If you’re serious about increasing revenue for your business, there’s no better place to look than your current clients.
The average retention cost for existing clients is much lower than the cost of acquiring new customers, and existing customers are also 9x more likely to purchase from you.
Knowing this, what’s the most effective way to increase engagement and drive more revenue from your current clients?
The answer could be found in your pockets.
SMS marketing has quickly become one of the most effective ways to keep current and past customers engaged with your business through updates and promotions.
Beyond that, it’s simply a lightning-fast communication channel to your customers that converts at a much higher rate than emails.
How SMS Marketing can Make Your Business More Money
SMS outreach provides you with a unique opportunity to have virtually unlimited touch-points with your clients that you know they’ll see.
This form of marketing is effective for maintaining client relationships, offering exclusive promotions and sales, driving traffic to content pieces or your website, and much more.
Maintaining Customer Relationships
The best way to keep current customers engaged is by constantly providing value. This can be done in many ways, such as checking in on their results and providing actionable advice relevant to their pain points, telling them about new services and special discounts, or encouraging satisfied clients to bring in referrals for an incentive.
Driving Traffic
Outside of directly offering promotions and new services or products, SMS outreach is also an excellent channel for driving traffic to anywhere you want your customers to go. Whether you want to bring them to a specific page on your website or get more eyeballs on the new blog post you published, SMS is a great outlet to drive immediate action and traffic to external content.
Getting Opt-in information
SMS outreach is a permission-based marketing channel, meaning your customers have to willingly opt-in to receive texts from your business to comply with business laws.
The most effective and easiest method of getting customers to opt-in to your SMS campaigns is by promoting an offer or opportunity that they can only claim by texting a keyword or code to your business’s number.
For example, say you send an email campaign to your customer list promoting an exclusive live conference event, and to claim their free tickets all they have to do is text “RSVP” to 121212.
Other ways of collecting phone numbers from customers can include offering a valuable lead magnet content on your website free to download after their number is inputted, or sending a mass email offering x% off their next purchase to those who opt-in to the SMS list.
Segmenting & Tagging your contacts
Once you have your contacts collected, the next natural step is to analyze customer data and segment them accordingly.
Just as you would when creating email marketing campaigns, it’s incredibly important to segment and tag your contacts in order to send the right messages to the right people.
It’s a good idea to segment your contacts based on demographic information, purchase history, what services or products they’ve purchased, or their stage in the buying cycle.
Utilize any relevant customer data you have in order to effectively group your contacts based on the messages and campaigns you plan on sending.
For instance, you wouldn’t want to offer an upsell to a customer who purchased a product or service not relevant to the current promotion or send messages to customers in New York promoting an event taking place in Los Angeles the next day.
Segmenting your contacts will allow you to keep track of multiple campaigns at the same time, and deliver the most effective results for all types of customers.
Pro Tips for Better Converting SMS Messages
Ready to start increasing your revenue? Here are some pro tips to implement when crafting your SMS campaigns.
- Utilize an SMS platform for bulk messaging
Keeping track of hundreds or thousands of contacts and multiple campaigns can seem daunting. Fortunately for smaller businesses, you don’t need to have an entire task force dedicated to your SMS channels.
SMS outreach platforms allow you to easily import contacts, tag, and segment, craft and run multiple campaigns from your computer, schedule upcoming messages, track analytics and much more. By utilizing these platforms, you’re saving time and resources as well as increasing the lifetime value of your clients.
- Personalize your messages at scale
Customers react better to messages that are tailored specifically for them. While this can be tough when managing thousands of contacts, it can be easy to personalize messages at scale by using their name, referencing past interactions, and singing messages “ex: — Chris (Account Executive)”.
Keep your messages natural, and to the point. Too much information or text could overwhelm your contacts and discourage them from taking the actions you want.
- Timing is key
Timing and immediacy are very important factors when it comes to sending SMS messages to customers. Generally, results from text campaigns are most effective when they are in-the-moment impulses. For example, reminding customers about an active discount that will expire later that day, or encouraging them to act now for an even greater incentive.
Additionally, the time and day you send messages will have an impact on the results of your campaign. Pick times where customers would be most likely to act upon your message, and be respectful by not sending texts too late at night or early in the morning.
- Craft Effective CTA’s
In order to get the most out of your SMS campaigns, every massage should have a clear call to action. Make this the focal point of your message, and provide just enough information to incentive them to take the next step and follow the link or button you provide.
- Be creative!
When competing for the attention of your customers, it’s crucial to be creative to drive engagement. Some businesses use polls or include engaging videos or photos that accompany your message.
Whatever you decide to do, remember that on average, people open SMS messages 3 minutes after receiving them and close out just as quickly, so it’s important to capture their attention as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
SMS outreach is giving large companies and small businesses alike the opportunity to consistently reach their customers, provide relevant information, and increase their profitability and bottom line.
Planning, creating, and executing an SMS campaign undoubtedly takes time and practice. It’s important to revisit your campaigns on a monthly basis to gauge results and make tweaks to your strategies as necessary.
The ease, effectiveness, and affordability of SMS outreach are the main reasons why this channel is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for companies to drive engagement and increase revenue for their business.
operations & marketing. cofounder @hoo.be / @ImMakingADifference
