Are you a business owner searching for new and impactful ways to perform customer outreach? Know how to send emails and direct mail, but unfamiliar with texting and how SMS can improve your overall business strategy?
Understanding text messaging and SMS marketing is essential for business success, as more and more people are relying on their smartphones to fulfill their everyday needs. By investing in texting outreach efforts, you can connect with, assist, and delight customers in ways you didn’t know were possible!
8 Tips to Improve Your Customer Outreach with Texting
Ready to ramp up your SMS marketing efforts? Here are 8 tips to improve your customer outreach with texting so you can meet your business goals.
Make it Personal
Unlike direct mail and standard marketing efforts, SMS outreach is a very personal experience. When performing SMS outreach, you should always be sure to use your customer’s first name in the message. This will make the message feel more personal, which will grab the customer’s attention, and make them more likely to read and respond to your message.
What’s also great is that this is a relatively easy move. By using a dynamic text variable, you can easily input the customer’s name and make them feel like you’re reaching out to them on an individual level. This will make the customer feel more connected to your brand, and save you from having to reach out to each customer individually.
Offer the Content Customers Want
Since customers opt-in for SMS messages, you should make sure the content you’re giving them is valuable and worth staying opted-in for. Your texts should clearly emphasize the value customers get by being opted-in. Use SMS to highlight deals, text message promotions, giveaways, and coupons as those are things that customers want.
Be As Concise As Possible
One of the main reasons people prefer texting is because it takes less reading effort than things like a flyer or an email. In fact, the average text message takes a person only 5 seconds to read. So, when using SMS outreach, be as concise as possible so customers can quickly identify the purpose of an email.
In general, your SMS message should be less than 163 characters. If it’s longer than that your message will be broken out into chunks, which will make it harder for the customer to read and understand. The message should tell simply tell customers what they need to do, and the overall benefits of the message.
Send Messages Out at the Right Time
One of the most important parts of SMS outreach is messaging customers at the right time. If you don’t, you run the risk of customers not reading it, or worse, seeing your message as spam.
The best time to send an SMS message is when your customers are anticipating it, so create a consistent SMS schedule and determine in advance the kinds of messages that will be relayed via SMS.
Not sure what time works best for your customers? Here are some general tips on time for SMS outreach:
- Send SMS out on weekends
- Send SMS out after a customer has taken a certain action
- Avoid sending messages too early or late in the day
The best time to send out an SMS differs for each company based on factors like your target audience’s age and mobile usage. So try out a few different times before creating your SMS schedule.
Use a Link Shortener
There’s little space to work within SMS outreach, so don’t waste precious characters on things like long URLs. Use a link shortening service like Google’s link shortener to truncate links. This will make your SMS easier to read and give you more space to write an effective SMS.
Don’t Send out Too Many Messages
Because texting is a such an easy and consistent part of our everyday routines, you may think it’s best to send out your SMS on a daily basis. But if you send out too many messages, your customers will think your messages are spam and opt out of them.
Not sure how many SMS messages you should be sending? The suggested sweet spot is 10-12 SMS messages a month. So, instead of sending a bunch of messages, send just a few and try to optimize them to the fullest.
Make Sure to Strike the Right Tone & Voice
What’s great about SMS is that you can use it for many types of customer interactions, such as surveys, sales messages, and shipping and delivery updates.
The issue here, however, is that it requires you to get the tone right for each type of customer interaction. For example, a sales SMS message should be a lot more playful and upbeat than something like a delivery delay notification.
The tone of the message should match the gravity of the message that’s being delivered. It should speak to your specific target audience in terms and language they understand. If you’re a more youthful brand, emojis may be appropriate for your SMS messages, and if you’re a more sophisticated company you may want to keep it strictly professional.
Keep the Communication Channel Open
If you’re texting customers on a one-to-one level, it’s important to provide them with an opportunity for conversation and interaction. Texting already feels like a personal interaction, so if you give customers an option to reply, they’ll feel like you care more about them and their needs.
There should always be a way for customers to interact, whether that’s clicking on a link to learn more, or being able to opt out of future messages. Mot all customers will engage, but having the option available will make them think more highly of your customer service outreach.
Final Thoughts
If you want to keep customers and provide better outreach, you need to invest in SMS texting and marketing efforts. By following these 8 easy tips, you can provide helpful content that will resonate with customers and keep them coming back for more.
Struggling with your SMS efforts? Not sure what kind of content you should be sending customers? Let us know in the comments!