Effective communication is incredibly important as it helps brands establish trust with their consumers and other stakeholders. In fact, stats show that 51% of users avoid interacting with a company once they’ve had a lousy communication experience.
That’s why businesses need to choose communication channels that increase customer personalisation and boost engagement – that is where text messaging comes in.
Benefits of text messaging
Compared to conventional communication channels, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of being sent and texts can also be 100% automated. This way, you leverage the most efficient channel of one-to-one communication – enabling you to build brand loyalty and elevate sales.
However, this is not the only benefit of using SMS services.
Here are several other ways to grow your business and ensure better client relations with SMS:
Added Convenience
Text messaging promotes comfort for both business owners and consumers. Research shows that 64% of consumers prefer to communicate over texts rather than calls.
Whether it is you calling a customer or the other way around, cellphones have a habit of ringing at the most inconvenient of times. Imagine the convenience if you could book a hair appointment over SMS – no waiting on hold or interruptions due to lost signals.
With SMS supporting numbers, you can get to your customers anywhere anytime, without being invasive.
Opt-In, Opt-Out
People will only opt-in for your messages if they feel that your services are relevant to them and they want to stay in touch.
This tactic allows you to curate an even more personalized experience based on the demography, needs and behaviour of subscribers. Personalization results in brand loyalty as people prefer businesses that cater to their significant needs rather than those that do not.
This way, you can be sure that your messages make it to people who have declared their interest by opting in, and those who don’t want to hear from you can easily opt out of the SMS service.
An added advantage: your message will not end up in the spam filter.
Increase In Automation
Incorporating SMS in your communication plan allows for better automation, which can be hard to accomplish with either calls or emails.
While both emails and messages follow the same notification protocol, emails are more likely to get ignored than text messages. Texts have an 8% higher notification response rate than emails.
Texts can also be 100% automated, making them the perfect tool in situations where you might need to make contact several times to get through, such as an invitation to a webinar. Automation also comes in handy when you need to send a message to the masses, i.e. thousands of people at a time.
Consumers Preferred Mode Of Communication
Text messaging is not only easy for consumers, but it is stress-free for business owners as well.
With over 5 billion people sending and receiving texts daily, texting is the most popular way of communication. It ensures frictionless conversation from both ends.
Whether it is to inquire about order updates or to inform about promotions, information is exchanged through the customer’s preferred channel. That means you are curating stronger relations and retaining clients.
Segmentation
One-approach-fits-all is not optimal when it comes to marketing. Segmenting the audience for text messages helps ensure that the relevant information reaches the right recipient at the right time.
Marketers can segment the contact database by geography and demographics as well as where they are in the sales funnel. So, for example, it is possible to send different texts to a large group of people for follow-up, remarketing, upselling and cross-selling campaigns.
Go Paper-Free
Cashing in on trending topics is an excellent way to generate ROI, and being environmentally friendly always proves to be a good strategy for business.
Distribution of coupons via text eliminates the use of paper as unnecessary printing becomes redundant – this also leads to cost optimization for businesses.
In Conclusion
Whether you lead a global marketing strategy or only handle sales communications, employing text messages is now the way to go. It is highly effective and flexible for businesses of all sizes and across many industries.