4 Ways To Use Automated Text Message For Your Business

Every marketer, as well as every business owner, is aware of the main stages of a marketing funnel. A potential lead goes through this funnel which starts with awareness and ideally ends with loyalty. Automated text messages can help you in each of these stages. For the purpose of this article, we will be concentrating on the last stage i.e Loyalty.

Loyalty ensures that customers keep returning to your business. Loyalty however comes at a price. The price obviously is providing the ‘best customer experience’. If customers are unable to find value in your business they probably won’t return. So to gain customer loyalty the first step is providing the best customer experience. That however in itself doesn’t completely guarantee that customer will return. Every business out there knows how vital customer experience is, all of them are on the same quest to provide the best.

What can however distinguish you is how you choose to ‘engage’ your customers. It can make all the difference! This is exactly where text automation or automated text message for that matter, can help you out.

As with the marketing funnel stages, there are different stages of building customer loyalty where you could use automated text message. Some of them are as follows :

1. Building trust and credibility

Loyalty and trust go hand in hand. People will be loyal to you if they can trust you and trust comes with proving your worth. To show that you are a master in your field, you need to have a few marketing strategies up your sleeve. These marketing strategies can make use of automated text messages. Let’s see how.

When you are capable of educating customers about your field, they will be able to see you as a thought leader. This builds trust and credibility. One of the ways in which you can prove your mettle in this area is by sending personalized newsletters or information pamphlets to your customers. This will make them remember you whenever the specialized need arises and also keep the customers ‘engaged’. As we discussed this engagement is necessary to keep up the customer loyalty.

How can you automate this process? The good news is any kind of marketing campaign has the potential to be automated if used through the correct platform. For our example of newsletters, you can use software that helps you personalize it according to which customer you are sending to, schedule it to go on a particular date, and also send a follow-up message if needed. For text messages, you can provide the link to the newsletter in the text body. The text body also can be personalized.

2. Making the customer onboarding easy

If your business requires that your customers fill up a form before availing your services, for example, if you have a healthcare practice, then patient intake forms are a requirement, or if you have a real estate business and you wish to get the buyer information, these situations require the customer to prefill a form. This process can be made a lot easier and more comfortable, if you give the customers an option of filling these forms online, in the comfort of their homes. 

You can text automate this process by scheduling or instantly sending a text message with the required form link. With the help of automated text messages, the customers can then fill this out and submit it before they come to visit your business. This will help save both your and the customer’s time and make for a seamless onboarding process.

3. Reducing no-shows in your business

Another aspect of maintaining customer loyalty is ensuring that they don’t miss their scheduled appointment. Sometimes customers need a reminder for the upcoming event because it’s possible that they forget about it.

Automated text messaging can prove useful in such a situation. You can schedule automated text messages that serve as appointment reminders. Different softwares offer different solutions but mostly you would be able to schedule these reminders to go hours before the appointment, on the day of the appointment, or even 2 days or a week before. Timely spaced-out reminders will help ensure that your customers do not forget about the appointment.

4. Reactivating customers

Customer reactivation involves ‘bringing back’ those customers who have been dormant for a while. But why is it so important? It’s up to six times cheaper to sell to a previous customer than a new one. A Harvard Business School found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits between 25 and 95%.

So how can you reactive customers through automated text messages? You can start by making a list of customers who haven’t engaged with you for a particular period of time. If you have CRM, you will be able to filter contacts according to their last engagement with you. Once you have the list ready you can schedule a text reactivation campaign and send it to the aforementioned list of contacts. A reactivation text message can look something like :

“ Hey {{firstname}}, we haven’t seen you at {{businessname}} in a while. Would you like to schedule an appointment for {{service}}”

Tip : A tip to re-engage customers is content marketing. You can send relevant content, social posts, blogs, or podcasts to keep your customers engaged.