Text message marketing is an opportunity for companies to grow their sales. It’s a great way to gain visibility in front of your leads and hopefully turn them into loyal customers. What should you pay attention? Why text message marketing over email? I get those question all the time. The goal of this article is to make a case for adding text messaging in your sales process to grow your sales.
Many people don’t check their email in real time. People check their email once a day and some take weeks. The open rate on email is roughly 20 percent and some emails get opened even less than that. If you compared that statistic with text messaging, it’s not even comparable. Text message have an 98% open rate within 15 minutes of receiving it.
Consumers open your text message faster than email. Out of the 98% of consumers who open their text message within 15 minutes of receiving it, they respond within 30 minutes from the moment they open it. So it’s essentially real time visibility in front of your loyal followers and customers. But the question is, how do you take advantage of it?
Here are the 5 steps to successfully add text messaging your sales and marketing process.
For an e-commerce store, a good text message marketing campaign might be something like an instant coupon. If you notice that you’re getting a lot of abandoned carts, you may want to have the ability to send a promo code if they complete their order for free shipping or a discount.
The message could be “Hello, thank you for opting in to our promo text messages. Enjoy 20% off your purchase by using SAVE20PCT promo code during check out.
The secret to growing your sales is to move leads forward through the sales process.
Let’s use a gym for example. A gym that has daily fitness classes may have last minute cancellations. Imagine someone on your site that sees “Today only! Get a free fitness class on us. click here to book”. This is not an option with email, right? Especially when the open rate is only 20 percent as opposed to 98% open rate with text messaging.
Now, imaging the same gym must cancel the class due to a family matter. The trainer would like a way to advise everyone scheduled for the class about the cancellation. With text messaging, you can send a message to the group and you know most if not all will read it.
I mean, when would they possibly need text message marketing? Right. You do your roof once every twenty five years. Well, there can be great use cases like asking for reviews, write review platforms, often block people if they’re on the same IP. So you can’t just give people the same iPad or anything. You really need them to do it on their device. So having them opt in to leave a review through their own phone could be an effective thing to do.
But now think about this. Now you have this huge list of people in your estimates marketing campaign that you basically never text, you never text them, but all of a sudden it fails in your area. Now, instead of going door to door with flyers or sending an email that 20 percent of people might see, you send a text message in all. Ninety seven plus percent see it real time. You get that roof inspection job before the other roofer, right.
Because you had this optative list. So every type of business has a way to use text message marketing to either better inform their audience or to drive more sales. A restaurants. Another great example. It’s a slow day on Tuesday at lunch. Right. Instead of just sitting there with a slow day and just dealing with it, you can send a text message out to your loyal followers of your restaurant, loyal customers of the restaurant that there’s, what, ten dollars off an appetizer, ten dollars off your meal or whatever it might be if they come in for lunch today.
And now what you’re going to see is everybody in an area that sees that message is going to come and eat there. Right. They need to eat lunch anywhere anyways. Right. They need to eat lunch anyway. So why not eat lunch at your place that they already like? Right. Because you’re sending them a deal. This is a huge way to get great business. My sister’s husband owns a chiropractic office and they have everybody opt in to their Esme’s campaign so that on their slow days they can send out a deal to get people to come in and fill the seats because there’s nothing worse than the doctor.
And the nurses stand standing around twiddling their fingers. Right. They’re still getting paid. So what you need to do is fill the seats when Sam’s campaign is a great way to do that, email wouldn’t be as effective because only 20 percent of people would see it and oftentimes they wouldn’t see it till tomorrow. And it’s too late. Right? SMS is perfect for that. So really think about what type of content you can send to your. Loyal followers and customers to drive more sales and to add more value so that they are motivated to stay, opted into your list and you get more sales.
So at the end of the month, when the clock is running down and you’re behind on your sales goal fome, you can send this text message out and reach goal. So that’s step number one.
When you send a promo code like in step 1, leads and customers have opted in to receive discounts. You can then send them a code when you think the time is right. If you sell vacations, don’t send a code every day. People don’t vacation every day. It would get annoying fast to receive codes about a luxury once in a lifetime promotion. Promo codes could be sent out after noticing a visit from a past customer that didn’t buy. Be smart!
You should send a text messages to your customer after an important event. An event should be right after a sale or when your product shipped with a tracking code from the postal office.
Everyone is different so you may want to give a choice of opt-in codes for them to respond.
Keywords are a way for customers to let you know by text when they would like to hear from you.
So when somebody opts in, they instantly get a message right away that adds some value so that they don’t opt in. And then it’s just like, wait, you know, until something comes at some point, give them something right away.
When your customers opt-in, thank them for doing so and let them know how to stop receiving the promo codes or text messages from your company. The customers get their first a-ha moment knowing they will start receiving the information they wanted. It’s a great way to build trust and loyal fans.
When sending messages, be sure to use 160 characters. Textodog will shorten all URLs for this exact reason.
If there is one advice I would give about text marketing campaigns is to track results. You will want to tack opt-ins, opt-outs and customer engagements. It’s worth investing in a shopping cart that can accept promo codes.
The whole idea behind calculating your customer acquisition cost is knowing whether you continue and double down on your existing campaigns or completely stop and move in a different direction. This winners track everything. Once they collect data, they optimize their calls to action, social ads, email campaigns, in-store displays, events, etc.
Timing is really powerful with text message marketing. You need to meet with your team and brainstorm when you should send your text messages. The secret is to give an a-ha moment gratifying message.
If your customers have opted-in to receive your daily recipes, you can may send a message with a secret link to your recipes at 10am and not 10pm. You don’t want to be sending a text message too late or too early. You want the business and keep your customers opted-in to grow your sales.
If you own an e-commerce store, you probably don’t want to send a text message during the middle of the working day. People don’t have time to shop and buy. I’m going to want to send this at night when they’re sitting on their couch during the commercials. Give yourself a chance to make sale while respecting your customers. Be smart! Send the right message at the right time. Be sure it’s a gratifying moment every time. You want your list to grow, keep your customers engaged to ultimately grow your sales.
