enter the aggregator. The aggregator negotiates with each SMSC for you, giving you a single point of entry into the SMS delivery world. 