E-commerce brands compete for customers’ attention throughout the entire holiday season. Forward-thinking brands are adopting new marketing channels like SMS and Facebook Messenger to message customers directly and achieve better open rates and conversions. It’s these brands that will cut through the noise and effectively retarget Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) visitors and follow-up with BFCM purchasers.

Average open rates for Facebook Messenger apps are over 80% while SMS open rates average over 98%. These two channels can work alongside email to help you reach customers through the right channel, at the right time.

To help you familiarize yourself with Messenger or SMS as marketing channels, I’ve outlined some easy and actionable ways to use them to boost sales and increase customer loyalty.

Build Facebook Messenger and SMS subscribers using email

One of the biggest challenges when launching Facebook Messenger or SMS is figuring out how to drive new opt-ins. But if you’re using email marketing, you already have an existing base of email subscribers. Why not use this list to fuel subscriber growth for both Messenger and SMS?

For customers to subscribe on Facebook Messenger, they have to engage with your page’s Messenger. To encourage this type of engagement, send customers an email that redirects them to your Facebook Messenger channel through a custom Messenger Link.

Once they engage with Messenger, they become a subscriber. The conversation you guide them to can also ask for their phone number to encourage them to become an SMS subscriber as well.

Send a post-purchase survey to BFCM customers via email

Another great application of Facebook Messenger is to collect valuable data. You can do this with surveys that ask questions like:

• How was your purchase experience?
• How do you like your purchase?
• Would you recommend the brand to a friend?

Plus any other data you’d like to collect! Finish off your quiz by asking for their phone number, to increase SMS subscribers.