Jonathan Denney

What’s New for 2022: SMS List Growth Tools, Ecommerce Elements & More

Last Updated:

February 22, 2023

First Published:

January 13, 2022

What’s up, marketers? Happy New Year! 🎉

As we’re breaking in 2022 and working on our strategies, it’s a good time to reflect upon what worked last year.

Last year, we were coming off the notorious 2020. That year caused nearly everyone to throw out their 20th century shopping habits and re-wired behavior to shop online first.

McKinsey estimates that in Q1 of 2020, we saw 10 years' worth of ecommerce penetration in just 90 days:

Many of us assumed things would return to normal, that everyone would go back to the good ol’ days of in-person retail shopping. They did not!

2021 reinforced that 2020 ecommerce habits are here to stay.

During BFCM, 2021’s peak online shopping season, ecommerce platforms like Shopify saw sales increase 23% compared to 2020—a year that had already reached new heights itself:

This breakneck growth of ecommerce quickly uncovered winners for marketers in the new landscape.

And we think the biggest winner of 2021 was (drum roll 🥁) SMS marketing.

In 2021, 70% of surveyed businesses were using SMS to communicate, with 77% saying they would continue using SMS after the pandemic:

Although highly effective with open rates as high as 95%, SMS marketing seemed like an afterthought of email marketing for most of the last decade. Most marketers didn’t use it, and most of those that did would have SMS campaigns bolted onto their email marketing.

This decade, that’s already changed. We’re seeing brands starting to skip email altogether and collect just phone numbers for their marketing efforts.

This doesn’t mean email marketing is dying. It’s still alive and growing.

What we’re seeing is SMS emerging as an effective addition to email for communicating with customers and driving revenue.

Anecdote: I’m 26 years old. Here’s how I engage with ecommerce marketing…

I use email primarily for work. While I check my email for work-related content, as a consumer, I don’t go out of my way to look for offers and promotions in my email inbox.

But, when my favorite iPhone case maker, Peel, sends me an offer through SMS, I open it:

Maybe it’s because my personal email client (Gmail) filters any messaging that looks ecommerce related into the “Promotions” inbox, suppressing push notifications to my phone. Or, maybe it’s because we’re still early enough in SMS marketing that consumers’ haven’t declared inbox bankruptcy in their messenger apps like I already have with my personal email.

SMS is also more expensive per recipient than email, it has easier opt-out functionality, and it has tighter regulations.

The result? Brands are forced into creating a better experience for consumers.

With this new reality in mind, ConvertFlow’s 2021 product shifted significantly towards helping brands personalize their SMS marketing.

Let’s dive in:

What's new in ConvertFlow?

Collect SMS opt-ins, without email
SMS marketing integrations
SMS subscribe templates for the entire retail calendar
New builder improvements for ecommerce offers
Two-tap buttons for opening popups
Increase AOV with cart progress offers + templates
New quiz scoring features
New quiz templates to make personalized product recommendations
Intercom integration
100+ new templates
Dashboard improvements

1. Collect SMS opt-ins, without email

You can now collect SMS-only opt-ins using ConvertFlow 🙌

This means if your marketing is skipping email altogether and going straight for SMS campaigns, ConvertFlow’s forms now work perfectly for you too.

Here's how this works:

Collecting a phone number (even without an email address) will create a contact in ConvertFlow
Phone number fields now have a country code dropdown and improved phone number validation
Collecting SMS marketing consent is easy with the SMS consent checkbox
We've added a new "Subscribe via SMS" confirmation type for buttons, forms, and surveys to pre-fill an SMS message to the phone number of your choice

2. SMS marketing integrations

ConvertFlow now has lots of deep integrations with SMS marketing platforms.

Here's a full list of the integrations you can subscribe SMS contacts to with ConvertFlow:

3. Retail marketing calendar 2022

Each year, there are so many opportunities to run a time-sensitive promotion around themed holidays and events. So, we created a marketing calendar for 2022 with all the key dates you need to know about.

To save you time, we've also designed lots of holiday and seasonal sale ConvertFlow templates:

Here's a list of all the new campaign templates:

For more, check out our template library.

