Texting is a fast, effective, personable way to manage communications with your consumer base. While the method is quick and direct, it is also one of the most enduring forms of managing customer relations. Texting has a much higher open rate than emailing, for example, and produces highly consistent results in terms of conversions and lead generation. The advantages of a text message service are not restricted to sales, however.
Adopting the right strategy for your text message service can ultimately reduce your marketing costs as well by dramatically increasing your profit margin. Here’s how to make your SMS marketing strategy work to improve the cash inflow of your business.
The Advantages of SMS Marketing
One of the most useful attributes of text messages is that they don’t just disappear as readily as emails. We all know just how easy it is to ignore an email for seemingly one second, only to find that the next moment you check your inbox, the unread message has been buried in an avalanche of other automated promotional messages. If you were to send a text and the customer does not read the text then and there, fortunately, you don’t face the same risk.
Instead, the text will remain in their notifications rather than getting lost at a moment’s notice. Even if they were to leave it sitting in notifications, the receipt of other text messages would not push your business SMS any further into a bottomless inbox. Regardless of how long it takes to reach their eyes, texts have a 98% open rate! Also, most people (85%) only take about 15 minutes to read a text message after receipt. Your customer is almost guaranteed to receive these notifications as long as you maintain a consistent tone and frequency of automated text messages for your business.
The use of a text messaging service for business is ideal for both immediate and long-term communication, making it far more optimized for marketing efforts than other outreach techniques. Its effectiveness can also be attributed to the fact that it completely follows the timing of your customer, as well.
Instead of having to sit through an advertisement in the middle of a video or during a mobile game, your customer is entirely in control of when they consume your business content. Giving your customer this extent of agency in the marketing process significantly improves your ability to build rapport with them.
How to Use Business Text Messaging to Cut Costs
Sure, these advantages are all great, but how does any of this translate into reduced marketing costs? To understand that, first, you must be familiar with one term: customer acquisition cost (CAC). The CAC continually measures the status of your money as you generate revenue. Essentially, it is the money you are spending to generate leads and convert those leads to sales. In other words, the CAC represents what you “pay” to accomplish a sale. The CAC, in particular, is the cost you want to keep down, as it is the pivotal factor between making a profitable sale and settling for a wash (or no sale at all).
To make a healthy profit margin, you must closely monitor all facets of the inflow and outflow of capital from your business. To cut costs, you must know the costs. Thorough CAC management requires that you review each component of your marketing process and identify what does and doesn’t work. (What is generating leads, and what isn’t?) This is where a text messaging service for business comes in. Because of the high open rate yielded in SMS marketing, you have at least an 85% chance of engaging the reader in your marketing content. This rate is too high to pass up, and the effectiveness of this strategy is indisputable. To make this work for cutting costs, you must capitalize on these statistics to boost revenue, thereby reducing the investment relative to profit.
Here’s what to consider when designing your automated text messages for business:
- Research your leads. You may already have an idea of what your consumer base looks like, what their needs and challenges are, etc. While you may be right, do not attempt to base your marketing efforts on such an assumption. Do some extensive research into your target audience. Learn the problems presented to your consumer base and get a clear understanding of how your product can resolve those issues.
- Based on your research, create a persuasive narrative about your product. What have you learned about the most pervasive challenges for your consumer base as it relates to your product or service? If you were in their shoes, how would buying from your business improve your life? While you want to be convincing in constructing this narrative, don’t go overboard. Give genuine consideration to this matter and build an honest argument.
- Build your campaign based on this narrative. After the research and some thought, dedicate some time to write messages to your consumers. Design your campaign in such a way that messages can be genuine yet automated, allowing you more time to run other facets of business operations.
- Follow up with human communication. Don’t just leave your campaign up to automated messages, however. No matter how persuasive your narrative may be, this can come off as cold and distant. The real key to successful business text messaging is making your customers feel as if they are in a two-way conversation. Be ready to follow up automated content with real text messages from yourself or your team.
Abiding by these guidelines will improve the speed and efficiency of your SMS marketing techniques to increase not only your conversion rates but the time necessary for these conversions as well. This way, you can reach your revenue goals faster and increase your profit margin while reducing the costs of running your marketing campaign.
SMS marketing is one of the most reliable marketing techniques for increasing revenue and reducing operations costs, as it increases both sales conversion rates and frequency. Once your campaign is set, send your automated texts with your team ready to follow up with authentic human communication, and you’ll reap the benefits of the campaign in no time.
