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No one makes calls anymore, and direct mail is equally out. All the old, reliable methods of communication are becoming less popular, which means all the previously tried-and-true methods of reaching customers and clients are becoming less effective, even obsolete. Business leaders who want to maintain contact with their consumer base need to find new solutions — and increasingly, the best solution seems to be text.
Most business leaders have some familiarity with sending SMS messages in their personal lives, but communicating with customers and clients through text messaging likely feels foreign. Here is a useful guide for navigating the new and interesting world of business texting.
What Are the Benefits of Business Texting?
A business text is any SMS message sent by an organization to clients or customers. Most often, business texts are bulk texts — identical or nearly identical messages sent to an organization’s entire contact list to provide some extra value to the consumer audience. However, there is also a wide variety of autoresponder SMS messages, such as abandoned cart texts or appointment reminder texts, that offer more personalized communication with individual customers. Finally, businesses might engage in 2-way SMS with customers as a tool for sales or customer service staff looking for more convenient and more direct contact.
Since the inception of text messages, this method of communication has been burdened with a social stigma. Initially only widely adopted by teens, text messaging has long been seen by business leaders as informal and inefficient. Yet, as texting teens have aged into adults — and as the technology behind texting has improved — texting has all but replaced phone calls as the most convenient and comfortable form of communication.
Though many executives might retain the old stigmas against texting, it is important that every business leader recognize the potential advantages of engaging in business SMS, which include:
Quick and efficient communication with customers. Text messages reach their destination essentially immediately after being sent, and the vast majority of SMS messages are opened and read within three minutes of receipt. Thus, businesses with time-sensitive information can be relatively certain that customers will receive this information appropriately via text.
Full control over the timing and content of messages. Customers check their email or social media at varying times during the day, but text messages are read almost immediately. Thus, businesses gain more complete control over when and how their customers engage with their marketing, increasing their ability to create positive and lucrative connections.
Access to a primed consumer audience. To be compliant with the FCC regulations regarding text communications, businesses can only send SMS messages to customers who have opted into this service. As a result, businesses know for certain that the recipients of their texts are interested in the content of those messages to some extent, giving their messages more power to influence customer behavior.
Easy automation of marketing communications. Businesses can set up an SMS autoresponder program similar to their email autoresponder service, which means marketing messages can automatically reach customers at key points in their journey, improving conversion rates without staff attention or intervention.
How Does a Business Send Text Messages?
The best way for an organization to send text messages is through an SMS messaging platform. There are several reasons why a professional SMS service provider is advantageous to trying to build a business texting program from scratch. First and most simply, a platform can provide your business with a single phone number for texting, which makes texting a cohesive and more trustworthy communication method for customers. What’s more, professional SMS services will make it easy to walk through the steps of creating different types of business texts, so a company can be certain that their texts look and function exactly as they expect. SMS platforms tend to be affordable, offering straightforward pricing for different types of texting services, so organizations should consider building their SMS program on a platform.
Is Texting Professional?
As more businesses adopt and foster SMS campaigns, consumers are becoming more comfortable with business contact over text. Yet, how an organization retains its professional reputation depends almost entirely on how it manages its texting program. Customers are less likely to consider professional a company that sends out copies of the same text messages, that sends messages incessantly or that uses slang or emojis. Thus, executives should become familiar with the rules of etiquette around business texting, so they can maintain a positive reputation with their most loyal customers.
It is unlikely that voice calling will ever truly disappear, and the importance of postal mail will linger as people continue to live in the physical world. Yet, businesses stand to benefit by entering into a new field of communication with SMS messaging. Texting programs promise to connect companies with customers in a new and exciting way, so the sooner executives invest in a business texting platform, the better.