Consumers want to do business with companies they trust and relate to. Text messaging via nurturing campaigns helps you create relevant moments (interactions) that build trusted relationships and drive revenue. This article is part of our Become a Textpert series designed to help you kickstart your messaging expertise.

Defining Nurturing

A nurturing campaign is a series of messages sent to a targeted list of customers designed to sustain engagement, build trust and ultimately result in a commercial relationship. The purpose of nurturing campaigns is to drive revenue and growth.

Nurturing differs from a promotion, discount, or offer in that it allows your customers to move at their own pace, learning what they need to know along the way to choose to do business with you…repeatedly. With an intelligent text messaging platform, your text messages are sent via an automation system, scheduled to deliver at the frequency you’ve specified.

Why Become a Textpert at Nurturing Campaigns?

• Grow Engagement: One of the biggest challenges in today’s noisy environment is getting customers to give you their attention by engaging with the information you send them. There are so many options to choose from, that your message needs to stand out. It also needs to be reinforced to drive preference and action. Text messages get attention—usually within minutes.
• Increase Responsiveness: With a read rate of 98%, messaging is one of the most responsive channels available for marketing, sales, and service. People read and act on messages quickly. You can send them content, videos, images, links to web pages, and more, and they will reward you with their responsiveness. In fact, 85% of consumers say they want to have conversations with businesses via text message.
• Retain Existing Customers: It’s common knowledge that keeping an existing customer is much more cost efficient than acquiring a new one. As you learn more about your customers your messaging can become hyper-relevant, offering them a variety of useful information. This includes tips for using your products, which additional products complement the products they’ve purchased…the options are endless. Nurturing with messaging is personalized, friendly, and intuitive for them to engage with you. What more can you (or your customers) ask for?

Converse Apps Remove the Risk

Creating a text messaging nurture program from the ground up can seem daunting. Under usual circumstances it requires IT development resources, coding, testing, content creation, and more.

Converse Apps remove the complexity, time and need for additional resources to get your messaging programs out the door. Converse Apps provide a kit of preconfigured, ready-to-go conversations to kickstart your efforts.

This means you get a fully functioning App based on best practices validated by more than 1,800 customers so you can focus on achieving your objectives to grow your business.

Each Converse App delivers a complete conversational text messaging campaign, ready-to-run with simple tuning. Included are industry proven:

• Message content templates that make it easy for you to quickly create your messages in a best practices way.
• Conversation flows for your campaign, including automated workflows, auto-responses (where applicable) and triggers for these actions. The Converse Drip/Nurture App also includes the ability to trigger emails for content delivery, if your prospect prefers email.
• End-to-end data, as well as the analytics and reporting you need to capture the key insights to optimize your results.
• Intuitive user interface designed to accelerate and simplify managing the volume of conversations you’ll create with conversational messaging.

Steps to Nurturing Message Campaigns Using Converse Apps

1. Define a Segmented Target List: Converse integrates seamlessly with popular CRM systems allowing you to pull a list based on any object or field to create the best possible profiles and lists for your campaign—just as you would for an email campaign.
2. Tune Your Messages: Your Converse App comes with templates that reflect best practices. All you need to do is tune and tweak the messages to speak to your specific audience. This may include name fields to match your CRM, keywords and short codes for responses, and links to the content you’re sharing in each touch of the nurture campaign.
3. Select Your Cadence: Choose how often you want your messages to be received by your target audience. You may choose a cadence based on a timed release (once per week) or choose to have your campaign triggered by audience behavior, such as a customer responding with a keyword for more information.
4. Set the Goals for Your Campaign: Goals can include response rates, number of replies by contact, speed of replies, conversions, etc. Converse Apps will track your results against your goals and display the information on the insights dashboard for your nurturing campaign.

Now you’re set to run your campaign. Yes, that’s all you have to do to get it up and running. Your Converse App will route contacts that act to the appropriate response mechanism, either an automated message or set of messages or a personal interaction with a marketing, sales, or service user, depending on what you’ve specified.

You can check your dashboard in real time to see the progress of your messaging sends, responses to individual messages, groups of messages or the entire campaign.

Converse Apps give you a no-risk way to become a Textpert at nurturing campaigns.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform nurturing programs—and other communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with the relevance that drives business growth.