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.
Let’s get down to the basics. If your customers are unsatisfied with your business, your business will fail. It really is that simple. Keeping customers happy is a priority to build a profitable and successful company. But how do you know if your customers are happy with your service and your product?
For a customer service team, customer satisfaction (or CSAT) is one of the most measured key performance indicators (KPIs). Every contact center manager knows — if you don’t measure customer satisfaction, you can’t identify unhappy customers. If you don’t know who is unhappy, you don’t know who will churn, and you can’t figure out why they’re unhappy. It’s in your hands then to understand where unhappiness exists and improve your service to improve your customer satisfaction.
One simple way to boost customer satisfaction? Connect with customers using business texting.
What is Customer Satisfaction and Why is it Important?
First and foremost, we need to understand exactly what customer satisfaction is to know how business texting can help it. Customer satisfaction is the measurement of how happy a business’ customers are with its products and services, and it can be a powerful indicator of where the company is headed.
The future of customer satisfaction lies in greater use of technology, automation, and personalization. With new technology added into the customer experience, though, customers have greater expectations (as seen below).
According to a Deloitte report, customer satisfaction took on an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses felt the impact of the pandemic on their bottom line. Maintaining customer loyalty and trust was paramount for survival, so many companies began to focus more on their customer experience. This means, businesses are using customer satisfaction and experience as a means of competition.
It’s time to join in on the competition. How can you meet customer expectations? How can you keep customers happy while keeping your budget under control? Add business SMS to your omnichannel solution to help.
The Importance of SMS for Business
Customers want to know they can reach you in a myriad of ways. If they prefer talking with an agent directly on the phone, they want a phone number to call. If they want the flexibility and low stakes of sending an email, they want to know they can shoot you an email. And, if they want to text you, they should have a way to do so.
Texting is worth the investment. SMS is the most used communication channel, with 4.2 billion people using SMS globally. How does it fit into your business?
Customer Service and Support
Customer service is at the heart of many companies’ success and is the heart of customer satisfaction. Providing an excellent customer service experience makes your customers want to come back. Consumers expect customer support to be fast, effective, and simple. Texting offers a way to give quick responses and start a two-way conversation that can be escalated to voice, if necessary.
Texting integrates well with your other channels with customers to boost customer satisfaction. It helps you lower wait and hold times by deflecting from your IVR. You can offer a flexible form of communication that live chat can’t compete with. If customers want a more personalized access to your help, texting gives them casual and personal conversations that email can’t. Texting, when added to your other channels offered, gives customers more options to reach you how they want to.
Customer Engagement and Sales
A Harvard Business School study found that for a 5% increase in customer retention, you can increase profits by at least 25%. That means that keeping your customers engaged can have a direct impact on your profits. One way to engage your customers is through sending out promotions and discounts. Not only does this potentially increase your sales and revenue, but also gives your customers a reason to remain loyal to your brand.
Use SMS for direct and personal access to your customers and to connect and engage your audience. Keep customers in the loop about new products or upcoming events. Send out personal birthday messages with a coupon to remind customers you care.
Context-Based Marketing
A business texting platform helps segment your target audience. You can send messages according to context. For example, Uber sends a message to airline passengers as soon as they land, inviting them to call a car to pick them up from the airport. Use texting to reach your customers where they are to keep them satisfied with your service.
3 Ways to Use Messaging to Boost Customer Satisfaction
So, SMS can fit easily into your business strategy. But how exactly does it support customer satisfaction? Here are some creative examples of how business SMS can be used to keep customers happy:
1. Send out exclusive content—pre-launch
When you have a new release or launch, why not build anticipation in the group with the highest chance of conversion: your existing customers? Send SMS messages offering your customer base the option of ordering before the launch. Make them feel special! They’re part of the club. Sending a text gives you the chance to target this high-intent group directly.
Yes, yes, I know. Email exists. But with the reliable open rate of texts compared to email, you’re more likely to reach your customers if you shoot them a text. This can create loyalty and enhance conversions.
2. Use gamification
We’re all a bit tired of telemarketers and stock promotional emails. Customers are less likely to open content when it’s pushing a sale on them. But, with gamification, you can creatively engage customers in your latest deals.
Gamification means incorporating gaming elements into a non-gaming context to make the experience more enjoyable for the customer. For example, you can engage customers with a loyalty reward program that is also a game. Like McDonalds’ Monopoly game. Using texts to communicate, let customers accumulate points to cash them in for products or discounts for future purchases.
3. Follow up
How can you keep customers satisfied? Find out if they are first! Send out surveys and questionnaires via text and email that ask customers to rate your product or service. Then, use the responses to guide your CX strategy and grow your business.
Then, use those analytics, insights, and administrative tools built into your text messaging service so you can improve issue resolution. Or look through records of text interactions to help you understand how to address customer concerns better.
