Retail stores use RCS to send branded, interactive messages that let shoppers browse products, tap to reply, and check out inside their native messaging app. Vibes runs this verified, live retail agent over direct carrier connections. Watch RCS for retail in action below.
If you're here, you’re weighing RCS for retail, and we can’t wait to demo it for you.
My name is Mara Miller, I’m the Director of Marketing at Vibes I’m going to be walking you through our RCS demo and how it can drive immense value for retail brands.
RCS for retail is rich communication services, the messaging protocol that succeeds SMS and MMS, used by retailers to send interactive, branded messages with images, buttons, and product carousels.
RCS business messaging looks and feels like an actual conversation between your brand and your customers, providing you with even more opportunities to showcase your brand voice and create engaging, memorable customer experiences.
At Vibes, we’re committed to paving the way for RCS adoption in the U.S. We've launched more RCS agents in the US than any other direct connect aggregator, and our customers are already seeing 3x engagement and a 30% boost in revenue from their RCS campaigns vs. SMS.
Here is a rich card, which allows you to attach images, gifs or videos along with more detailed descriptions. But what’s particularly unique about this RCS feature is the ability to add a menu with suggested actions that can generate user engagement with just one tap instead of typing.
If you think about collecting subscriber preferences in the SMS world, they might be asked to reply 1 for male, reply 2 for female, or you might link them out to a web form, which disrupts the messaging experience by taking your subscribers out of their messaging app.
RCS makes data collection feel more natural for your customers who just have to click on the button that resonates most with them, and it feels more authentic that you, the brand, want to genuinely get to know your subscribers.
RCS allows you to include a carousel of up to 10 rich cards that your customers can scroll through. Unlike an SMS where you can only send text and a related URL, RCS allows you to include product images coupled with relevant information about the products, like color and price. The visual elements make it more enticing to interact with, and serve as helpful reminders of the products your customers looked at.
This interaction mirrors what your customers are more familiar with experiencing on social media, directly on your website or in your mobile app, but now it’s happening directly in their native messaging app.
Suggested reply buttons - which are customizable to best fit the user flow you're building - make it super simple for your customers to take the next step, like adding browsed products to a shopping cart.
RCS also gives retailers a number of built-in suggested action buttons, such as:
RCS also offers an improved customer servicing experience for helping solve issues for things like order exchanges or returns – something brands previously would often redirect to a separate app to handle.
While cart recovery is a use case that you can do with SMS today, it’s an improved experience via RCS because you can present visuals of the items your customers previously looked at within the conversation vs. having to link out to a web browser or mobile app to provide the full details. Your customers can pick up right where they left off in their shopping journey in a single channel – they can begin the checkout process, or they can opt to browse recommended items that go along with the items in their cart to complete the look, and they will only be redirected out of their messaging app to your website to complete payment for their order.
RCS enhances traditional SMS/MMS messaging by bringing richer, more interactive experiences typically found in a separate messaging app like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but directly inside your native messaging app. RCS looks and feels like an actual conversation between retail brands and shoppers, providing you with an abundance of opportunities to create engaging, memorable experiences for your customers.
The best RCS use cases for retail include but are not limited to:
There are several key features RCS offers that elevates the customer experience in ways SMS cannot, such as:
To send RCS messages to customers, retailers must work with a messaging aggregator, and like any industry, not all aggregators are the same. Tier 1 aggregators like Vibes have direct carrier connections that give brands unmediated access to faster RCS agent registration and quicker, compliant campaign approvals, which is how we've been able to launch our customers' RCS campaigns live in market within 1 month.
Yes, RCS is available for ecommerce brands not only as a more engaging way to market to customers, but also helps to streamline the customer journey because there's less toggling between a web browser, a mobile app, and a separate messaging app.
Vibes and our 25+ years of messaging leadership, our years-long relationships with Apple and Google and our direct carrier connections helps brands and businesses get live in market with RCS faster and more successfully than the competition. We also offer RCS Studio, the only end-to-end platform that handles RCS agent creation, provisioning, compliance, and carrier delivery - all in one place. Our commitment to bringing RCS messaging to our customers in the US has resulted in:
Ready to bring RCS to your retail or ecommerce program? Get in touch with us today.
