Marketing is the heart of every business. Among business aspects and elements to prioritize, most businesses pay utmost attention to marketing and advertising efforts. But what makes it exceptionally important? Without efficient marketing plans, other aspects of the business won’t function properly because of the lack of brand supporters and consumers. Despite growing investors, creating social media content, and other actions, your marketing campaigns won’t succeed if your target audience doesn’t connect with them.
Becoming A Customer-Centric Business
A customer-centric marketing approach can help organize plans and goals that focus on the welfare of your consumers. Through a consumer-focused business approach, you’re not pushing your products and services to your audience, but you should be assessing and providing their needs.
Also, it would be better to give personalized experiences to each potential and existing customer. Consistent communication and engagement are the keys to attracting customers into your marketing funnel by using a customer-centered approach. If you’re looking for a powerful medium for this type of marketing, nothing can beat SMS marketing.
SMS: An Overlooked Yet Powerful Technology
Whenever people wish to send a message to someone through their devices, the first method that they can think of is to open their social media accounts and drop a message. However, before the internet became available for people to send their messages online, mailing started through SMS.
Short messaging service or SMS, is used to send short, text messages. Users can also attach multimedia content such as images and audio files to their messages because SMS includes the multimedia messaging service (MMS). SMS is basically a textual communication service part of many telecommunication, web, and cell phone systems. It uses standardized electronic communication protocols to allow mobile phones to send short text messages to other mobile phones.
There are many different types of SMS services that are offered by different companies. SMS gateway, SMS to email, SMS to web, SMS to phone, and SMS to text are some of the common types of SMS service. All of these services provide users with a way of sending short messages and images through a mobile network. These days, most of the small businesses, home-based businesses, and companies prefer using these SMS services rather than fax machines and other conventional modes of communication.
The first concept of SMS was created in 1984, but it was only 8 years later when the first text message “Merry Christmas” was sent. Since mobile phones during that time didn’t have any keyboards, they had to type the message via PC. Consequently, phones started supporting SMS texting, and the first mobile phone with a full keyboard was introduced.
Although SMS existed long ago, it’s still a powerful technology that people tend to neglect because of instant messaging services available today. Looking at these new technologies today, SMS paved the way for them. Even in the future, SMS will continue to prove its worth by helping businesses and organizations serve their consumers better through SMS marketing.
What Is SMS Marketing?
SMS marketing refers to the marketing method by which businesses send promotional texts to their customers who have signed up for a text-messaging service, through sales promotions, confirmation text messages, direct conversational messages, confirmation codes, discount coupons, rebates, and much more.
SMS marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy that can be accomplished via phone. The involvement of mobile phones and telephones in marketing is unrivaled as the majority of people today own mobile phones, and use them on a daily basis. By sending promotions and campaigns to the mobile phones of your target audience, you’re more likely to convert more strangers into leads and customers.
Telemarketing Strategies Associated With SMS Marketing
To perform your mobile marketing and telemarketing campaigns successfully, it’s worth investing in paid services that specialize in these forms of marketing efforts. Drop Cowboy offers a broad spectrum of mobile marketing and telemarketing services involving phone operations like virtual phone systems, voicemails, auto–dialers, auto messaging, and interactive voice response (IVR), to name a few. All these services can be integrated seamlessly with one another to achieve the best marketing results.
To make the most out of your service subscription, make sure to pick out the best telemarketing and mobile marketing services, which are specified below:
Ringless Voicemail Systems
Telemarketing is often surrounded with misconception because of businesses that operate telemarketing in an unethical manner. Many people tend to get annoyed with telemarketing due to being intrusive and bothersome. If you follow a telemarketing path like this, your audience will more likely ignore your campaigns. For a non-intrusive way of promoting your business through phone, ringless voicemails got you covered.
Ringless voicemail systems allow you to send pre-recorded messages to your target audience without ringing their phones, thus reducing the disruption that you can possibly cause.
Auto Dialing Systems
Identifying and dialing phone numbers one by one is a good but inconvenient telemarketing strategy that will not work smoothly with technology. Instead of dialing phone numbers manually, an auto dialer can automatically predict, dial, and record phone number information into a software. Whether you’re using your personal mobile phone or desk telephones, you can incorporate auto–dialing systems in these devices as your dialing platforms.
SMS Auto Messaging
Now that you’ve found ways to drop voicemails and dial calls in a more convenient way, the last and most important service that you can integrate to your telemarketing campaigns is SMS auto messaging services. Through text message automation, you’re in full control of scheduling, organizing, and sending your messages with as little manual intervention as possible.
Advantages of SMS Auto Messenger Services
If you’re planning to use text messaging automation in your business, it’s important to know how this technology can benefit your business, as well as to determine which telemarketing strategies are best to use in your future operations. Discussed below are nine ways on how SMS auto messengers can help your business:
- Achieve More Open Rates
The likelihood of your telemarketing success always starts when the target individual opens the message campaign. Communication technologies enabled businesses to choose among different ways of sending their campaigns, which often boil down to sending emails versus text messages. Surprisingly, SMS have higher open rates than emails, so your target audience will tend to open your text message more rather than emails.
