The best businesses continue to evolve and find new ways to interact with their customers, new and old. Putting together customer reports indicating how your target market thinks and purchases is valuable to letting you know how best to tweak your marketing approach moving forward. It always pays to get to know your customers that little bit better and when you have basic information it can be useful to target your audience through text messaging, as long as you’re careful and considered when doing so.
Everyone has a smart phone these days. From your youngest child to the eldest grandmother, and we’re all active on it. There isn’t anything you can’t do with a smartphone and as a result it has become the best way to interact with your customers and try to reach out to new markets as a business owner. A text message is glanced at and read in seconds, and if you can capture the imagination of your reader, you’ll be able to tap into the market as we all know how often a person spends looking at their phone on a daily basis.
Ensure a Successful Text Messaging Campaign
Capture the Information Carefully – Whether through a loyalty scheme or membership to your service, or through a competition, carefully capture your customers’ mobile numbers. But always ask for permission first as the last thing anyone wants is a text message from a company they don’t want to hear from. Ensure your messages have an opt-out option for those who wish to later change their minds.
Be Clear About Your Goals and Plans – Before starting out have a solid and simple idea about what it is you’re looking for from the campaign. You might want a certain number of replies to the messages, or for a certain target of sales to be made for a new product or line of goods and services. Plan to implement the text messaging campaign slowly and incrementally so as not to hound your customers with messages on a daily basis and potentially scare them off. And always have a clear call to action so the reader knows what to do next.
Incentivise – There’s nothing better than to feel part of the in-crowd. By offering your customers, who have agreed to receive text messages from you, access to special offers, or a discount code for future use should they act in a certain way, you are more likely to gain traction. The worst thing you can do is just wave a big red flag shouting ‘BUY! BUY! BUY!’ as this will scare off your customers. They have to have a reason to continue reading your messages.
Measure Carefully – The statistics surrounding your text messaging campaign are important in how you move forward. Understanding how many people opt-out and how many people have followed through with your intended consequence ensures you can constantly tweak your approach to text message marketing and find the right way to not only retain customers, but to attract new ones.
Don’t rest on your laurels and assume your customers will always return to you. Keep them happy and informed with text messages that show the good side of your brand and isn’t intrusive like so many text messaging services can be. Striking the right balance will keep your customers happy, returning, and spreading the word to others.