Building revenue for your company is more than just getting customers in the door. It’s about creating lifetime customers. To do so, pay attention to your customer lifecycle. The customer lifecycle refers to the full lifetime of customers from when they learn about your product, to when they make a purchase, to when they become a loyal customer.
The five stages of the customer lifecycle are:
Reach
Acquisition
Conversion
Retention
Loyalty
The customer lifecycle starts with your sales team reaching customers and continues throughout the customer journey with sustained customer support. Once you reach customer retention, your team drives profitability. In fact, increasing customer retention by just 5% leads to a 25% to 95% increase in profit.
So obviously you want to keep customers engaged with your company and continue building revenue, right? You don’t reach the loyal customer stage by chance. You have to first actually connect with customers, and then have to maintain those connections.
Customers expect you to keep them engaged across all channels. In fact, 85% of consumers expect to use a blend of physical and digital channels to connect. For sales and support interactions, customers value you saving time and money or making their lives easier.
Traditional channels like phone or email get a notoriously low response rate. They can be as low as 6% when salespeople try to make contact through a phone call or email! It makes since though, I mean, how many of us answer a call from an unknown number any more? And then, our email inbox is cluttered (I have about 4,000 unread messages in my inbox alone), with nearly 50% of emails being spam.
When you’re limited by traditional communication, other challenges get more complicated, too. Every sales and support team has to face:
Difficulty in Lead Qualification: When email responses get delayed and phone calls go unanswered, your sales team struggles to track down and qualify hot prospects.
Vying for the Competitive Advantage: Odds are, customers aren’t only talking to you. Your teams need tools that give them a competitive advantage and help them stand out.
Managing Administrative Tasks: Sales teams spend less than 36% of their time selling due to manual processes and administrative tasks. They need tools that let them focus on selling.
Maintaining Relationships Post-Sale: Once a prospect becomes a customer, support and sales need effective ways of nurturing a relationship.
How do you meet these challenges? Well, SMS messages have an open rate of 98% (compared to 20% of all emails and 16% of phone calls). So to break through the noise, and connect with customers faster through texting. By investing in texting technology, you can reach customers through the entire customer lifecycle.
Three Texting Tactics to Help your Bottom Line (and how to do ‘em)
1. Send mass promotional texts
The best way to boost sales and start the customer lifecycle is to reach customers through promotions. Once a text has been sent, 95% are read within the first 3 minutes of receipt. So sending out promotional texts to customers is a primary way to draw customers in..
An SMS promotional text may take only five minutes to set up. Let’s say you have a list of prospects that have opted into receiving texts. They responded to an ad campaign in the past and you want to draw them back in. Here are some ways to do so:
Get creative with a text-to-win campaign to start a conversation.
Blast a message about a new product discount that just launched.
Create unique coupon codes for prospects to send via text.
How will this help your bottom line? Let’s take an example: Let’s say a clothing retail company sends one promotional campaign to about 1,200 people a month. After that campaign, they get about $2,500 in additional business for that month. By letting prospects know about possible discounts, they boosted their monthly revenue significantly.
I really struggle to follow through when I’m shopping online. Seriously, I’d be embarrassed to share how many of the open tabs on my computer are from different stores with items just sitting in my cart. I am notorious for abandoning carts. And I’m not alone. Nearly 88% of people never finish the checkout process. How can your sales team help avoid this loss of revenue?
To bring potential customers back into the customer lifecycle, follow up with customers who have abandoned purchases. Use texting to encourage those shoppers (like me) who’ve left products behind to come back and buy.
Let’s say a shopper leaves items behind in your online store. Have either your sales or your marketing create automated messages that send to their phone. It might look something like this:
Perhaps incentivize the customer to follow through on the sale with a small discount on their purchase. This use of texting restores customers who may otherwise walk away from a sale without a second thought.
3. Send date-triggered campaigns
Buying is personal and emotional, right? So, your customers want to feel known and respected by you. Personalized messaging stands out and helps you reach and acquire customers, while also nurturing the relationship. For a more personalized approach with your customers, send date-triggered campaigns.
