Posted by Deepshikha Shukla
December 9, 2021 | 4-minute read (648 words)
Text messages can be accessed by virtually any mobile phone user (whose numbers are increasing by the day), making them an excellent medium for reaching a wider potential audience. What’s more, most mobile phone users allow their devices to notify them whenever a new text message arrives. According to SMS marketing statistics 2021 for US businesses, 95% of text messages are read and responded to within three minutes of being received, making it an effective marketing channel.
You can use business texting in multiple ways
Integrating text marketing with email marketing, push notifications and other channels allows entrepreneurs to improve customer engagement, build brand affinity and thereby potentially increase sales.
For example, when a customer visits your website and adds items to their cart but then forgets to make payment or purchase, you can send a text message as a reminder automatically via your marketing automation platform.
Here are 20 tips for using texts for marketing:
- To promote exclusive deals and personalized or seasonal offers.
- To inform about new product launches, collections or services and flash sales.
- To send back-in-stock alerts.
- To remind customers to check their email, social media page or a new video.
- To help customers access their accounts with one-time passwords.
- To inform about a booking cancellation.
- To schedule appointments and send automated reminders.
- To answer customers' queries.
- To enable customers to track orders.
- To provide shipping and delivery updates.
- To send payment and billing reminders.
- To provide event schedules and updates.
- To request reviews and feedback.
- To promote free trials and package upgrades.
- To provide customer service.
- To send birthday and anniversary messages to customers.
- To send text-to-vote SMS polls to collect customer insights. You can then use that data to personalize your offerings as per customers’ preferences.
- To distribute coupons, referrals and discount codes.
- To conduct a contest.
- To share inspirational text messages to stay top of mind with your customers.
Benefits of business texting
Communicating with your clients and customers via text can potentially save the time your employees would otherwise spend making calls and eliminate the need to keep callers waiting for help. Many small businesses use texting to increase their brand awareness as well as to acquire and retain customers.
Other primary benefits of business texting:
- Reaching customers wherever they are.
- Employees can text with customers from home or wherever they are working.
- Sending mass text messages lets you reach customers (in your mailing list) simultaneously.
- Instant responses. Consumers are 134% more likely to respond to a text than an email, and 86% of businesses using texting find it generates higher engagement than email.
Best practices for business texting
With Unified Communications as a Service combined with your text marketing channel, you can access a full conversation view that brings all forms of communication together in one place. That means it becomes easy for anyone to pick up the thread and respond to a particular customer query.
Track your ROI
Monitoring and analyzing your text messages is crucial to increasing your ROI. It allows businesses to see what is and isn't working, enabling them to create further targeted campaigns by segmenting customers according to their responses.
Here are some of the best practices to boost your text marketing ROI:
- Measure the performance of each SMS campaign. Track who responded and whether it led to a sale.
- Text customers based on their demographics, interests, purchase history and past interactions with your business.
- Ensure customers’ requests are handled quickly.
- Create templates to use over text for answering FAQs, appointments, promotions, deliveries and billing.
- Sending an exclusive offer is a great way to encourage customers to read your messages.
- Give customers an availability schedule when you will be able to respond.
- Be sure you have consent before sending customers marketing messages.
- Use your data insights to segment your customers into different groups like loyal or inactive customers to send more relevant messages.
