How much potential revenue have you left on the table through failed communication marketing efforts? The answer for most sales-focused businesses is, a lot.
In today’s world of marketing where there are so many potential touchpoints with potential customers and clients, it can be hard to dial in on the most effective strategies for doing so.
All customers and clients are different and will react differently to how, when and where you communicate with them. In this short guide, we’ll be discussing the top tips and implementation strategies for leveraging email marketing, SMS, and ringless voicemail to increase revenue and customer relationships for your business.
How These Strategies Can Help Your Business
In this section, we’ll be breaking down how the implementation of strategies for email, SMS, and voicemail campaigns can have a direct benefit on closing leads and bringing in more revenue.
An Omnichannel Strategy
The definition of an Omnichannel strategy is simply put, being everywhere that your customers are.
The ability to consistently reach and provide value to your customers and clients through channels like email, SMS, and voicemail, increases the amount of direct communication you have with them and gives you more chances to close sales and bring in additional revenue you may not have gotten the opportunity to elsewhere.
Improved Customer Relationships
More communication with your customers gives you additional opportunities to learn about their pain points, problems they might be having, and areas in which you or your product or service can provide value to them.
More likely to draw repeat business
It’s no secret that customers and clients are more likely to repurchase goods or services from businesses that they’ve previously had a good experience with. Use this to your advantage and target your top clients first for re-engagement through these communication channels.
Increased customer insights
An amazing benefit of implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy like this is the ability to gain important customer insights that can be utilized for further promotions and tactics.
Insights like most effective platforms for different types of customers, which CTA’s or email sequences perform best, or most frequent pain points are all incredibly useful for analyzing and restructuring your marketing strategies.
Leveraging Email Marketing
Whether you’re sending out cold emails, cycling clients through email sequences, or trying to effectively close deals, improved email marketing strategies can improve all facets of your sales process. The following are the best tips to implement to your email marketing strategy to increase revenue and conversions.
Segment your email lists for targeted email sequences
Not all email campaigns are created equally and in order to get the most out of the messages you send, it’s crucial to segment your email lists.
It’s best to segment email lists according to what is the most impactful for your particular business. Some campaigns will benefit more from segmentation based on demographics (age, sex, location), while others will benefit more from what content they’ve interacted with, past purchase behavior, and so on.
By segmenting your email list first, you can then go on to creating your sequences accordingly.
Keep your messages focused
One of the biggest reasons why email campaigns don’t perform or convert as well as intended is that there is simply too much information or distractions present in the message.
The best way to prevent this is to focus on one thing only for each email.
What is the most important message you’re trying to convey? What information is needed to get this message across? What isn’t needed? Is there a clear CTA for your reader to act upon?
You should be asking yourself these questions with every email you create in order to generate the most effective results.
Encourage Referrals
If you have email sequences established with current or previous customers, encouraging referrals is a great strategy for keeping customers invested in your product, while simultaneously bringing in “free” warm leads.
Offer incentives for each referral they could bring in. Think, what value would a customer receive by referring their friends or colleagues to use your product or service?
SMS Marketing
It’s a surprise that more businesses aren’t implementing SMS marketing for their sales strategy since SMS messages have an incredible 98% open rate and 90% of messages are opened within three minutes. Here are the top tips for how you can leverage SMS strategies to increase your revenue:
Know your customers
As mentioned above with emails, segmentation is equally as important for SMS campaigns. Analyze and segment your customers based on location-based demographics and purchase history.
This is incredibly important for sending promotion based texts. For example, if you’re an insurance broker, you wouldn’t send a text offering discounted monthly payments to a customer who recently purchased insurance at full price.
Timing is everything
Even more so than emails, timing and immediacy are key when it comes to crafting effective SMS campaigns.
Sending texts that contain promotions, sales, or local events are most effective when they are in-the-moment impulses. This could mean sending a promotional reminder a few hours before it ends, or inviting clients to an event the morning of.
Keep in mind that while communicating through SMS is effective and easy, it’s also incredibly personal. You wouldn’t want to receive a text from a company at 1am, and your customers don’t either. A guideline for acceptable hours to send SMS messages is between 8am and 9pm.
Utilize effective CTA’s
Specific call to actions increases the likelihood that clients will engage with your messages and convert.
Effective text CTA’s can include:
- “Claim your offer here”
- “Text back to RSVP”
- “Show this text for x% off at checkout”
Your CTA’s should reflect the offer or message your conveying and make it as easy as possible for a customer to follow through. Determining the best CTA’s will take some tinkering, so it’s important to analyze results for different scenarios on a regular basis.
Syncing Channels into One Concise Strategy
While all of these channels are undoubtedly effective on their own, to get the most out of your efforts it’s import to sync these channels into one concise strategy.
Utilize segmentation across channels
We talked a lot about the importance of segmentation in this guide, for all channels.
When syncing these channels together for your marketing strategy, you may find it useful to keep the segmentation of your contacts the same across all channels to reduce time spent segmenting, and to increase the effectiveness of your messages.
Track results consistently
Perhaps the most important step you can take after unrolling your new campaigns is taking time monthly to deeply review the results each channel has brought in, and tweak or remove segments accordingly.
More touchpoints to communicate and close sales
The more touchpoints you have to send effective and valuable messages to your customers, the higher your chances are for getting them to convert.
Luckily, with this omnichannel strategy, you will have all of the opportunities you’ll need when structured effectively. However, always have respect for your customer’s time and personal boundaries.
Ex: if a customer hasn’t been responding to your email sequence, don’t spam them with SMS’s until they respond.
Conclusion
Utilizing modern communication channels like Email & SMS marketing can be incredibly powerful tools for your business to not only streamline your sales cycles but to bring in additional measurable revenue.
As with all new marketing initiatives, effectively implementing these strategies for your campaigns will take time, resources, and cooperation of your sales and marketing team members. It’s crucial to carefully plan your campaigns based on your customer base and current objectives, and tweak accordingly as you track results and progress.
When correctly integrated, these strategies will increase your customer relations and allow you to avoid leaving potential revenue on the table at each step of your sales cycle.
operations & marketing. cofounder @hoo.be / @ImMakingADifference
