Every business should be aware by now that the advantages of using a bulk SMS service cannot be ignored; organisations failing to leverage texting risk being left behind by more convenient and efficient competitors.
So you’ve decided to begin or improve your company’s use of SMS, but how do you actually implement text messaging successfully to provide benefits to you and your customers?
Follow these 7 tips to enhance your business success using SMS:
Source ADD Systems
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Use character limits effectively
A standard text message consists of up to 160 characters. Beyond this, your text may be segmented and those segments may not arrive at the same time or in the correct order. Clearly you should avoid this, and most bulk SMS providers allow for longer messages without segmentation.
Take your character limit into account to ensure your message is able to say everything needed for your customer to take the action you want them to take, such as following a promotional link or using the discount code you sent.
Regardless of your character limit, always aim to communicate the most critical information in the first 30-40 characters, as this is what the average smartphone will display before the text has been opened. This opening line should convince the recipient to open the text and find out more.
Some symbols take up more than one character, so use this handy tool to check the exact length of your text.
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Promote deals and campaigns
When you are running a sale for a few weeks, you want as many of your existing customers as possible to take advantage of it, right? If you are tracking the open rates of your emails you will be painfully aware that most of your marketing emails sit in the inbox unopened.
This is not the case with texts, where an impressive 90% of texts are opened within 3 minutes of being received. This makes SMS an ideal method of letting your customers know about time-sensitive deals they can act on.
Use discount codes and links in your texts to incentivise immediate action and make it as easy as possible for customers to follow up on your offer.
Source: Gleantap
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Optimise your texting schedule
Texting your customers on a near-daily basis will get on the nerves of even your most loyal customers. Text customers once a week at the absolute most, if you see a lot of opt-outs or reduction in open rates over time, your customers may be getting fatigued and you should probably dial it back a little.
Think about when your target demographic is likely to busy or have free time, and base your text schedule on this. As a general rule you should avoid any day or time generally considered to be private such as early morning or late at night.
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Be considerate and follow regulations
Buying mailing lists or using information collected during payment to send marketing messages has always been a shady practice and in most countries it has been illegal for some time. The only legitimate way to acquire a mobile number is via an opt-in explicitly stating what the number will be used for, whether that is marketing or simply updates and alerts.
Every marketing text you send should make it immediately clear the text is from your business, and remind users of the opt-out code they can use to stop receiving your texts.
Many countries also place restriction on when you are allowed to text customers, for example in the US texts must only be sent between 8am and 9pm.
Be aware of all the regulations that apply in the countries you operate in, as breaking them can be costly and give you a bed reputation.
Source: Build-A-Brand
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Automate reminders and order confirmations
Bulk SMS is great not just for marketing, but also for ensuring your business is more convenient and customer-friendly than your competitors.
Make sure you go with a bulk SMS provider offering an easy to use and flexible API so that you can easily integrate your business’s texting with your other business systems. For e-commerce businesses, offering to send out text alerts when a wish-listed item is on sale or a subscription is about to expire can greatly increase the likelihood your customer will return to purchase that item they wanted but could not afford, or re-subscribe regularly and consistently.
If your business involves booking appointments or consultations with clients, automatic text confirmation and reminders help your customer out and reduce your losses from missed appointments.
Similarly, automatic confirmation of orders and delivery updates both provide your customer assurance and reduce the amount of customer calls and emails you receive requesting updates.
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Process orders via SMS
Integrating SMS shortcodes with your sales platform can make it much easier for your customers to make purchases quickly and on the move, even without an Internet connection.
For businesses only selling a small number of products or packages you can use a shortcode or even an emoji for each product or package, but for businesses offering a wide range of options, this will get far too complicated for your customers, so look for ways to simplify.
Instead use shortcodes to repeat previous orders, resubscribe, or change the quantities or details of a regular order.
Combine order processing via SMS with your automatic reminders and order confirmations to make it as simple as possible for customers to edit, cancel or repeat appointments and purchases directly from the confirmation or reminder text.
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Optimise daily tasks with texting
On top of all the ways SMS can improve your communication with customers, texting can also provide benefits to your internal communications. SMS alerts to let employees know about important emails and updates to team boards on productivity apps such as Trello are a great way to keep everyone in the loop, especially in remote teams or when your employees are often on the move.
Just as SMS can be used to remind customers of appointments, it can do the same for your staff. If you have employees always on the move from one consultation to the next, SMS can be a great way to automatically help them keep track of where they need to be and any updates to their schedule, even when they have no Internet connection.
There are many more ways to integrate SMS with your daily business tasks, such as text alerts for low inventory levels, or collecting customer feedback via text, so get creative when thinking about how you can use automated texts to enhance your efficiency and productivity.
In summary, following these 7 tips will give your business a solid foundation to successfully leverage the benefits of using SMS. There are many possibilities for using text messaging specific to your customers, industry or way of working, so on top of implementing these core principles, you should always be on the lookout for new ways to improve your customer experience and facilitate your work with the use of SMS.
