A crucial part of growing your business requires good communication with your customers. Good communication also means establishing effective and efficient communication strategies to stay connected. Businesses can achieve this and more using business texting. Let’s explore seven ways to use texting for business growth.
Why Use Texting?
While email is useful, only one-third of emails get opened. It’s not as effective as many businesses might think. On the other hand, SMS is becoming one of the most popular communication channels for businesses, with over 3 billion users predicted by 2022.
Texts have a staggering 99% open rate, and they often get opened within three minutes of receipt. What is even more interesting is that people prefer to receive a text message from a company instead of a phone call.
Some benefits of using business texting include:
It gives customers a direct way to contact a company
A text messaging strategy can grow with your company. Using mass or group messaging, you can easily scale your text communications whenever your customer base grows.
7 Ways to Grow Your Business by Texting
Business texting is easy to implement and well received by customers. Here’s how it can increase your reach and your revenue.
1. Mobile lead generation
Phones have become an essential part of life: communication, entertainment, searching on the internet, purchasing products and services. Most internet traffic is now mobile. When potential clients search for local businesses, it’s ideal if they can text you right from your mobile website. Using a texting platform allows your customers to contact you with a single click.
2. Increase conversions with SMS chat
Attracting visitors to your website is one thing, but converting them into leads and customers is a different challenge. A texting platform ensures a direct connection with people interested in your products and services.
3. Book appointments and reminders
For service providers, it can be a hassle tracking and reminding customers about upcoming appointments. Make booking appointments easier and minimize the no-shows with business texting.
Customers who may be too busy to answer a phone call or an email immediately are likely to respond to a quick text. This makes using text messages to schedule, confirm, and cancel appointments much easier. For instance, sending a text as simple as “Please confirm your appointment on Thursday at 5” can be effective to ensure appointments are kept while minimizing scheduling gaps.
4. Direct promotions
Sending offers and promotions is a regular part of SMS marketing. However, it’s imperative to ensure that promotions get to the intended customers and encourage them to act on that promotion.
Business texting immediately positions your promotion in front of your clients. Moreover, with rich media texting, you can send images and videos to entice customers to click on the promotional link.
For instance, a retailer may send the following text message:
“Hi [Customer Name],
A feast of discounts at the Magnolia website! Purchase two pieces of jewelry and get the third for free! Claim this promotion at any Magnolia store until April 30th.”
5. Cross-department communication
Internal communication can sometimes be cumbersome, and it is not unusual for workers to have dozens of unopened emails. In fact, employees spend 16% of their workweek on email—that amounts to approximately 15.5 hours a week.
Texting can reduce the time spent on communications by providing a quick way to get answers, approvals, and signatures. By reclaiming that time, your business becomes more efficient, and staff can review the message thread instead of asking questions a second (or third) time.
6. Improve customer service
When you answer your customers’ queries and questions promptly or send them a text to let them know their order is ready, you’re giving them a good customer experience. Positive interactions, in turn, increases customer loyalty and satisfaction.
A helpful feature that improves the customer experience is self-service SMS. This feature helps customers to resolve many of their questions quickly without needing an agent.
7. Use it as part of your sales funnel
Quick messages can assist your customers during the purchase journey. Push notifications and abandoned cart reminders can help keep your customer in the funnel, guiding them through their purchase.
4 Steps for an Effective Texting Strategy
How can you ensure your business texting strategy is effective? Here are four steps:
1. Use a business texting platform
Implementing a business texting strategy won’t be very effective if you need to do it manually. A business texting platform can make your work much more manageable. With tools to automate and organize business texting, you can quickly scale your marketing up or down, and you can segment your clients with group texting.
Texting is a great way to communicate with customers, but only if you have their consent. That’s why your next step should be building your opt-in list—add a lead form to your website or ask your customers to opt-in for SMS at the moment of purchase.
3. Create great messages
Once you have your list, it’s time to craft some great messages. Write messages that are relevant to your audience and the stage they are in the sales funnel. Mix your messages to include product awareness, improve purchases, or offer tips and interesting information.