Specifically, SMS reach a 98% open rate compared to emails with only 20% open rate, where a person will more likely view your text message within 90 seconds while reply to your email is within 90 minutes.
Also, there’s a higher possibility for your marketing emails to go into your recipient’s spam inbox than the main inbox for some reason. Therefore, they’ll ignore these spam messages and delete them.
- Build Automated Workflows
The best, unique advantage of text messaging automation that you won’t get in other mobile marketing services is the feature to create automated workflows. Through automated workflows, each message recipient will have a different experience as instructed by the automation software. Using this mechanism, the message content sent to your subscribers are tailored in such a way that’s based on their consumer behavior.
This automation workflow can also facilitate the following functions, which overall saves time, cut down costs, and achieve more reliable results:
- Set up auto-replies
- Simplify agent assignments
- Make keyword-based triggers
- Integrate ticket systems
- Streamline customer data uploads
- Activate Drip Message Campaigns
With text messaging automation, you won’t need to hire an agent that will oversee the sending of messages as you can make use of drip message campaigns. In drip messaging, you can automatically send text messages to your subscribers at any specific time of the day, as long as it’s scheduled.
Moreover, drip messages can be easily chained, so you can send a series of messages to a follower whatever the time intervals are, whether it’s between days, years, and months. If you’d like to apply additional configurations, there are also segment filters where the software will only send messages if the subscriber has met certain criteria you’ve set.
For instance, if a certain individual clicked a discount link that you’ve provided on the text message and used the discount to purchase your product, you can set a filter where people who click and use your discount links will receive more communications in the future. In this way, you can enhance customer loyalty and engagement.
- Integrate With Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can work hand in hand with text messaging automation. Since CRM focuses on your business’s individual interactions with customers, you can take advantage of this to deliver better experiences suited to each client. With the right choice of text messaging automation services, some of them can be integrated in CRM systems using behavioral triggers.
Furthermore, you can save message templates that you’ve created so you won’t have to manually create them every time. There’s also a feature where you can track the performance of your message templates to see which is the most effective template to continue using in the future.
- Work Across Different Marketing Campaigns
Aside from your CRM systems, SMS auto messengers blend well with other marketing campaigns, particularly social media marketing. In this way, you can maximize your marketing efforts and give each campaign the opportunity to be recognized by your audience. For example, if a person is interested in your brand, they can send a text message or dial your number. Alternatively, you can text your subscribers about a giveaway that you’re currently hosting, which will require them to follow and share your account to obtain an entry. It’s a win-win situation for both campaigns as they have both received exposure.
- Allow Contacts For Unsubscription
Businesses should understand that not every individual is interested in their offers. Customers can start supporting a brand and also discontinue their loyalty whenever they want. Another reason might be to protect themselves from too much marketing texts and stop receiving marketing campaigns. Whatever the reason may be, businesses should give their followers the freedom to unsubscribe from text messages.
Using an SMS auto messenger, their followers can use their unsubscribe option anytime. Although you’ll be losing a customer because of this, it’s better than annoying them, which can do more harm than good.
- Give Out Automated Rewards and Incentives
Customers love rewards, and it’s also one of the reasons why they keep coming back. Whenever you have big sales, promos, and rewards, you can use the SMS auto messaging system to inform them. Additionally, you can also schedule your subscriber’s birthday, and send rewards on or days before their birthday. People love receiving these kinds of messages and they’re a personal way to make a connection with them.
- Bring Abandoned Orders Back
Some customers don’t successfully finish checking out their cart due to many reasons such as getting distracted and forgetting their transaction with your online store. These situations are a big waste to your revenue, and can potentially glitch your ordering system. The best way to invite these customers back is through automated text messaging. You can create a message template specifically assigned to abandoned orders, then encourage them to complete the transaction.
Additionally, this can also apply to out of stock items in your shop. They can pin the product into their wishlist, then you can send them a text message when their desired item is now in stock.
- Increase Lead Conversion Rates
Last but not the least, through incorporating this type of marketing technology into your business, you’ll experience increased lead conversion rates in no time. Looking at the bigger picture, one reason why businesses succumb to failure is the lack of understanding about a business’s target audience.
Admit it or not, the market offers a lot of identical products and services, but your selling point will be your marketing strategies. The better your marketing strategies are, the more potential customers you’ll be able to entice. Since many people own a mobile phone today, you can simply reach them through this channel even without their internet access.
Bottom Line
Reaching out to potential customers has never been easier with the help of telemarketing and mobile marketing. Thanks to these services, particularly SMS auto messengers, brands can communicate with their text subscribers consistently without manually typing and sending messages, thus increasing the productivity and efficiency of your marketing efforts at a smaller expense.