These kinds of text messages let you text customers at times when they are primed to shop. This may be on their birthdays, anniversaries, or Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale reminders. Who doesn’t want to get free or discounted stuff on their birthday? Here’s how you can do this:
With the help of your texting platform, keep track of customer birthdays or note when customers first joined your company. Then automate date-triggered messages to go to those customers who opted into texts from you. Maybe send a promotional message five days before a customer’s birthday with a discount code or a BOGO deal so they have time to use it. Chances are, they’ll be excited about your birthday gift and will buy something in your store, supporting your bottom line and helping to retain customers.
For a while now, it’s been clear that texting isn’t just another way to connect with old friends and family. Texting has also become the preferred channel for customers to reach businesses and vice versa. Primarily, businesses and customers alike are seeing how reliable texting is for efficient and effective communication. As many as 60% of customers read texts within 1-5 minutes after receiving them. And the average SMS open rate is 5x higher than your typical business email. Customers are eager to reach you and hear from you via text.
In a world where communication remains a crucial part of any business’ strategy, texting can be an effective way to build business, improve consumer-to-business relationships, and enhance your brand. But it can be tricky to know what works in business text messaging. We need examples.
As the youngest in my family with three older siblings, I spent a majority of my life looking to my older family members as examples: What’s cool to wear? What music should I like? What should I not do to avoid getting in trouble with mom and dad? We naturally look for examples to understand how to grow and thrive. The same goes for our businesses. We look to good examples for how to grow and thrive with our customers.
So we’ve gathered a list of some of the companies who are leading by example. These are some of the best business text message examples out there. Ready to get inspired?
Suntrup Automotive Group has been servicing and selling cars in the St. Louis area since 1957. As a reflection of their amazing customer service, Suntrup was honored with the Women’s Choice Award for being one of America’s Best Car Dealerships for customer service and continues to strive for excellence in every aspect of their business. One way Suntrup maintains excellence is by opening communications between their service team and their customers with business texting.
To streamline communication at their dealership, Suntrup uses business texting to keep customers in the loop. Here’s how:
When a car gets serviced and is ready for pick up, the service advisor sends a text out from their computer to the customer notifying them that their car is ready or asking for approvals. The customer then has an easy way to chat back and forth with the service advisor — able to ask questions, give approval for work, or schedule a pick up. There’s no need to play phone tag or get bogged down with emails. With online texting, Suntrup can shave off over 40 hours of work every month, cut back on interruptions, and build customer trust.
I love to travel, but the process of flying stresses me out. I know I’m not alone in this. Every time we prepare to get on an airplane, there’s a lot to keep track of: security lines, boarding passes, baggage claim ticket, boarding time. I’m getting stressed just thinking about it. So as soon as I book a flight, I’m quick to download the app of whichever airline I’m on so I can check-in as soon as possible, look up my boarding time, check my gate, etc. Delta, though, relieves stress and helps me to be a step ahead in how they use business text messaging.
Delta Air Lines continues to earn accolades from customers for its outstanding customer service in the U.S. and around the world, frequently dubbed the best overall customer service airline. One way they stand out is through meeting their customers on the go. Here’s how they do so:
Delta keeps customers up to speed with any changes during the customers’ journey. When you sign up for texting from Delta, any time a flight change or gate change occurs, you’ll get a text from Delta with all the info you need immediately, no matter where you are. Customers can avoid showing up to the airport to find their flight delayed. Instead, they’ll know as soon as the airline makes the call, saving customers stress and time.
Delta also made another industry-leading move with business texting. To connect with customers in their channel of choice, Delta integrated messaging in their app with Apple messaging, letting customers connect with a live Delta representative to get in-the-moment assistance. Instead of sitting on hold for two hours after a flight gets canceled, customers can text a Delta rep using the phone in their back pocket.
Ginger Bay is dedicated to providing the best salon and spa experiences for men and women. In fact, they are so good at it that they’ve been named a Top 200 Salon & Spa in the nation from Salon Today Magazine for 21 years.