4. Measure and revise
A business texting platform has the added advantage of tracking and reporting. Modern solutions use artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to analyze your business texting activities. You’ll discover how your customers are interacting with you via text and how often they respond. You can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Grow Your Business with Textel
A reliable business texting platform can make your SMS strategy much more effective. Textel is a complete business texting solution that allows customers to text you to your existing phone number. The API and intuitive chatbots seamlessly integrate with your existing CRM and sales solutions to automate repetitive tasks for a seamless SMS strategy.
Learn how Textel can help grow your business by requesting a demo. If you have questions about our leading business texting platform, contact us.
Customer experience is everything. It’s the ingredient that sets you apart. It sparks business growth and promotes customer loyalty and retention. A positive CX ultimately affects your bottom line. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. So, how do you support your customer experience in your call center? Add business texting.
Ok, maybe I’ve lost you. Let’s walk through how adding texting to your customer service will refresh your customer experience:
Every interaction between a business and its customer is a conversation. As a result, customers more and more prefer to reach companies through messaging. According to surveys conducted by Zendesk, messaging by text and live chat are the future for building a successful customer experience. Why? Well, shockingly enough, your customers don’t actually want to sit on hold with your agents. And, they definitely aren’t thrilled when they’re stuck waiting a day or two to get an email back. They’re looking for fast and responsive service.
Conversational messaging is more effective than email, showing significantly higher open and response rates. Customers today want a personal, 1:1 conversation when they reach out to a company. But, what if you already have chat integration? Why should you need to add texting as a channel in addition to chat when chat seems to offer your company and customers the same benefits?
While live chat offers fast, real time service, it has its limitations. Let’s break those down:
Common Challenges Call Centers Face with Live Chat
Live chat is bound by operational and physical restraints that ultimately can harm your customer experience. Here are some challenges call centers face with chat:
1. Live chat is inflexible for your internal operations.
Chat sets the expectation that the customer will receive a response in less than 30 seconds to be considered a success. So, it requires an agent to be ready and waiting to immediately answer a customer. When a customer fills out a chat request and is told no representatives are available, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth.
But, hold up — have you been in a call center? This kind of flexibility is not always possible when phones are ringing off the hook and your team is understaffed. Chat establishes expectations with customers that realistically cannot always be met, thus negatively affecting your customer experience.
2. Live chat is inflexible for your customers.
Just as live chat requires your agents to be sitting ready and waiting before a computer screen, it also requires customers to wait. Let’s say it’s one of those days — your team is swamped. Customers are getting stuck talking with a bot on your live chat.
Customers choose live chat because it’s supposed to be quick and easy. It’s not convenient then for customers to get stuck sitting in front of their computer waiting for an available agent. On a bad day, live chat removes any form of convenience or possible flexibility for customer service.
3. When a chat is closed, it’s gone.
Chats are incredibly temporary. Once a conversation ends, your conversation’s history disappears. That means a new agent can’t pick up the conversation at a later date as easily. You don’t have as clear a record of your customer interaction. And, your customer can’t go back to reference their previously asked questions. Basically, everyone’s left in the dark, making crafting a customer experience tricky.
4. You’re stuck without much customer context.
In order to build a solid customer experience, your agents need to know your customers. It’s vital that every customer interaction, no matter the channel, can funnel its data to the same place. But, live chat is not always tied to your CRM. This means that your call center agents don’t have the same easy access to customer history or relationship context that occurred over chat.
Chat just cannot support your customer or your call center’s needs on its own. Add business texting and see a huge impact on your customer experience.
How Business Texting Helps Support your Customer Experience
At this point, nearly every American consumer owns a smartphone. According to Pew Research, as many as 97% of Americans now own a cellphone of some kind. And, as of 2021, the share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%. What’s the effect of this on your customer service and experience?
Customers want to be able to use that phone that’s in their back pocket to reach you. Text messaging hits customers right where they live, offering flexibility and ease unlike any other channel.As many as 78% of consumers wish they could text a business. That’s 78% of consumers telling you one way you could give them a better customer experience.
But, what makes it a better solution than live chat? Easy – Texting. In fact, texting is replacing live chat for your competitor’s on-the-go customers who want to connect when (and how) it’s convenient for them. Think about it: texting offers flexibility and accessibility in all the ways live chat can’t.
With text messaging, customers can communicate directly and conversationally with your business. The conversation stays logged for you and for the customer, retaining helpful details about the customer relationship and history. And, it gives your customers a place to go back to to find helpful guides, links, and media to answer their questions.
