Many B2C companies spend lots of money on marketing, advertising, social media campaigns, emails, and what not! but well, they still struggle to find consistency in customer interactions. Email messages most of the time go unseen; social media posts get dwelled in a sea of other similar posts; and a company loses a chance to even get the opportunity to respond before a potential lead loses interest.
Hence, One of the biggest challenges in outbound marketing in today’s era is not just reaching out to right customers, it’s beyond that. It is about reaching them at the right moment, when you have their utmost attention available. And that’s when SMS marketing comes for the save. Studies show that SMS messages hugely achieve open rates of over 90%, with most being read within minutes of delivery.
SMS marketing helps solve this challenge by delivering messages directly to a customer’s mobile device almost in an instant. And so in this article we are going to explore the six key aspects of SMS marketing that help businesses gain and engage more customers and also much more effectively.
Six Essential Components for SMS Marketing that Drive Customer Engagement
Let’s start with the prime elements or the core elements first. An effective SMS marketing strategy, mainly runs around three prime principles: Fast, Relevant, and Meaningful Communication. Consumers expect brands to provide them with timely responses, that too in a simple, easy-to-understand manner.
Companies that consistently supervise the following six components can expect to see an increase in customer engagement, and produce better results with lead generation.
1. Fast Response Improves Lead Conversion
As talked about, one of the core principles of SMS marketing is Speed, It is critical in online marketing. As a customer submits a form, requests a quote, or interacts with a website, companies should follow up with them as quickly as they can, and as fast the company responds, the better are the chances of a successful conversion.
For example, a home services company can send a quick SMS follow-up to someone who recently requested a quote.
A simple message like “Hi, just checking if you’d like to schedule your service this week” receives comparatively a quicker response than an email, that’s how effectively SMS marketing helps businesses convert inquiries into confirmed bookings, from a potential target to a happy customer.
You can respond to customers in seconds and keep them engaged while their interest and curiosity level is within the idea.
More Examples of how implementing a successful instant-response plan includes:
- Quickly sending confirmation text messages when a customer submits a form.
- Automatically responding with an SMS message to confirm a service or a booking request.
- Following up with customers who have left their shopping cart unshopped, or were near completing the process but left the website in between.
By responding quickly to customer inquiries, you can build trust within your customers and can initially decrease the ratio of potential customers who are deciding to go with your competitor instead of you.
2. Clear Opt-In Builds Trust
Transparency is an essential element of mobile marketing success. Also a customer’s first impression of a business is generally through the opt-in process. Businesses should have a clearly established process that helps customers understand the types of messages they will be receiving through text marketing and the benefits of joining an SMS list. If you want to create subscriber lists of high quality and built on solid trust, then your business needs a well-designed opt-in process.
Some of the common opt-in techniques that marketers can use to gain new subscribers include:
- Website and Landing Page Sign-Up Forms
- SMS marketing campaigns with exclusive discounts or promotions
- Using SMS during Checkout at Online Retailers/Sites
- Using QR Codes for On-Site Registration/Sign-Up
- SMS rewards through loyalty programs
The clearer a customer sees the benefits of joining an SMS list, the longer they will remain engaged.
3. Marketing Automation Supports an Effective Lead Nurturing System
Promotional messages usually don’t get great responses, if they’re of random nature. With this concern, the new generation of SMS marketing highly relies on marketing automation for reaching out customers with the Right messages at the Right times and in the Right context generally based on their behavior.
Marketing automation ensures that text messages will continue to be timely and beneficial to customers without being overwhelming.
Some examples of automated SMS campaigns include the following:
- A welcome message sent to new subscribers.
- Reminders about Cart abandonment.
- Follow-up messages after a purchase asking for feedback.
- Reminders of products that have been purchased.
- Messaging to customers who have not purchased recently.
4. Conversational Messaging Improves Sales Outreach
Businesses are also making a huge error by treating sms marketing to be treated as they would treat an email campaign. It should be focused that sending texts to customers in a way that feels more like a conversation will get a better response than sending text messages that are overly promotional, or a bit too pushy in nature.
Thus you are converting your SMS communication channel into two-way communication, eliminating the one way broadcast, by using Two way-messaging.
Some ways that a business can improve its interaction with their customers through sms include:
- Writing messages in a very natural and conversational tone.
- Allowing customers to end the message by sending a reply (asking a question, or making a request).
- Sending an automated response with quick reply prompts (ex: “Reply YES to confirm”).
- Using sms to provide customer support via chat.
