One of the most challenging aspects of marketing in 2022 is staying fresh and current. The customer journey changes with the development of technology like deal-saving alerts and automated sales processes. The informed marketer’s responsibility is to know what channels their customer base prefers – and can be reached on – and to optimize their use of that channel.
If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely your customer base can and should be reached by SMS. Texting is the customer’s favorite channel over email, blowing its open rates out of the water. It’s flexible, smart and optimizable. Looking for ideas? Here’s how SMS comes in handy for marketing campaigns.
Increase response and conversion rates
SMS can be classified as a high-connect rate channel, especially compared to the alternative of dropping an email into someone’s inbox. It has a 52% improved response rate compared to emails and phone calls, which vastly outclasses engagement metrics for other communication methods and helps accelerate conversions.
As a permission-based channel, it’s important to enable users to opt in for texts from your business. Permission can come from a sign-up form, recorded phone call, physical store visit or further enhanced via keyword response, which helps ensure that the people you continue to contact will want to hear from you. And one of texting’s biggest advantages – its ease of use – comes into play when contacts can pick up the phone in seconds to ask questions. By following some of our texting best practices, SMS marketing is mutually beneficial; when you make it easier for customers to reach you, they will do so.
Next, meet your conversations halfway. Custom drip campaigns allow businesses to schedule and send text messages to follow up with customers automatically. The days of unopened emails sitting in a lead’s inbox while they grow stale are over – sending a follow-up text greatly increases your message’s chance of being viewed quickly, as SMS has a 4-minute average response time. With dynamic variable insertion, you can personalize automatic text messages to follow up with customers easily and flexibly. And with natural language AI and conversation flows, a texting system can automatically handle routine customer conversations and fill in information for you until the key moment, handing off the lead to a Sales Representative. This robust conversation process is an advantage that Marchex Sonar holds over other SMS providers.
Evaluate your campaigns
Mass drip campaigns allow customers more chances to reach you, and they also create a lot of data to evaluate. Once you’re established on the SMS channel, it’s time to optimize and make each campaign better than the last one. With a dynamically variable solution that allows you to experiment with different campaign structures on a highly engaging platform, your marketing team affords itself plenty of opportunities to tweak and optimize.
Marchex Sonar offers a comprehensive texting solution with custom drip campaigns, AI-powered conversation flows, and integrations with the top CRM systems to fit with your business. It is tried and proven, showing tangible success where it’s used.
To learn more about texting in business and Marchex Sonar, request a demo.