Pairing Your Business SMS Strategy With Good Management
A business SMS platform can help meet your customer expectations. But texting can’t fix your customer experience on its own. Pair your SMS strategy with strong management for real growth in your customer satisfaction. There are other factors to take into account:
Prioritize Good Training and Coaching
Customer satisfaction doesn’t come without training and coaching agents to use the technology well. Provide best practice guides and an internal knowledge base for agents so they have resources to grow. Meet regularly with your texting team and collect successful and some unsuccessful texting interactions with customers. Use these to model how agents can more effectively communicate with customers. Support your agents in their work and grow together.
Be Personal
Although automation can save you a lot of time and effort, messages should be as personal as possible. Business texting platforms can help you insert personal details (e.g., the customer’s name) so you can send personalized messages to mass groups. Stay aware of your customer history and use it to create a personalized experience to keep customers satisfied.
Keep in Touch
Customer satisfaction happens when customers feel seen and heard. Use scheduled messages to follow up with customers. Keep track of important dates — like the customer’s anniversary with your brand or their birthday — and send out personal messages to help customers feel known. When you meet your customer where they are, and build the experience around them, you’ll see customer satisfaction soar.
Want to learn more about how Textel can boost your customer satisfaction? Let’s connect.
This article published on March 23, 2021 and was revised on April 14, 2022.
Each Sunday night, Tori Spelling welcomes viewers back to The Look: All Stars, a TV series broadcast this summer on the CW network, showcasing top beauty experts as they compete through themed-timed challenges and makeovers while presenting beauty hacks, techniques and top looks. Each week, the audience texts in their votes for their favorite team and makeover.
Who else would the producers turn to for an interactive texting solution that would play such a critical role in their show’s success? None other than the popular St. Louis startup whose business texting platform has proven to be the perfect business texting solution for salon and spa industry: Textel.
“Our series isn’t just about watching, it’s about having fun while you learn to look your best,” said Gregory Butler, Executive Producer of The Look: All Stars. “Textel makes it easy to be a part of the action, driving engagement that is beneficial for our viewers and our brand partners. We are excited to be working with a such a great company, and a great product.”
Once texting took over as the premier form of communication among customers, the salon and spa industry quickly shifted to include this in their customer service strategy to save time (their own and their customers) as well as costs due to operational efficiencies.
Textel makes it easy to implement a text-first strategy by using your existing business landline phone number and offering easy price points to get started without any contracts or limits and unlimited texting.
Why Salons and Spas Choose Textel
Front Desk Efficiency
Textel’s cloud-based business texting portal serves as a “call center inbox” for salon and spa front desk employees with easy permission controls and even messaging history so they know right where the last conversation left off.
More Bookings, Less No Shows
By reaching out and replying via text, front desk or call center staff can increase bookings while cutting down on call times, voicemails, emails, etc. Plus, they avoid no-shows by confirming guests via scheduled texts or rescheduling appointments on the fly due to last minute changes.
Increased Profits
Along with increasing retention by making your front desk and call center employees’ lives easier, Textel helps organizations stay in front of changing customer needs. Salon and spas can recapture lost revenue by quickly confirming and rescheduling the cancelled appointment.
Improved (Measurable!) Marketing Results
It’s easy to drive traffic to your salon or spa by making keyword texting promotions part of your marketing strategy. Pick a keyword, program an auto-reply text that offers surveys, prizes, discounts, text to win, gift with purchase, etc. and then promote it around your store or on social media. The ROI is immediate and measurable.
See Textel in Action for Local Salon and Spa Owners
Textel offers a variety of business texting features that enable salon and spa organizations to provide top notch customer care and employee engagement. See why Ginger Bay Salon and Spa and Paul Mitchell turn to Textel to power customer communication and cut costs:
“We use Textel for a lot of reasons. We can communicate more efficiently and effectively not only with our guests but with our team. Texting has become an eco-system of communication from guests to our salons, salon to salon, call center to front desk and staff to call center or front desk. One of the most profound ways that Textel has changed the way we do business is in our call center. In the same amount of time we answer one phone call, we can respond to about 5 test messages. That saves us about 60 man hours per month which translates into about a $13,000 per year payroll savings. It has improved the way we do business over night and we couldn’t live without it.”
Laura Ortmann – CEO/Daymaker Ginger Bay Salon & Spas
“Textel gives our guests who prefer to text, the option to do that now. Textel also helps my service desk leaders not have to continually place guests on hold. They have the ability to respond to texts at a convenient moment. I also like the fact that we have the ability to perform virtual consultations. When a guest texts a style or inspiration photo to us, we can book them with the appropriate stylist for the appropriate time and we can also inform a guest if the style they are requesting is actually possible.”
Ginger Reed – Guest Service Leader/Co-owner, Paul Mitchell The School
Bring the Power of Textel to Your Salon and Spa
No one wants to be put on hold for booking or changing an appointment. Give your customers the freedom to text their ideas, pictures, questions and availability to your business and create happy customers who tell their friends why their salon and spa is the best in town.
