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
- It enhances the customer experience
- It increases customer satisfaction and engagement
- It provides insights about customers
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.
2. Build your text messaging list
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.