The channel offers more grace to your agents and customers, allowing for more natural pauses between replies. Customers can leave their computer to cook dinner or run to the store and still keep up the conversation. Agents get a breather between interactions, allowing for better internal operations, less stress, and more collaboration.
Integrate texting into your omnichannel solution for a more flexible way to support your customer base. Reach your customers where they are to provide a stronger customer experience.
At the second annual DEVone Partner Conference, Textel, a St. Louis-based software startup, was honored to receive the Rising Star Award as part of the 2018 DEVone Partner Awards ceremony.
These partner awards highlighted the innovative companies who are designing cloud-based applications that bring additional value to the NICE inContact CXone cloud customer experience platform. The event was attended by more than 350 partners and NICE inContact employees and featured product displays from various DEVone partners.
“It’s exciting to see so many innovative applications integrated with the NICE inContact CXone platform, empowering customers to deliver exceptional customer experiences,” said Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact. “The annual DEVone Partner Conference provides a great look into how the customer journey can be enhanced with CXone, and the awards highlight the most outstanding achievements by DEVone partners.”
The Rising Star Award specifically calls out Textel’s exceptional partnership role in NICE inContact’s success. This active engagement stems from a deep collaboration across co-marketing activities, sponsorships and various other sales and marketing efforts.
While being recognized at the 2018 DEVone Partner Awards, Textel’s advanced mobile customer service features were highlighted as a leading driver of CXone’s positive customer service experience, giving them the ability to reach users effectively and efficiently via their mobile device.
Among the many benefits of this enterprise texting software, Textel creates customizable enterprise solutions that lower call volume, increase net promoter scores and generate more leads.
4 Key Benefits to a Faster, More Reliable Business Texting Experience:
Connect Faster Communicate with your customers the way they will most likely respond.
Drive Sales Close more deals by reaching prospects more efficiently.
Elevate Productivity Save time by reducing voicemails and getting information out faster.
Reduce No-Shows Recapture lost revenue by quickly confirming and rescheduling.
“It’s a great privilege to empower contact centers with a simple platform that connects their customers in a fast, modern way,” said Textel CMO, Mike Mixon. “By texting with customers from existing contact center phone numbers, Textel answers an increasing customer communication demand and securely powers the resulting high-volume traffic through the call center software. We’re honored to receive the Rising Star Award from NICE inContact for our work together.”
Essentially, Textel’s SMS capabilities improve the experience of the customer via two-way text and proactive text notifications. Textel reaches customers at their preferred method of contact and keeps historic conversations saved to help carry the next interaction forward without making the customer start from a scratch.
This is all implemented through programmable SMS via Textel’s API and is a big step forward for call centers pursuing true omni-channel communication.
As Textel continues to cement their place as an innovator in the enterprise texting space, their focus will be on making communication with a contact center as easy as sending an emoji.
Haven’t you heard? Instagram is the new big thing for business!
Instagram is up to 800 million monthly users and nearly 500 million daily active users! (statista.com). That means more people are spending time on Instagram actually being engaged. Think about it, Instagram is appealing for many reasons, but one main one includes its simplicity. The platform holds user’s attention because it is sleek and beautiful. There’s less clutter than Facebook and it keeps users engaged. There are now 25 million active business profiles on Instagram (techcrunch.com). So what are you waiting for? Get on board and join the Insta-movement!
Part of Instagram’s new business account feature includes the ability to text directly from a company’s profile. How, you ask, can you connect with your customers through texting straight from an Instagram page? Well I’ll tell you in just a couple of short, easy steps…
Your customers can text you directly from your Instagram profile?
YES, but first things first. You also must have an Instagram Business Account.
1. Make sure you have a Business Profile.
Once you create an account, go to Settings then click “Switch to Business Profile.”
2. Go to www.textel.net and text-enable your business phone.
If you don’t have business phone texting, then check out Textel. You can start your free trial today!
3. Click “Edit Profile.”
4. Select “Contact Options.
5. Type your Business Number.
6. Choose “Text”
7. “Save” it!
8. Now your customers can easily text you!
Your customers can now easily reach you if they are checking out your business Instagram account! Which, of course, they will be because your page will be filled with exciting, enticing content.
