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SMS Marketing: How To Stand Out From Your Competitors And Drive Sales

How To Stand Out From Your Competitors And Drive Sales By Integrating SMS Text Messages.

This is what this guide covers:

  • Three reasons why you should integrate SMS text messages.
  • Examples of use cases.
  • Prerequisites before getting started.
  • Best practices to avoid common mistakes.
  • Tool example: ClickSend.
  • Integration tutorial.

3 Reasons Why You Should Integrate SMS Text Messages

1) Differentiation

In today’s competitive business landscape, standing out is crucial. While email and social media are popular communication channels, SMS text messages provide a fresh approach to engaging with your audience effectively.

Your audience – in fact – is bombarded with emails and social media content daily and by leveraging SMS, you can capture your audience’s attention and make your marketing efforts more impactful.

2) Higher open rate

According to Forbes, SMS messages have an impressive open rate of over 98%. This means that SMS provides an excellent opportunity to ensure your messages reach your potential customers and clients.

Additionally, you can use SMS to include relevant links and call-to-actions, guiding your audience through their customer journey.

3) Omnichannel strategy

To succeed in today’s market, you need an omnichannel approach that keeps you top of mind with your audience: the attention span is low and people forget about you after minutes they see your post/ad/piece of content.

SMS text messages offer a cost-effective method to communicate with your customers and prospects, ensuring they stay engaged and connected to your business.

This leads to increased sales and a superior Customer Experience.

Use Cases

I group the use cases into two macro-categories:

1) Sales & Marketing

You can set up SMS text messages to do the following things:

  • Conduct sales follow-ups with links to relevant materials to guide prospects through the buying process.
  • Utilize SMS for upsells and cross-sells, capitalizing on opportunities after a customer’s initial purchase.
  • Implement SMS promotions to target specific segments of your audience in your CRM.

2) Customer Experience

You can use SMS messages to improve your Customer Experience.

This includes:

  • Enhance customer experience with SMS notifications and confirmations after significant events such as purchases, scheduled demos, and form submissions.
  • Utilize SMS reminders for appointments, demos, and trials to ensure customer engagement and reduce no-shows.
  • Send check-in messages to gather feedback and verify customer satisfaction.
  • Use SMS for internal notifications to keep your team aligned when delivering services, improving overall efficiency.

What’s the result?

The implementation of SMS text messages improves your Sales & Marketing efficiency and Customer Experience, which leads to an increase in conversion and retention rates.

Prerequisites Before Getting Started

1) Strategy

SMS messages will not solve your strategy problems, make sure your processes are already bringing some results.

After that, you need to analyze those processes and understand where the use of SMS messages helps you be more effective, solve a bottleneck, or speed up a part of the process.

SMS can amplify the effectiveness of successful processes.

2) Single source of truth

You need to have a single source of truth!

A well-structured and organized CRM is essential to leverage data for personalized SMS messages and automations. A clean CRM ensures you can tailor messages and deliver a more personalized experience for your audience.

Best Practices To Avoid Common Mistakes

These are the main best practices to make sure you don’t make the most common mistakes:

  • Opt-In and Opt-Out: Always collect consent to send SMS messages and offer clear opt-out options to respect your audience’s preferences and comply with regulations.
  • Identify Yourself: Remind your contacts who you are in your messages as not everyone may have your contact information saved.
  • Timing: Be considerate when setting up automations, ensuring you don’t send messages at inconvenient hours.
  • Be concise: With limited characters in SMS, choose your words wisely to deliver impactful and effective messages.

Tool Example: ClickSend

As always, there are many tools that you can use and the best one depends on the scenario.

I often use ClickSend for the following reasons:

  • Native Integration:: ClickSend seamlessly integrates with ActiveCampaign, making it easy to incorporate SMS into your existing automations.
  • Zapier integration: ClickSend’s integration with Zapier allows for even more flexibility and automation possibilities.
  • User-friendly interface: ClickSend provides a user-friendly experience, suitable for both tech-savvy and non-tech-savvy individuals within your team.
  • 1:1 chat: You can have one-on-one chats with your contacts.

TIP

ClickSend also gives you the opportunity to mail postcards and letters.
If you are in a service-based business, you can automate the mailing of welcome postcards to new customers, special promos to loyal customers, etc…

Needless to say, these activities improve your Customer Experience and make you stand out from your competitors.

Watch the video for the integration tutorial.

Outsourcing the implementation could be a good idea for your business.

In the last few years, I helped several SMEs to make the most out of Business Automation through digital project management services.

If you want to learn more, download the Business Automation guide with the 5 phases I follow:

Download the Guide

Or fill out the application form to work with me:

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