What's the Best Bulk Text Messaging Service for Growing Brands?
As a decision-maker in a growing brand, you understand the value of engaging with existing and potential customers. As consumer habits change, you see that email and social media no longer deliver the kind of connection that provides the growth you're looking for.
To be in a position for growth, you need to look at more than just cost as you compare bulk text messaging services. You need to look for advanced features, an easy-to-use application, a stable company, and exceptional customer support.
In this post, we're going to talk features. We'll show you the six specific features that help brands scale their growth the most.
The Best Bulk Text Messaging Service: 6 Features that Matter for Growing Brands
Did you know that 98% of text messages are read? Compare that to an average 22% open rate on emails, and you'll see just how much Short Message Service (SMS) marketing can do for you.
With that kind of read rate, you don't want to do the bare minimum. You need to maximize your marketing potential by using bulk text messaging to its fullest potential. And that means more than just sending an occasional 1-off text.
There are so many ways to engage your audience through bulk text messaging. In over a decade of offering bulk text messaging services, we've found these six advanced features to make the most impact on business growth.
1. Marketable Keywords
One of the most powerful tools at your disposal for growing your text contact database is the combination of Keywords and short codes. You've probably seen a business advertisement like this:
Hair styling products retailer Snob Life uses the catchy Keyword 'SNOBMOBB' to get people to subscribe to their text updates. The 'SNOBMOBB' Keyword goes with their brand name, but also includes the concept of a group of people. Savvy text marketers often make their contacts feel like a select group by referring to them as VIPs and offering them exclusive discounts they can get nowhere else.
The best bulk texting service for business will help you find the right Keyword to market your text list in various channels such as email, your website, print ads, and more.
2. Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns have long proven their value in email marketing, but did you know you can use them in SMS marketing as well?
Drip Campaigns allow you to automatically send a timed series of text messages to a group of contacts. While you don't need a Keyword for a Drip Campaign, most people connect a Drip Campaign to a group which someone can join by texting in a Keyword.
A text drip campaign might feature a series which includes:
A request for a review on a 3rd party site An upsell or cross-sell related to a recent purchase A preference survey A discount to incentivize a repeat order Drip campaigns take a little time to set up and optimize, but they can be very valuable in the long run in terms of new customer conversion and customer retention and satisfaction.
3. Automated Reminders
Our customers often tell us that automated reminders have done more to grow their business than thought possible.
Reminder campaigns can be used in a number of ways including payment due dates, birthdays, customer anniversaries, and appointment reminders. Using reminder campaigns, you can virtually eliminate past due calls and reduce appointment no-shows significantly.
4. Chat via Text-to-Landline
With the text-to-landline, you can receive and reply to text messages on your existing business phone number, even if it’s a landline. In fact, chances are that customers and prospects are already texting your number, and you’re missing those messages.
Text-to-Landline is perfect for customer service and other types of one-to-one conversations. Restaurants can use Text-to-Landline to take orders by text; doctors' offices can use it for scheduling appointments. In addition to reducing phone calls and customers on hold, text-to-landline increases customer satisfaction. In fact, a study has shown that 9 out of 10 consumers want to text message with brands.
5. Tracking and Reports
It's difficult to overstate the importance of making data-backed decisions. The best bulk text message services will deliver attractive and useful results so that you can optimize your investment and grow your brand.
As your contact database grows, you'll need to be able to see in-depth reports to understand your customers better and deliver precisely what they want.
The service should give you the opportunity to view stats about texts sent, messages received, and overall up-to-date contact counts. With this data, you can find spikes in engagement, see results, analyze, refine, repeat, and profit.
6. Integrations
Growing brands need deep analytics and integrations with every part of their marketing campaigns. Look for a bulk text messaging service which offers integrations with other key components of your marketing stack. Make sure your text messaging database has a fully-supported integration and sync option with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, email marketing service, event registration provider, and project management solution.
Don't Forget Customer Service
If you're just sending a couple of outbound messages a month, you probably won't interact with the customer support team. But if you're growing your database significantly and using some of the advanced features above, you'll undoubtedly need to lean on the support team to fine tune things. Make sure your business text messaging app offers top-notch support. Take your customer service to the next level with EZ Chat!
Take a Test Drive
Once you've developed a short list of the best bulk text message service providers which provide these features, you'll want to take them for a test drive. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to this process:
Is the sign-up process easy? We've poured significant resources into making both our sign-up and application processes simple so that you can spend your energy actually developing the campaigns which will make you successful. So, as you're signing up for a free trial, take note of how complex that process is. If it's cumbersome, chances are the software interface will be as well. Is the interface intuitive? Once you get into the platform, ask yourself if the controls and layout are intuitive. Text messaging isn't complicated, so the interface should be pretty straightforward. Can you quickly tell how to upload contacts, create groups, send messages, and analyze results?
At EZ Texting, we've spent over a decade helping 210,000 brands grow with a super-simple sign-up process and a software that is as easy-to-use as it is powerful. Take a spin with our free trial. The sign-up to send process usually takes half the time it took you to read this post.
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