The Trick, The Text, and the Treat

Halloween can be absolutely ghoulish. Ghosts, witches, and zombies roam the street, trying to scare up some candy. For e-commerce store owners, this time of year can be frightening as well. Hackers do their best to “dress up” looking like legit customers and use stolen logins to access accounts and place orders.

Ecommerce retailers can help protect their customer accounts with business SMS messages that protect customers from scary trick-or-treaters.

Plus, we’ve also got some great tricks and treats of SMS marketing for you.

Protect Your Customers From Themselves with OTP

The sad truth is many customers are tricked into handing over their login information. These seemingly innocent exchanges, called phishing, use social engineering to convince people to share usernames and passwords.

For example, the hacker may pose as a customer service agent and advise a customer that their account may have been hacked. They will then ask the customer for their username and password to confirm their identity.

Once the hacker has received the login credentials, the customer is assured that their account is safe. Then, the hacker uses the login credentials to cause mayhem.

Adding a one time password over SMS to the login process helps protect your customers’ accounts. Even if they are tricked into handing over their login credentials, the hacker still can’t access the user account without also having their mobile.

Text – and Test – Your Scary Good Deals

Halloween offers the perfect testing ground for those key Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales. It’s a great opportunity to test out new messaging ideas, such as segmenting target markets into groups. Send out different types of offers to your customers to see which ones deliver the best results, and use those as a guide for your holiday sales messages.

For example, you can split up your list into five different groups and send out five different types of messages.

Group 1 – Limited time offer coupon on a product category
Group 2 – Sneak preview of upcoming promotion followed by a second text with the actual promotion
Group 3 – Free shipping offer with minimum purchase
Group 4 – General discount on all merchandise
Group 5 – Buy More, Save More offer

Track your click through rates and conversion rates to see which type of offer generates the best response among your customers and use that when prepping your holiday sales strategy.

Host an Online Halloween Party

If you sold Halloween costumes, candy, décor, or other Halloween-themed merchandise, reach out to your customers via SMS and ask them to tag you or use your Halloween hashtag in their Instagram pictures.

You can motivate them with a promotional incentive or loyalty points and offer to share their pictures on your site. For an even larger impact, gamify the promotion by offering valuable prizes to customers who tag your store and get the most likes. A simple SMS message at the time of purchase and a reminder on Halloween should get your online Halloween party into high gear.