Customers are the lifeblood for any business regardless of its types of products or services. But acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers doesn’t mean that you have to increase upselling or cross-selling or to improve your products every time.
To improve customer engagement, SMS marketing has been proved to be dramatically effective. But how can you increase customer engagement for your business with mobile SMS marketing? In today’s article, I will show you the benefits of mobile SMS marketing and the ways to do it efficiently.
Customer Engagement in a Few Words
You may feel worried about grasping customer engagement. But the thing is if you are operating your business you are already likely to know about customer engagement.
While researching for the term “Customer engagement“, my mind was teeming with so many questions that I thought it is one of the most elusive topics to define.
However, In layman’s terms, customer engagement is the mutual interaction between your business and your customers. It’s just like the relationship between you and your friends. You meet one another, talk to one another and care for one another. That also goes for engaging your customers too!
You can apply these strategies greatly by simply using a CRM solution.
How SMS Marketing Can Boost Your Customer Engagement
According to Simple Texting, you will find SMS marketing more beneficial than email marketing:
With SMS marketing, you can announce a sale, give a temporary discount, reward loyal customers, promote a new product, share news, and more, all from SMS.
Though it’s clear that the popularity of mobile SMS is on the wane and that it has past its prime, it has still a great volume worldwide.
When it comes to daily texts, American adults….
- 18-24 y.o. sent and received about 128 text messages per day
- 25-34 y.o. sent and received about 75 text messages per day
- 35-44 y.o. sent and received about 52 text messages per day
- 45-54 y.o. sent and received about 33 text messages per day
- 55+ y.o. sent and received about 16 text messages per day
Here Is How SMS Marketing Help You Engage with Your Customers Better
SMS marketing is one of the greatest ways to maximize customer engagement for your business. If you are yet to be convinced here are a few reasons:
Interact with Customers with Cost Effectivity
Contrary to the conventional email marketing method and other marketing options, SMS marketing is pretty affordable. For instance, the cost of Facebook Ad or Google Ad is significantly higher than the mobile texts.
With the affordable SMS marketing technique, you can prevent leakage of marketing expenditure especially during the early days of your business.
If you want to find a way to minimize your marketing costs in order to engage with your clients, you can flat out give a shot to SMS marketing.
Higher Open Rate than Emails
Research shows that mobile texts are opened upto 98% of the time when received by your customers. This is significantly higher than the open rate of emails.
Moving forward, it’s quite common that emails end up in the spam folder and flyers are thrown away sometimes without even looking at it.
More often than not, mobile phone texts don’t go unnoticed. The higher open rate of SMSs lets you engage more with your customers.
Never Lose Your Clients
As business owners are harnessing mobile texts more than ever before and the conversion rate is higher than all other marketing mediums, it is wise not to overlook it.
After all, mobile texts ensure the highest amount of exposure to your marketing campaign. Being a vital part of the marketing campaign, mobile texts are pretty mobile-friendly. So, your customers are more likely to get engaged with your business using their cell phones.
Engage with a Wide Variety of Customers
Though most of the users have mobile devices having an internet connection, there are some users who may have only a feature phone without an internet connection.
Instead of targeting only one segment of demographics, target different types of demographics who are possible to convert in the future using mobile SMS.
Reach Your Customers Quickly with SMS
In the case of mobile texts, there is no need for any design to prepare from the beginning. All you need to do is to compose your text and press the send button to get it done.
Therefore, mobile texts really shine in by significantly minimizing the time for preparation to send the SMS. And it also allows you to send the texts as fast as possible whether the customer has internet or not.
Strengthens Customer Relationship
With mobile SMSing you can not just get the option to engage with your customers. When you sent SMS to your customers, your customers can also find way to engage with you.
You can attach your customer care number not only on your website but also on each of the mobile texts so that your customer finds you on their need. Later on, you can send them a thank you text at the moment after the purchase. You can also remind them about the accessories or warranty. This is a great way to elicit emotion on your customers’ minds.
Thus, you can stay with them and allow them to recall you.
Bonus Tips: Optin & Optout Feature
Mobile texting may not be effective all the time. That’s because sending promotional texts randomly may irritate your audience.
So, you have to be in the safe zone by giving your customers an option to opt-in or opt-out. This feature is necessary to optimize the acceptability of your mobile texts. Plus, it also makes your customers stay comfortable with your business.
Utilize the Most Popular SMS Gateways from the WP ERP
Now, that you know the importance of SMS marketing, you may feel the importance of sending bulk SMS. Because it is really tiresome to send bulk SMS by selecting the recipients manually.
If you are using the free WP ERP CRM, you can use the popular gateways to send phone SMSs to your customers in bulk. WP ERP CRM supports the following SMS gateways:
- Clickatell
- Twilio
- SMSGlobal
- Nexmo
- Hoiio
- Intellisms
- Infobip
The Twilio is the default gateway right after the installation of the plugin.
To use the SMS marketing solution with the free WP ERP CRM, you have to use the SMS notification extension. To know how to use the extension, you can follow this documentation.
Customer Engagement Best Practices by SMS & Email Marketing
With all of the above-mentioned benefits, SMS marketing can be a game-changer for your business. In spite of its widespread benefits, SMS marketing remains untapped most of the time.
However, we are not saying that you have to cancel email marketing and move to SMS marketing only. Rather, we recommend you to get the upper hand by using both of these effective marketing strategies.
If you are already using an email marketing tool, like MailChimp, you can use it together with the WP ERP CRM. You can export or import an email list between them using the Mailchimp Contact sync extension too!
Finally, if you are yet to give SMS marketing and email marketing a try, go for them without any delay.
