Texting in business is becoming increasingly more common, particularly when it comes to interacting with prospective customers. Nearly everyone is within reach of their phone at any given time, so texting is often the best way to grab a customer’s attention quickly. It’s also the easiest way for them to respond, making texting a highly useful channel throughout the customer journey.
In business today, decisions are all about speed and convenience. Text messages reach your customers instantly, leading to an increase in customer engagement and faster service times. Text communications with customers can span marketing and sales as the customer progresses toward a buying decision.
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is the sending of a text message that contains promotional content, such as special deals, product updates, customer loyalty perks, or any other marketing information directly to customers. SMS marketing also includes sending follow-up messages, which can often be set up to be handled automatically.
An SMS campaign typically operates on a permission-based model, meaning people opt in to receive SMS messages. You can get consumer permission to text their number during a recorded phone call, through a sign-up form on your website, or at your physical store locations. You can further enhance the quality of your SMS campaign and database by asking your customers to reply to your introductory text with a designated keyword.
Advantages of texting in business
Texting throughout the customer journey is relatively easy. Mobile-friendliness is one of the main advantages of texting your customers and potential customers. The use of mobile phones in business is heavily increasing. According to an article from Forbes, “Most consumers are already being texted by businesses. More than 75% of the consumers polled are already receiving some kind of text message from a business.” This could mean texting is already becoming the new normal for business communication.
Generate more opportunities
It’s much easier to reach large groups and market to prospects both personally and at scale by automating your SMS marketing. Mass drip campaigns are an easy way to send highly-targeted messages to a particular audience. Sending targeted, relevant text messages helps accelerate the path to purchase, by making it easier for prospective customers to communicate with your brand throughout their customer journey. By using a texting solution like Marchex Sonar for these campaigns, you can quickly organize and segment audiences to keep messaging personalized and relevant. You can send messages immediately, schedule them for later, or trigger messages automatically through the Marchex Sonar API.
There are several best practices for business texting like using smart campaign management and having compliance capabilities like opt-in status tracking, which protects your business while empowering you to respect your customers’ messaging preferences. Intelligent time zone message delivery and auto-unsubscribe can also help you represent your brand the way you want, and your customers will only receive messages they want at the appropriate time.
Supercharge your engagement rate
Break through the noise and nurture your leads more effectively by enabling customers to engage with your business on the channel they prefer, whether it be online, through text or on the phone.
Texting is considered a high-connect rate marketing channel. In fact, the ease of use for customers can help accelerate conversions and close more business. Using a call to action like, “Questions? Send us a text,” makes it easy for customers or prospects to engage with your business via text from any device, whether they’re visiting from a desktop, laptop or mobile device. By setting up custom drip campaigns that use dynamic variables to insert customer information, you can schedule and send a text or a sequence of messages that will automatically follow up with the person trying to reach your business.
Discover the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns by tracking messaging volume and performance. Understand how people interact with your text campaigns so you can optimize your campaigns and generate more leads. A texting solution also gives you an opportunity to test different variations of messaging to see which strategy is more engaging with your audience.
Boost your productivity with automation
The best time to respond to a customer is immediately. A major benefit of text message marketing is its ability to make your team hyper-efficient through an automated response function. Depending on the action your subscribers take, you can streamline lead qualification and boost seller productivity with AI-automated conversations. Specific messages can trigger a series of follow-up replies or actions from your SMS marketing software to engage customers further. You can route customers or prospects through a customized conversation flow, available 24 hours a day, saving you time and effort.
AI bots can also handle lead qualification, meeting scheduling, and follow-up, so your team can focus on the meaningful interactions that close deals. When specific actions occur or it’s time to transfer the conversation to a human, the AI bot routes the inquiry to your team when it’s time to close a sale. With Marchex Sonar, you can collect information during the conversation, and can even use data from your CRM to generate a score for each lead that comes through the text messaging funnel. Keep your employees informed in real time to make follow-up easy, and further increase customer satisfaction.
Marchex Sonar workflows can automate your campaigns based on an assortment of different events. For example, when a new lead becomes qualified, the tool can trigger a welcome text or informative message to the lead based on the information received. Then, Sonar’s API and webhooks allow you to easily integrate these with your existing workflows on other systems to provide a complete solution that aligns with the way you run your business.
Whether your customer is in the research phase of the journey or already considering your product, texting can facilitate their experience and help them arrive at the decision stage faster.
Save time, increase customer satisfaction and provide faster service times with a texting tool. Learn about business text messaging with Marchex Sonar.
