The deeper your customer relationships, the better your business’s conversion rates, customer loyalty, and bottom line will be. Marketers, however, have always struggled to balance customer volume with relationship depth. Would you rather have deep relationships with just a few customers, or shallow relationships with a wider customer base? With conversational messaging, you don’t have to choose between meaningful customer relationships and scaling up your business. You can have your cake and eat it, too!
More than 5 billion people communicate with each other by sending text messages globally. With an open rate of 98%, compared to email at 15%, messages are clearly preferred over cold calling and emails. When your customers are actually reading what you say to them, everything changes.
Messaging customers gets their attention by using their preferred communication channel. It helps you reach a wider customer base, and it also helps you send more personalized content. With the right approach, your customer outreach through conversational messaging can have both depth and breadth. How can you get the best of both worlds? We’ve got a few proven tips to share!
1. Don’t Violate Trust
Every good relationship is based on trust, and this applies to customer relationships too! Make sure to get explicit permission to message your customers. This is a legal requirement in the US, and it also helps protect your company’s reputation. Remove any customers from your messaging list who have not confirmed their permission status. When customers purposely opt in to receive your messages, they’re less likely to feel harassed or spammed. Invite customers to opt in using powerful call-to-action buttons on your website, and display easily visible messaging in your storefront, too. Incentivizing opt-ins with giveaways or discounts is a great way to sweeten the deal!
2. Show Them You Care
Messaging is useful for marketing, but it’s also a powerful customer care tool. Customers feel appreciated when their feedback has a direct impact on the business. Getting a personalized message asking for feedback after a procedure, service or purchase makes your customers feel that they matter. You can send out messages inviting customers to take feedback surveys, and send a personalized thank-you text whenever they make a purchase. You can even offer a special discount for your most loyal customers, targeted to their favorite shopping category.
3. Timing Is Key
Text messaging allows you to text your customers at any time of the day. Yet, this doesn’t mean that you should do so. Nobody wants to receive text messages at 2 a.m., right? Customers will opt out quickly if they’re getting messages at inconvenient times. Sending texts outside of work hours may imply a false sense of urgency, and your customers’ trust will be violated.
In addition to the time of day, it’s important to justify sending a message on a specific day. Do you have something relevant and time-sensitive to say, or is your message just there to make noise? Appointment reminders are a great way to use messaging for timely, relevant content. Your customers will appreciate your help when you keep them from missing a doctor’s appointment or special event. Reminders help to establish your organization’s messaging as helpful and useful in your customers’ eyes. You can even automate them on your end!
4. Keep It Short and Sweet
There’s a world of difference between a promotional message and an email newsletter. Customers typically read messages on their mobile phones, so less is usually more. Getting your point across in 2-5 sentences is ideal, since that’s the maximum length of an average text message. Make sure to use powerful words and get your point across in clear sentences. This approach is part of personalizing your messaging outreach–it shows that you understand your customers’ busy lifestyle and respect their time.
5. Make It Personal
Let’s be honest. You wouldn’t respect a business much if you felt like you were just a name on their marketing list. Your customers feel the same way. Personalizing your marketing messages will engage your audience more. When your customers understand that your business cares about them, your conversion rates will soar, along with your sales and customer loyalty.
Sending personal messages doesn’t mean you can’t use powerful automation features that make your life easier. You can customize parts of a message while using templates for other parts. You can also send a variety of targeted messages, each one addressed to only a select group of users in your database. This can be far more effective than a single, generic outreach, and it doesn’t take much more effort.
When you use messaging to grow your business, you don’t have to choose between quantity of customers and quality of customer relationships. Our team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make connecting with your customers easier and more effective with a demo or a free trial!