4. New builder improvements for ecommerce campaigns

After 2020’s builder overhaul, we’ve been able to expand ConvertFlow’s builder significantly.

You’ll now find that you can add:

We’ve also made improvements to design controls to help you create fully on-brand campaigns—without relying on developers for custom CSS.

5. Two-tap buttons for opening popups

When shopping on an ecommerce site, have you ever closed out a discount popup and then later realized you could've used that discount?

With the new "two-tap" floating button trigger, you now have the option to enable a two-tap button that can appear before your popup shows:

The kicker? Regardless of how you trigger your popup, you can choose to also have a two-tap floating button show after it gets closed.

This means people can open the popup back up again as and when they like—giving more conversion opportunities 🙌

6. Increase AOV with cart progress offers + templates

That new progress bar element mentioned earlier and the new shopping cart merge tags both integrate with Shopify’s cart. Meaning you can visualize to shoppers how much they need to add to cart to have a bonus applied (free shipping, free gift, etc.)—which helps increase your average order value.

We paired this with lots of templates for offering free shipping or any other cart progress offer:

Take a look at some more designs here:

7. New quiz scoring features

ConvertFlow now makes it easy to assign scores to specific survey/quiz answers and custom field selections, using the new quiz and contact scoring features:

Features include:

Assign positive and negative scores to survey options/quiz answers
Use merge tags to display the current score
Display conditional outcomes based on scores/quiz results
Collect user-inputted scores using numerical form fields
Save score results to contact custom fields and integrations
Apply calculations to scores using automations

That means no more waiting on developers to do javascript-wizardry to use math in your funnels. ConvertFlow has now got all the scoring tools you need in a no-code interface.

8. New quiz templates to make personalized product recommendations

When you enter a retail store, you're usually greeted by helpful team members who ask you what you're looking for and guide you to the perfect products.

Shop quizzes play a similar role online by asking questions and providing personalized product recommendations based on the answers. It's like having a sales associate for your website—except it's working on autopilot 24/7 😎

Built with health & fitness stores in mind, ConvertFlow's new shop quiz campaign templates are 99% ready-to-launch, with landing page templates, popup templates, and sticky bar templates already done for you:

Check out the templates here:

9. ConvertFlow now integrates with Intercom

Use Intercom as your email service provider? If so, ConvertFlow just became much more powerful for you.

With ConvertFlow's Intercom integration, you can:

Automatically sync form submissions to Intercom fields (guide)
Use ConvertFlow automations to segment contacts in Intercom (guide)
Personalize your website and CTA funnels for Intercom segments (guide)
Trigger the Intercom messenger from any button, form, or survey

10. 100+ total new ConvertFlow templates

You may have noticed we’ve made it a point to pair campaign templates with new feature releases.

In 2021, we released dozens of campaign templates, many of which are made up of multiple CTA templates that you can launch together, totaling more than 100+ ConvertFlow CTA templates added:

Here’s a recap of all the new CTA templates added in 2021.

New cart abandonment / exit-intent campaign templates, each with overlay popup, hook popup, and sticky bar templates:

New SMS subscribe campaign templates, each with overlay popup, hook popup, sticky bar, and embedded CTA templates:

New quiz templates, each with landing page, overlay popup, hook popup, sticky bar, and embedded CTA templates:

Product bundle sales page templates:

Simple‍
Fitness

11. Lots more improvements and additions

Lots more improvements and additions were made in 2021. Here's a quick overview:

In May, we released a significant performance update and saw a 3x improvement in dashboard speed ⚡️
Guiding people to different outcomes based on their survey response is now much easier
40+ editions of the Conversion Marketing Roundup have been released (2021 recap mega thread)
In 2021, we published 26 marketing guides, case studies, and articles to ConvertFlow’s blog
We added 100s of examples of real conversion campaigns in the wild to ConvertFlow’s campaign inspiration library

What to expect for 2022

We’re shaking things up at ConvertFlow for this year, so expect some significant additions to ConvertFlow’s product 😉

If you have any feedback, suggestions, or requests, please reach us at team@convertflow.com so we can chat.

From the ConvertFlow team to you, let’s make 2022 your most successful year yet! Happy marketing!

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