- Directing customers to the next step in the purchasing process.
By using this conversational approach, a business can build strong customer engagement, while increasing their sales outreach on the other hand as well.
5. Smart Timings Improves Customer Engagement
Receiving a text message, at the wrong time of day, surely results in the ignorance of the message, or it gets viewed as an unwanted interruption. Because of this fact, effective mobile marketing campaigns rely highly on data to determine what’s the best time of day to send messages to subscribers.
As far as timing of sending text messages is concerned, Try following these practices:
- Send messages to your customers during peak engagement periods of the day.
- Don’t send text messages to customers very early in the morning, or too late at night.
- Segment your customers based upon their past engagement with you.
- Schedule reminder messages for customers about appointments or events.
- Keep an eye on your customer unsubscribe rates, also make adjustments to the frequency of sending text messages accordingly.
By sending messages to consumers at a smart and right time, you will keep the engagement levels consistent without overwhelming the subscribers.
6. Personalization Increases the Effectiveness of Business Marketing
Comparatively consumers respond better to information they find relevant on a personal basis than to advertisements or other unrequested forms of communication. Personalization can help SMS marketing stand out amidst other variants because it is a form of communication in a very crowded digital space and works as an effective marketing tool.
The following are examples of effective use of personalization means of strategy:
- Using customers’ names in the SMS communications.
- Referencing a customer’s most recent purchase or browsing.
- Recommending a product to a customer based upon their previous transaction with the business.
- Sending promotions to customers based on their geographical location.
- Providing exclusive deals/money off to existing loyal customers, etc.
When personalization is embedded with marketing automation, businesses can provide targeted marketing messages to customers in a wider scope ultimately improving their overall marketing performance.
SMS Marketing Best Practices for Increasing Engagement
Verify these points below to assure that SMS marketing campaigns are good in conversion:
- Keep text messages concise and simple, go for or 160 characters or less than it
- In order to drive better customer response, have one clear call-to-action.
- To avoid the SMS to be perceived as spam, don’t use excessive hyperlinks
- Segment customers for more focused targeted marketing messages.
- Keep a watch on engagement metrics like responses/conversions.
- Maintain a very consistent, and a reasonable frequency of sending the messages.
- Test the message formats on multiple cellular devices before sending the message out to actual customers.
Employing these practices allows a business to create and retain successful mobile marketing campaigns without overstimulating subscribers.
How SMS Marketing Can Assist with Lead Nurturing in Four Simple Steps
Step 1- Customer Opt-In
The customer can opt in using the website form, promotional content, or QR codes. After opting-in, the customer receives a quick message confirming the same. The categories of messages that the subscriber can expect from the marketer also mentioned.
Step 2- Audience Segmentation
The integration of the customers with the CRM tools enables the segmentation of the customers based on their purchase history or engagement level.
Step 3- Automated Messaging
The marketing automation enables the dispatch of messages that are relevant to the customers, based on their behavior. This increases the engagement of the customers with the marketer.
Step 4- Campaign Optimization
The use of analytics tools initiates the creation of metrics on the performance of the marketing campaign, while these metrics include response rates, click-through rates, or conversion rates. Metrics assist the marketer to create new marketing campaigns and it also adds enhancement to the lead nurturing strategy.
Establishing Trust in SMS Marketing
For any successful SMS marketing, establishing trust is the most critical element. As it has been said, Honesty is the key to long-term and successful relationships. A sense of credibility and trust can be created in the minds of customers by keeping a watch on some common-error points:
- Clearly state the brand name in all text messages.
- Offer a visible and very clear opt-out choice.
- Restrict the SMS communications to opted-in customers.
- Avoid using deceptive language in promotional communications.
- Strive for a genuine or consistent rate of communication.
- Respond immediately to customer’s queries and doubts.
By abiding by these principles, an organization can build a sense of credibility and can strengthen relationships.
Ending Note
In the changing digital environment, it is becoming slightly more important for organizations to recognize ways to communicate effectively and rapidly with their target audience. SMS marketing provides an opportunity for an organization to engage their customers directly through their mobile phones. When it’s combined with mobile marketing, marketing automation, and personalized communications, SMS marketing is a very viable solution for generating new leads quickly, and it also helps expand existing sales efforts, and creates a retained long-term customer loyalty.
If you’re seeing ways to improve your customer engagement with SMS marketing, the team at LeadsRain can help you design such campaigns that capture, qualify, and nurture leads through automated messaging. For more information, reach out at support@leadsrain.com.