With no change to your existing phone service, Ginger Bay implemented business texting to stay in contact with scheduled clients, send alert notifications, and send out call-to-action marketing:
Ginger Bay uses texting to communicate with customers. But aside from just using it to schedule and manage customer appointments, Ginger Bay drives customer engagement as well. Using Textel, Ginger Bay sends texts to customers to offer promotions, keeping customers loyal and interested. To do so, they release a keyword for their guests to text their salon phone number by a certain time to receive seasonal gift card promotions, bonus points related to a loyalty program, or discounts on products. During one promotion cycle, they received over 300 texts in 45 minutes! With this example, we see how one business text message keeps customers coming back to your brand over and over.
I have horrible eyesight. And for years, I’ve gone from one pair of glasses to the next, trying to find the right pair that I will actually want to wear. But then I tried Warby Parker. Warby Parker makes buying glasses easy — offering Home Try-On so customers can give five pairs of glasses a trial run before committing. Warby Parker has also made it their mission to offer a cohesive omnichannel experience, adopting business text messaging as a customer service tool. Here’s how they use texting to assist their customers:
Glasses are an expensive online purchase with a lot of details involved: health insurance, prescriptions, returns, exchanges. Making that kind of purchase online means customers need access to help at nearly any time of the day, and quickly during their purchase. Warby Parker has made it incredibly easy to get help, offering live chat, email, phone, self-service, and text support. When you need someone to answer a question, customers can just click on the “text” icon on their website and open a text thread within their phone or laptop’s messaging app.
The brand also has some fun with their SMS support. Back in 2017, Warby Parker invited customers to text their “Costume Council” to get ideas for what to wear for Halloween that year. In using text message support in this way, Warby Parker inspired interest in their brand and kept current customers engaged.
This post originally published on June 29, 2018 and was refreshed and republished on June 2, 2022.
Texting is part of our everyday lives. Even as I write this blog, I’m carrying on a texting conversation with my sister and my college friends, and just minutes ago used texting to verify my bank account. We’re so used to SMS messaging that most of us expect businesses to communicate with this channel too. In fact, 69% of all consumers want to communicate with a business via text.
Texting gives businesses a distinct advantage — it lets you interact with customers on a personal and convenient channel. To see how SMS messages fit in a business, we’ve imagined how the quintessential American office of Dunder Mifflin would have used business texting. What if the characters of NBC’s The Office had the texting technology we have today?
How Michael Scott would use SMS Messages
Ok, so maybe the “World’s Best Boss” would misuse access to SMS messaging at times. But even with Michael Scott’s (often stressful) craziness, we can imagine some practical uses for business texting.
Sending out Discounts and Coupons
What if Michael could have avoided the “golden ticket” debacle entirely? Instead of giving out a massive discount all to one client, he could have used SMS messages to connect with each winning client about their golden ticket coupon. Maybe it could have gone something like this:
Fundraising and Event Communications
Michael Scott’s Fun Run Race for the Cure would have been a bit more successful if he could have promoted the event to all of his clients simultaneously. Whether you’re fundraising or sharing info for an upcoming event, an SMS message is a reliable way to reach all of your customers at once. Instead of relying on the sales reps to ask incoming callers for donations, he could have contacted his clients using a mass SMS message and maybe could have raised more than $340. It could have gone something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
You don’t want to pretend to be Willy Wonka for a day to reach your clients. But use an SMS message to reliably reach customers selectively or on mass. Text messages have a significantly more successful open rate than other channels of communication, with a 98% open rate as opposed to just a 20% open rate with email. This lets you successfully reach your customer base when you run promotions or fundraisers.
