SMS marketing provides a variety of benefits for small businesses.
One of the largest benefits is the ability to have one-on-one conversations with your customers from your computer.
In this article, I’m going to discuss the top 3 benefits of two-way messaging.
Engagement
The more engaged your customers are with your business, the more likely they will purchase from you more often.
Thanks to SMS marketing, keeping customers engaged has never been easier.
You can send surveys and polls to your customers to engage with them while simultaneously collecting more data from them.
For example, let’s say you’re a women’s cloth boutique and you’re shopping at Market in order to find new selections for the coming seasons.
You can send a picture of different options to your loyal text subscribers asking them to select which piece they like best.
You can then send the results back to the group for what you went with.
Now your customers feel like they played a key part in your business with you.
This will only increase their loyalty.
Examples like this are limitless.
Support
Support from businesses can be a nightmare for customers. Customer support is a huge area that can help your business grow. If customers are having bad experiences, they will let everyone know which in turn can hurt sales. On the flip side, customers are willing to pay more money for products that have great customer support behind them.
Creating frictionless, easy-to-use support systems can give your business a leg up and stand out.
Automated phone support can be frustrating for customers to use when they just want to be able to talk to a human that can help solve their problem.
The fact is, most customers actually want the option to text a business when they need help.
People are used to texting as part of their daily lives. They want it to be an option when communicating with businesses. A study by eWeek found that “52 percent [of respondents] would prefer texting customer support more than their current preferred method of communication.”
If your business has pdf documents or online tools that can help customers, those can also be sent through texts in order to help customers easier.
Cost-Effective
Most small business owners watch where their money is going. If something can’t provide value or save time and/or money, there is no use in implementing it.
When it comes to marketing and communication channels, SMS can be one of the highest ROI software that you integrate into your business’s tech stack.
For less than a few cents per message, you can reach your customers right where they want to be reached- in their text inbox.
Other two-way messaging channels such as call centers for support or online chatbots can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month. Online chatbots also add a lot of code to your website, which slows it down. This hurts overall search engine rankings.
With texting, your cost per message will typically go down and your customers’ satisfaction will go up.
The best SMS marketing software plans start at just $29/month.
Conclusion
SMS marketing boasts many benefits for businesses. One of the most powerful use cases is two-way messaging.
Two-way text messaging in one central location online gives your business the flexibility to effectively communicate with customers in a user-friendly way.
When it comes to texting, we are used to texting people- friends, family, coworkers, etc. We are programmed to feel like we are talking to someone and they are talking to us. We feel heard. This is the large underlying factor of why texting is becoming so powerful for businesses. Customers want to feel like someone is there for them. Texting can bridge that gap.
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