5 Benefits of Using SMS Text to Engage Your Customers

The most successful businesses have been using text message marketing for years. Are you behind the curve? Restaurants like Domino's have been using Short Message Service (SMS) text marketing to increase their reach with college students and sell significantly more pizzas.

Jostens has been using text message marketing to make it easier to communicate with students. By signing students up to receive reminders, they've made it much quicker to ensure that the students arrive with the proper forms and payments.

Why are SMS Text Messages So Effective?

Would you believe that 46% of Americans would prefer to give up a day off each week instead of giving up their smartphone?

Cellphones are a mainstay of everyone’s life. People use them all day, every day, for everything from basic conversations with family and friends to reading the news, doing work, and capturing important moments on video.

Thanks to everyone’s cellphone obsession, your text message campaigns are received quickly and conveniently on the devices they are already glued to.

Customers will typically respond to a text message in only 90 seconds where they normally take around 90 minutes to respond to an email.

If you still haven’t invested in text message marketing yet, and you aren’t sure if it will work for your customers, then keep reading before your competition starts using SMS text messages first.

1. Texting Helps Businesses Reach Customers Faster

Most of the traditional campaigns that you create require you to create images and graphics, come up with a catchy subject line, and build an elaborate message.

However, when it comes to text message marketing, all you have to do is come up with a simple message and press send. This makes it much faster to go from concept to delivery on your marketing campaigns.

The speed benefits don't stop there.

There is almost no waiting from the time you press send until the time it's been received. Unlike emails, you don't have to wait hours or even days on someone to receive the message.

• 98% of messages are opened compared to 22% of emails.
• Plus, messages are typically opened within minutes of receiving them.

2. Texting Makes Marketing Communications Personal

Personalized SMS text campaigns can really make your efforts stand out. Texting campaigns are a highly effective way to connect with your loyal and engaged customers.

Keep these four things in mind and you'll be creating highly personalized text message marketing strategies quickly.

Relevant and Timely

Make sure that your messages are appropriate, relevant, and timely. Respect your subscribers' time zones and plan your campaigns in a way that will ensure that you’re not waking them up in the middle of the night.

No Embarrassing Misspellings

Make sure that you have their name correct. There's no point and including personalization tokens into the message if you're just going to spell their name wrong.

Make sure that you provide enough fields on sign-up forms for them to be able to leave their full names, nicknames, and even abbreviations. You can also give your customers an easy way to update their information as the details change.

Take the Time to Get Their Preferences

From the very beginning when you start collecting your information, you should make sure that you learn about their preferences.

You can do collect their information in a few different ways.

• You could have Keyword-based opt-in surveys.
• Think ahead and ask questions like their favorite sports team name, birth date, or other relevant information that you could use to represent targeted offers in the future.
• Also, make sure that you collect information that would let you segment your lists such as zip code and age.

3. Texting is the Most Convenient Marketing Tool

Text message marketing is a tool that is convenient for the customer, as well as the marketer.

For the Customer

Customers are able to receive messages directly onto the smartphones that they carry with them every day. SMS messages are short, sweet, and easy to read.

Your subscribers don't have to wade through a sea of emails, try to decipher the sincerity of subject lines, find the correct link to click, and then fill out lengthy forms before they can get value.

Customers are able to take advantage of amazing offers from companies like yours by simply hitting reply or showing the message to your staff when they come in to claim your offer.

For the Marketer

Marketers are able to put together messages and send them out very quickly.

If you have software like EZ Texting, then you can quickly claim a Keyword, segment a section of your audience, and send a highly targeted message to a relevant portion of your subscribers within a matter of minutes.

4. Texting Offers Speed and Simplicity

As a marketer, you will love how small the learning curve is when it comes to text message marketing.

• Unlike email, you don't have to worry about creating the catchiest of subject lines just to get people to open them.
• You don't have to try to be smarter than the algorithms of Facebook and Google just to make sure that you will be seen.
• You don't have to spend hours crafting the perfect content. You have 160 characters to get your point across so it's easy to focus in on the main point of your message.

Once you get ready to create a campaign, it's literally just a few clicks and a dose of inspiration away from being done.

5. Texting is Cost-Effective

Sending a text message to your audience is typically going to be cheaper per interaction than just about any other marketing channel that you would normally use. But — the real cost savings with SMS text marketing is about much more than the cost per message.

Texting can greatly reduce other costs associated with your business beyond just marketing. Here are just a few examples:

Customer Service

In a typical customer service scenario, customers are going to call into your business. They will usually receive an automated voice that tells them to “please stay on the line that their call will be answered in the order it was received.”

Waiting on hold not a pleasant experience for customers.

After customers have waited not so patiently in line, your service agent has to deal with a tired and angry customer. Service representatives have to deal with these situations over and over again throughout the day as they answer the calls.

Throw them in a blender, and you get a situation where customers receive the quick solution even if it's not the best one. Subpar solutions cost your company money and sacrifice customer relationships to do it.

By using text messaging you can greatly improve the interaction.

Customers are able to send a simple text message to your representatives. This gives your reps the ability to take the time to research what the best solution is. They can then respond in a timely fashion.

Meanwhile, your customers have been able to go about their day without being chained to a phone listening to terrible hold music.

Debt Collection

Through the use of SMS authorized payments, the cost of collecting on a debt can be greatly reduced.

Almost everyone has a mobile phone and they tend to carry them all the time. This makes it easy and convenient for customers to pay their bill. But — even when they don’t pay promptly, collection agencies are reporting that SMS text strategies have the highest rate of successful repayment.

Studies show that SMS payments cost lenders about one-quarter of the amount required for automated voice services, and only a tenth of what it costs to pay an agent to secure collections.

Church Communication

Churches operate just like any other business. They have to raise funds from their customers to stay in business. In the case of churches, their funds come directly from their congregation and other fund-raising efforts. You have to grow your member base and keep them coming in regularly.

At EZ Texting, we offer a free trial of our texting services. It gives churches and other faith-based organizations the opportunity to see the value of reaching out to their congregations and keeping them engaged via text.

Texting for churches is easy to set up and simple to operate. After you have a list of your church members that want to receive messages you simply add them into your account.

Then you can compose a message online, and click send. Within just a few minutes your congregation receives the message.

You could use this to share inspirational bible passages, promote community events, or generate support. You can even add a poll to your message to stimulate member responses.

This helps you stay top-of-mind and provide value that will keep your church members happy and grow your congregation.

Get Started with Text Message Marketing

Hopefully, by now, you can see that there are a lot of benefits to implementing text message marketing in your business.

People are on their phones more than ever before. They use them to shop, do research, build relationships with friends and family, do work, watch videos, and so much more.

Your customer’s reliance on their phones gives you an amazing opportunity to be able to communicate with them in a way that’s immediate and natural.

You can get started with EZ Texting in as little as 5 minutes without needing any special knowledge. Our software is easy-to-use and our support team is here to guide you every step of the way. We’ve sent over 4 billion messages and helped over 210,000 business grow.

So what are you waiting for? Download our strategies for Successful Text Marketing. You will learn how to promote your goods and services, increase engagement, send alerts quickly do your subscribers, and even automate appointment reminders.

Photo: Getty Images/Kryssia Campos