How Kelly Kapoor would use an SMS Message in Customer Service
Kelly Kapoor — the queen of customer service — is a master at handling any customer stress that comes her way. She’s the go-to in the office when it comes to navigating complicated conversations. And you know she would be on top of the latest trends with SMS messaging. So we’ve imagined some ways that Kelly would use SMS messages to build relationships with customers and handle customer support. Here’s how:
Two-Way Customer Conversations
Kelly Kapoor is not wrong. When customers text you, they want you to text them back. Two-way conversations is one of the biggest benefits of using SMS messages. When you text your customers, you create a relationship that encourages flexibility and shows that you’re available to help them. We can count on Kelly to add in a bit too much personality. But if Kelly were to use two-way SMS messages, it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
According to a recent survey, 63% of consumers would switch to a company that offers texting as a communication method. As Kelly showed us, business SMS messages make for an easy way to address follow-up questions or requests from your customers. It’s fast, personal, and can help to resolve inquiries quickly using the channel of communication we all feel comfortable with (especially Kelly).
When you offer text as a support option, you add convenience and flexibility. Customers can text with support departments while they’re at home, in the office, or running errands. With SMS customer support, the customer is in control.
Texting is also an extremely helpful asset for companies that have long-term client relationships — companies like Dunder Mifflin. Texting keeps a solid record for customer service so you can verify details from recent conversations or double-check important information like invoice numbers and address changes.
How Pam Halpert would use SMS messages
Every office needs someone sane to deal with the craziness of incoming communications and appointment and meeting schedules. Pam Beesley Halpert has to handle all the details and put up with whatever Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute are up to that day. That’s a lot of multitasking. For a receptionist, SMS messaging makes that multitasking simpler, allowing you to juggle all kinds of incoming and outgoing office communications simultaneously. Here’s how Pam would use an SMS message:
Scheduling Meetings:
SMS messaging can be useful for scheduling meetings and appointments — something Pam has to do a lot of for Michael. To avoid having to repeatedly answer phone calls, imagine Pam could use an SMS message to schedule those meetings. Maybe it would go something like this:
How this translates to your brand:
An SMS message system isn’t just useful for support or sales. It can be incredibly useful for managing business operations. As we can see with Pam, SMS messaging makes for a flexible way for your operations team to juggle meeting and scheduling communications in a way that integrates easily with your existing systems. Plus, since an individual person can have multiple text threads going at once, SMS messaging is more efficient than taking one phone call at a time.
Add business texting to reach customers effectively. And hopefully you’ll end up a bit more efficient than our friends at Dunder Mifflin.
There’s power in storytelling. Stories can shape, strengthen or challenge our opinions and values. And when a story catches our attention and engages us, we are more likely to absorb the message and meaning within it than if the same message was presented simply in facts and figures. The same goes for storytelling in our businesses. And the biggest story worth mapping and telling is the story of your customer journey.
A customer journey is a story about how you understand your users. It’s a roadmap for how they behave, and what you can do to improve their trip so that they keep coming back. When you pay attention to your customer journey, you can understand what they need, what motivates them, what concerns they have. Ultimately, it lets you boost your customer experience, leading to higher conversion rates and improved customer retention.
To know how to navigate your customer journey, though, you need to know how to connect with customers. What do they want? What makes them tick? And how do you make that connection? One way is by texting them.
Build Texting into Your Customer Journey
Business texting has only become more common and popular in recent years. We’re all within reach of our phones at any time, making texting a reliable way to grab your customers’ attention quickly. Texting is accessible to anyone with a phone — 97% of the American population — making it a useful channel to integrate into your customer journey.
Customers today care a lot about speed and convenience. Why would I buy from a brand with clunky technology, slow delivery, and a hard-to-reach customer service team? Instead, I go for the brands that I can reach out to at any time, on any channel, and who will help me fast. Texting helps you to do this — to reach customers instantly so you can guide customers along every step of their journey.
There are a whole lot of creative ways to integrate texting into your customer journey and experience. Let’s walk through the steps together:
Step One: Invite Customers to Reach Out to You Via Text
Before any other steps can be taken, you have to get opt-in from customers to get their consent for you to text them. This is the first touchpoint in a hopefully long-term relationship with your customers. It starts with inviting them to text you and receive texts from you. Find ways to spark that conversation early in the customer journey. On your landing pages or while they’re making a purchase, ask customers to provide a mobile number and accept incoming text messages from your company like Subway’s example below:
Step Two: Build a customer base using promotions, coupons, and rewards.
