Why You Need a Text Messaging Service for Business

There are several excellent reasons to get on board for business owners who haven’t adopted a mobile marketing strategy. eCommerce sales via mobile devices were estimated to reach a staggering 73% in 2021. That’s a more than 20% increase from the figures only five years before.

There’s more to consider than eCommerce transactions regarding text messaging services for business. 80% of Americans admit checking their phone within 10 minutes of waking up. It’s a habit that’s become so ubiquitous that even Forbes has written an article with a strategy to resist the temptation. However, it’s safe to say that phones have become another appendage for many of us in the modern era, making a text messaging service for businesses essential.

What do all of these statistics add up to? They point clearly to the current state of marketing and communications (MarCom). When it comes to your MarCom strategy, you’re missing out on a wealth of opportunities to drive sales, add value to your customers, and build brand loyalty if mobile isn’t playing a significant role.

Related:Enterprise-Grade SMS Texting Best Practices

Text Messaging Service for Business: A Key to Modern Marketing

The term “digital marketing” was coined in 1990, eight years before the birth of Google, MSN, and Yahoo! Web Search. The digital aspect referred to CRMs and their ability to track customer segments back then. When AT&T launched the first clickable banner ad, a reported 44% of people who saw the ad clicked on it.

Those were simpler times.

Now, it’s harder to capture the attention of prospective customers and more challenging to keep the attention of existing clientele. No longer a novelty, banner ads and other digital attention grabbers don’t have the same impact they once did. While companies have more opportunities to reach more people than ever, so have their competitors. Attention has become a fickle and fleeting concept – one that businesses need to fight for and actively need to work to maintain. Email may still work, but adding in a text messaging service for your business is smart.

Email vs. Text Marketing

How many email addresses do you have? And how many emails do you receive on any given day? Did you scoff at the idea of trying to quantify the onslaught of messages you receive? If your inboxes – business and personal – are bloated with emails from every direction, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that more than 319 billion email messages are sent each and every day.

The open rates for text messages stand at 98%, compared with only 20% of emails. Not only are people opening the majority of text messages, but they’re doing it with a sense of urgency: the average person reads a text message within three minutes.

Email marketing once reigned supreme, but it’s texting that stands out at this juncture. Text messages are both noticeable and timely while feeling more personal than emails sent to a blind distribution list from a sender that doesn’t accept replies.

Customers Embrace Business Text Communications

If you haven’t yet begun using a text message service for businesses to contact prospective and future clients, you may worry that you’ll be a nuisance. It’s great to be sensitive and not wish to bother your audience, but have no fear. According to a recent consumer report, 91% of customers would consider signing up to receive texts from a business.

Learning from the experience with autodialers and cold call harassment, the FCC regulates business texting. Recipients must give written consent through opt-in and confirmation in order to receive texts from your company. That means anyone you send texts to wants to receive them. That’s the first hurdle crossed.

Then, of course, you need to make sure your messages add value so that your customers are happy to continue to receive them. By ensuring the messages you send are valuable and relevant, you can continue to reach your audience effectively using a text message service for business.

Related: How to Use SMS for Business Communication

Enhance the Customer Experience

Given space limitations, business text messages must be brief and straight to the point. Marketers experienced in using other methods for outreach may find this challenging at first. Ultimately, this brevity ensures you don’t dilute the messages you send with additional text or information.

There are numerous ways you can use a text messaging service for businesses to enhance your customers’ experience with your company.

Send Offers and Promotions

Popular amongst customers, text messages with offers and promotions are a great reason to reach out. You can send blanket offers to an exhaustive distribution list, offering a discount code to be used in-store or online. You can also announce an upcoming sale to spread the word that you’re running a limited-time promotion.

If you’re integrating your text messaging service for business into your CRM, you can up the ante. Use your customer segments to send promotions that show you know what the recipient may like, either from expressing interest or purchase history.

Helping your current or prospective customers save money is an excellent use of business text. Try sending an enticing message with a link to a coupon or code.

Make Announcements and Send Event Invitations

A text messaging service for businesses is an excellent platform for sending timely announcements to your subscribers. If you have an upcoming milestone in your business, like a product launch or discontinuation, send a message to alert your customers.

Have an occasion such as a store opening or in-person or online event, send a message inviting your subscribers to participate. Make it easy for them to RSVP or sign up.

Run Contests

Another great way to encourage interaction with your brand while offering a reward is to run contests and enter-to-win opportunities. Depending on your offering and brand personality, this could come in several different ways.

You could run a simple promotion where your recipient replies to your text to enter. You could also provide a link to a form with a request to fill it out in order to be in the running. Other approaches include making a purchase to enter a contest or submitting feedback through a survey.

Solicit Feedback

A text messaging service for business needs is not purely one-sided. You can also reach out to your customers and solicit feedback on your product or service to help improve. This feedback can come in a personal or impersonal way. You can ask them to reply to your text, click a link to a form, or submit their feedback in another way, including anonymously.

You can also ask your clients to post reviews or provide testimonials for your use, but be delicate in how you make this request via text. You don’t want to seem pushy.

Schedule Timely Reminders

Text messaging can add value to your customers, building trust and loyalty in your company. Particularly powerful if you integrate your CRM with your text messaging service, you can begin to schedule reminders at important moments. If you have a product that needs servicing or has a time-limited warranty that could be extended, schedule these nudges in advance.

You can also send appointment and event reminders, reducing the number of no-shows to meetings. In these messages, make it easy for recipients to reschedule or cancel if they need to. You’ll either end up with many more kept appointments, or staff that are free to do other things without waiting for meetings that won’t happen. Chances are, you’ll see both.

Streamline Your Customer Service

A survey found that 65% of consumers feel better about a business that offers text messaging than those who don’t. It’s no secret that people these days dread making phone calls to businesses. No one wants to sit in an automated customer service loop waiting to get their questions or concerns addressed. There are a couple of ways you can modernize your customer service approach.

Try using a text messaging service for business to create an automated response system. When a customer texts your support number, your automated replies can be triggered by keywords, leading them to their answer or to another phase in the process. If your business is set up for it, you can have the conversation automatically direct to a live person and use two-way business text to work through their issue.

Offer your customers the opportunity to reach out to you in the way that feels best for them. Chances are, it’s not dialing the phone.

Be Where Your Audience Is

It’s clear that text messaging is the path to modern marketing and customer service. In an era where attention is fickle and loyalty is hard to come by, you need to stand out above the rest. Communicating in a comfortable way with information that is valuable is a great way to connect with your customers – as long as you reach them where they are, which is likely on their mobile devices.

With TrueDialog you can easily craft, send, and track messages to your subscribers. We’ll start by getting you set up with a dedicated short code and then give you the tools you need to get going. Our platform is easy to use – robust enough for an enterprise and approachable enough for a small family business.