I wonder if SMS is being effective now because it's under-utilized by companies and is known to be a channel more typically free from business notifications.. if lots of companies started using SMS would it become too noisy and change user perception about how they wish to be notified / kept part of the community?
This is a bit of "with great power, comes great responsibility" situation. It's really easy to piss someone off if you keep texting them. That's why Sonar is all about high touch two-way SMS, and that's largely how Mayvenn uses SMS as well. To use SMS effectively, it's important to let users opt in themselves, so they know to expect SMS and have the option to opt out. Mayvenn places their phone number on their website and asks customers if they want to opt in on the registration form.
I wrote this case study to analyze how Mayvenn built up to 10s of millions in revenue and 30,000 hair stylsits across the United States. It was great to talk to Taylor Wang (COO of Mayvenn) and get his thoughts on it all. Esp on Email vs. SMS. Let me know if anyone has any questions!
Yup, some examples are service businesses to coordinate with users--(Rinse, Shyp, Handy etc.) Handy is even using it to register users for recurring cleaning service if they had a good experience. Delivery on demand companies are using it to allow opt out (Susie assumes you want a meal from them everyday unless you opt out of it.) Mayvenn's definitely the first to apply SMS to Ecommerce so well.