Once you have their details and consent, build your customer base. Texting opt-ins gives you a reliable list of customers who actually want to hear from you. Incentivize customers to join you for the journey, by sending them limited offers, coupon links, and other marketing messages. This will help to keep your customers engaged and increase sales.
Business texting also lets you segment your customers so you can send targeted offers to fit the specific preferences of your customers. Assign keywords to any customer or group of customers in your database according to the products they bought or showed interest in to establish a more personalized experience.
Step Three: Keep customers supported by carrying on two-way conversations.
Customers won’t stay along for the ride if they don’t feel well supported. In fact, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. So to effectively use texting within your customer journey, add two-way communication. This lets you provide service and fulfill sales with a personal and casual channel.
We’ve all been there — dragged into an exhausting call with customer service that lasts forever. That hurts your customer experience. But with texting, you can offer a fast and flexible channel for customers to get questions answered. And, when you add MMS messaging, you can include images, links to help tools, pdf files, and even emojis to make your messages more attractive, increasing engagement and offering more help with fewer words.
Step Four: Help customers stay in the know with appointment and payment reminders.
I have a calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall with all the deadlines, reminders, and plans in my life and my husband’s. There are times it gets utterly overwhelmed with pen marks. I’m not always going to remember that one bill that’s due in two days. Or I may have forgotten the date of the dentist appointment I scheduled two months ago. This is where texting adds so much to the customer journey.
Help customers stay in the know, cut down on no-shows and make your front desk staff’s life easier by automating appointment and payment reminders to customers. These automated text messages streamline communication and provide better customer service.
Step Five: Value customer thoughts and gather feedback from them.
Essential to the customer journey is knowing what your customers want. A successful customer journey includes a way for customers to communicate obstacles they faced along the way. Customer feedback, when gathered and used well, improves your product and your service, builds brand loyalty, and makes customers feel valued and important.
Texting is way more effective in reaching customers than any other channel. Customers are more likely to open a text than an email. Use texting to follow up with customers near the end of their journey. Send surveys to receive your customers’ information and preferences. Add in a quick poll, for example, for customers to review how a product or service is doing. Or simply train your service agents to ask good follow up questions after each customer interaction.
Why Texting Should be Part of Your Customer Journey
When you use texting with your other portfolio of channels, you add more touchpoints with customers to keep them interested in the relationship. Ultimately, adding texting benefits everyone. Here’s how:
Quick delivery and response: An SMS message only takes a few seconds to deliver and can reach multiple customers with a personalized message. And customers can get quick help when needed.
Convenience: Since it is sent directly to the customer’s phone, texting is a more personal channel. Allowing two-way communication with the customer makes it convenient for them to send questions, inquiries, and ask for support on the go.
Simplicity: No one wants to read through a 1500 word promotional email. Text messaging is simple. It reaches a larger audience since almost everybody knows how to open the app and send a message. And since messages are short, you’ll have a great communication tool that gets straight to the point.
Traceability: Using a text messaging system enables you to track and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. With reports, you can evaluate how the strategy works and make the necessary adjustments.
Efficiency: Texting helps you to plan your messages in advance, create your campaign, and target groups of people with scheduled texts. SMS software systems also let you streamline processes by using auto-responses. This leads to time and cost savings, and increases your ROI.
With the amount of technology at our fingertips today, it’s never been easier to directly communicate with your customers. But how do you know if your customers are even taking note of your company communications? Is it possible to stand out from the noise in an era of information overload?
The truth is, only 20% of emails sent get opened. The number of spam and robocalls has risen over the past two years, making customers less likely to answer a call from an unknown number. With email inboxes often automatically filtering messages from businesses into promotion folders, it has become even harder to command the attention of your customer.
Hold on though. While email and phone calls are less reliable, as many as 95% of text messages are read and answered within three minutes of receiving them. That means that if you’re not using business texting, you’re missing a huge opportunity to reach your customer base. Let me convince you further.
Why use business texting?
Let’s start by exploring some reasons SMS marketing and business texting are so popular. Why should organizations use text messages to communicate with their audience?
1. Emails can be stressful
Email is popular. (I know because I’m kind of addicted to my Gmail app). But in reality, people only open one-third of the emails they receive. Keeping a clean and organized inbox is time-consuming and stressful. I can’t tell you how rarely I look through my 5000+ promotional emails that are just sitting in my inbox. I am quick to archive or trash any incoming marketing email without even looking at it just to keep my inbox cleared.
Really, the average person receives too many emails— as many as 121 — every… day… ugh.
How on earth can you send a customer an important message by email and expect them to see it? But with business texting, send your customers a text directly to their phone to send out critical information or a call to action. Then, you can follow up with an email to keep record of the message in a formal setting.
2. Texting is more personal and direct
Texting gives the user a more personal experience since it reaches them directly on their phone. I mean, who do you text regularly? My pinned message threads are with my husband, my Mom, and best girlfriends from college. Texting is an intimate thing. And for that reason, it’s a much more personal method of communication. And customers are far more likely to check and open a text sent to them than an email. Getting a text reminder for an appointment or an abandoned cart can have more impact than an email.
3. People are already on their phones most of the time
People spend more time now on their phones than watching TV. Or maybe you’re like me and you actually stream Netflix on your phone…oops. The average person checks their phone as much as 344 times a day. Maybe it’s kind of a depressing reality. But considering people are relying more on their phones to connect with businesses, shop, and engage in everyday activities, we can expect texting to become even more popular. I think it’s time to invest in business texting.
Hopefully you’re starting to see why business texting is so popular. It not only appeals to your customers, though. It’s also an incredibly useful investment for your company. Here’s how:
1. Business texting helps with digital transformation
If you’re looking for ways to boost your digital transformation, add business texting. SMS messages and notifications are entirely automated, letting your marketing, sales, and customer service teams send mass texts while at the same time personalizing the message.
This level of automation prevents human error and saves time and costs. The investment in automation, in turn, allows you to invest in your employees’ professional development and well-being by eradicating some of the more menial daily tasks.
2. It’s more convenient for the business and the customer
Sometimes getting on the phone and talking it out with a customer service agent is necessary. But for the less complex issues and questions, phone calls are a pain. They require customers to cut out a chunk of time to possibly sit on hold. And, over time, they’re overwhelming to your agents. With business texting, though, you’re offering a much more convenient means of communication.
Contact your customers directly without leaving a voice message, and your message always reaches the customer. And your customer can then respond to your business text on their own time, without interrupting their day.
10 Simple Business Texting Features You Can’t Miss
Now with you hopefully more convinced, let’s walk through some of the must have business texting features that you need for a robust use of the technology.
1. Keywords
Keywords give your customers an easy way to take action in a text message. For example, keywords are when you invite customers to text a specific word to trigger an automated response or to hear from one of your reps. One might be: “Text OFFER to [your business number].” These kinds of calls to action help customers opt-in or opt-out of business texting from you, respond to sales and promos, or tell you they need your help.
One significant advantage is that it makes it easier for you to track how people discovered your company. Keywords allow customers to respond to your ads and help you manage your opt-in list so you have a set subscriber list.
2. Drip Campaigns
A text drip is an automated message set to deliver after specific triggers or intervals (e.g., after a subscription or a few days after a purchase was not completed). Drip campaigns are perfect for welcoming new subscribers, educating customers, or nurturing sales leads.
And once you set up a drip campaign, it can run in the background, working behind the scenes even when you’re not. This way, you can keep customers engaged in your service that saves your team lots of time and effort. With business texting drip campaigns, create anticipation for upcoming sales and promos, assist customers while on their purchase journey, and increase sales conversions.
3. Recurring Texts
Recurring texts make it possible for you to create a text and set it to send to your customer on a recurring schedule. Let’s say you want to remind your customer to schedule their next hair appointment every two months. Set up a recurring text with the reminder to send on the same day on a bi-monthly schedule.
Or maybe you want to send your customers a birthday text with a gift. You can schedule an annual recurring text on their birth date. You’ll stay on your customers’ radar without placing extra demands on your contact center agents’ time.
4. Mass Texting
Mass texts are arguably the best feature of business texting. Need to tell all of your sales prospects about an upcoming sale? Send a mass text. Need to let your entire customer base know that your website will be down for maintenance next week? Send out a mass text. Segment off different groups of customers to send mass texts out to different customer demographics. This allows you to deliver a more personalized customer experience.
As we noted earlier, texting has a much more reliable open rate than email. So with a mass business text, you’re much more likely to reach your customers with important info.
5. Appointment Reminders
From health services to vet clinics and spas, business texting can be super useful to remind customers of appointments. Less worrying about no-shows. No more incessant phone calls to customers to remind them of an upcoming appointment.
Set up a scheduled text to remind customers of their appointments. Then, business texting can also help customers book, reschedule, or cancel upcoming appointments so they don’t have to worry about calling you to do so.
6. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)
Multimedia messages let your customer service team and your customers send images, videos, or audio files. When you incorporate different forms of media, your team can deliver a much more robust customer experience. MMS expands the kind of service you can deliver. Let me give you an example.
Imagine this: a customer, let’s call her Mary, is trying to assemble a newly purchased piece of furniture. Confused by the instructions and frustrated during the process, she texts into the customer service team. A rep texts back, asking for an image of her progress and the remaining tools. Then, the rep sends a video back, with a step by step guide to help Mary fix her issue. This is just one example of how multimedia messaging can be used to make your service more effective.
7. Text to a Landline
Adding business texting isn’t super effective if your customers have to search for a separate phone number just to reach you. But, with text to landline, your customers can reach you anywhere, using the same number they use to call you. Text-enable your business phone number so your customers have a convenient chat option using the same, memorable phone number they used to call you yesterday.
8. Tracking and Reporting
As with any other communication channel, it’s still really important that your texting platform provides tracking and reporting. This type of business intelligence is invaluable when it comes to adjusting and refining your business strategy. Keep track of first response rates, the number of messages received, frequent queries, and so on within your business texting platform to improve your customer satisfaction rates.
9. Link Shorteners
Long texts are a turn off. Your customers don’t want to be bogged down with a high character count. One way to make your texts much more effective is to use link shorteners. It can become cumbersome and a waste of space to paste an entire URL into a text message about a promotion or service. Look for a texting platform that provides link shorteners, so it is easier for your customers and leaves space for your message to be more direct and clear.
10 Integration with Other Software
What’s the point in adding new tech if it doesn’t integrate well with your other technology? Your business texting platform needs to integrate with your CSM software to be most effective. Find a service that integrates with other contact center solutions (CCaaS) like NICE CXone, Genesys, RingCentral, and others. Integrated systems will make your business operations run smoother and your staff’s work easier.
When I was right out of college, one of my first jobs was with a tech startup. Since we were so early in our company, we would meet weekly to discuss our brand identity and to assess who would be buying our product. Essentially, who on earth is our target audience and how do we appeal to and reach them?
When it’s your job to build brand loyalty and support customers, these questions are top of mind. While you probably have a decent customer database with basic customer contact info in it, you may not be reaching your actual target audience to the fullest potential. For a more accurate way to reach customers, make use of your text opt-in lists.
According to current regulations, businesses are required to get permission before sending any kind of text message directly to a customer’s phone. What makes this incredibly helpful is that you then obtain a list of customers who explicitly want to hear from you. Text messaging opt-in lists provide marketing, sales, and customer service teams a clear list of customers who are seeking a relationship with your brand.
Why You Should be Making Use of Your Text Opt-in List
I’ve been there: hovering my mouse over that send button on a bulk email, knowing there may be a handful of people who immediately trash it and some who roll their eyes and search for the unsubscribe button. There’s some anxiety and risk involved when you send out a message to your entire customer base.
But when you have customers volunteering to join your list, you can trust that they want you to contact them. No more stress about your message potentially harming your brand or customers responding angrily about getting “spam” from you. Text opt-in means your customers make a deliberate and conscious decision to hear from you. Then, when you gather a text opt-in list, you’ve got direct access to your target market, able to communicate with prospects and customers at a minimal cost.
Text opt-in lets you promote your product, reach out to sales leads, and offer support to a large group of customers all at once. Reach your exact target audience for future sales and feedback with an opt-in list.
How to Build a Text Opt-in List
With a bit of strategic thinking, you can promote and build your text opt-in list, making it the most effective way to reach your customer base. Getting customers to sign up for texts is all about awareness. Customers need to see something roughly seven times before they consider taking an action. So you have to take some deliberate steps to get on your customer’s radar. Here are a couple strategies to focus on:
Promote Opt-in When You Can
Before you start doing anything, you need to create ways for customers to opt-in. These opt-in opportunities should be obvious and easy to get to. The first option is to use online web forms.
Perhaps these get pushed with a pop up window when a customer visits your site. Or when a customer is creating a login. Give customers a chance to opt-in during check out by agreeing to future communications via text and email. Add an opt-in checkbox on any webforms forms and include opt-ins in email signatures to prompt customers to join.
Then, mention texting as an option in every customer interaction. Invite customers to opt-into texts any time they interact with your business. Some tasteful ways to do so could be to:
Update greetings and hold messages to promote it. Then in your IVR setup, offer text as a way to get help and information faster than waiting on hold.
Highlight it in your customer newsletters. If you already have marketing emails or magazines going out to customers, encourage them to hear from you via text as well.
Put opt-in sign ups on receipts/invoices. Any customer who has made a purchase from you has a place in your target audience. Encourage them to stay in touch by promoting texts on their order details and receipts.
Promote text opt-in in sales and support scripts. If your sales reps and support agents are chatting with your customers directly, make sure they tell customers about texting as a communication channel.
Create an Opt-in Campaign
SMS texts are much more reliable than email to get customer attention. SMS marketing takes the cake over email with an average open rate for business texts as high as 98%. Compare that to email with an open rate around 20%. Even with around 269 billion emails sent every day, roughly 50% of them end up in spam folders.
To promote texting opt-in, try focusing your efforts on an opt-in campaign. Use a keyword campaign to get your target audience to engage with you via text message. A keyword campaign invites possible customers to engage with you by texting a certain keyword to a phone number.
Create a specific keyword — like “PROMO” or “TEXTCLUB” — and prompt customers to text it to you whenever and wherever you can. That way you can share details about your promotional and offer double text opt-in to get customers hooked on future communications.
To encourage customers to participate, create website banners about the keyword. Feature the benefits of receiving promotional texts in a blog. Post about it on social media. Then, make it irresistible. I mean, let’s be real. How often are customers going to sign up for something without a perk? It’s not enough just to invite customers to opt-in to texts about your promos or your product updates. You have to make it worth their while. Here’s how:
Offer an incentive right off the bat. Think of it as a way of saying thank you. For every customer who uses text opt-in, send them a deal — 15% off their next purchase or a BOGO deal. Then, right away you are cementing the relationship and showing the value of them joining your texting list.
Make your opt-in list like a club. Those who join in are part of an exclusive group who get specific deals. They get asked first to share feedback. They get sneak peeks at product updates or first dibs on new updates.
Keep the content engaging. Send customers blogs, podcasts, or videos with useful tips or industry-specific news. Include attractive images or share a recent social media post to stand out. When you give customers interesting content via text, they’re much more likely to join in.
Run a short-term contest over text. A contest may not get you super long-lasting customers, but it is a growth hacking strategy that will boost your text opt-in list some. Consider a contest or giveaway something you can do every year to every quarter, attached to holidays, anniversaries and special occasions. Create some urgency, get customers to enter through opt-in, and offer a really sweet prize so it’s worth it.
Then, once you’ve got a strong and healthy text opt-in list, you have a way to reach customers on a mass scale. Or use it to target specific groups to promote your brand, gather specific feedback, or offer curated support.
