Can You Use SMS Texting in Client Retention and Engagement?

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There’s no way around it: you need to engage and retain customers to achieve business success. After all, everybody knows it’s less expensive to keep your quality customers, rather than continuously recruiting new ones. Can SMS texting help you accomplish both?

Short Message Service, or SMS, is a novel way of communication that involves sending short messages of up to 160 characters using cellular phones or smartphones. Unlike chat messaging, sending an SMS doesn’t require an internet connection. Instead, users can send and receive messages using mobile data. As long as both sender and recipient have access to their respective carrier signals, they can use continue to use SMS.

As a marketing tool, SMS texting offers great potential. Bankmycell reported that as of February 2023, 7.33 billion people around the world own a mobile phone. In short, nine in 10 people worldwide can send and receive SMS texts. With the right marketing strategy, you can use SMS texting to engage and retain customers conveniently and efficiently.

Increase Client Retention with SMS Texting

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What makes SMS texting a great tool to connect with prospects and engage with customers? The reasons are plentiful—let’s unpack a few.

Convenient and Non-Intrusive

Unlike phone calls that suggest urgency, SMS texts aren’t in a hurry. Recipients can read it in their own time and respond whenever they feel like it. In addition, SMS texting allows recipients to accept or reject further messages coming from a company. Even after engaging in a few conversations, customers can always choose to decline to receive further communication.

Short and Swift

Sending an SMS text takes a matter of seconds. Senders simply compose a brief message and press send. Assuming the recipients have cell service, they’ll receive the message almost instantly. At 16o characters or less, reading SMS texts doesn’t require much effort. Replying to these messages requires the same low effort as well.

Highly Affordable

Using SMS texting is both affordable and wide-reaching. This makes it appealing to small businesses that have minuscule marketing budgets. Instead of paying for expensive advertising space in print or on social media, they can simply send a few messages every now and then to a list of recipients at ultra-low rates. That service becomes even cheaper for mobile subscriptions with unlimited text plans. Even better, there are marketing websites that allow companies and individuals to use their free service to send free SMS texts.

More Meaningful Conversations

Maintaining a conversation with individual customers is easier and more engaging via SMS texting. Sending personalized replies to individual customers is as easy and fast as sending mass messages. Unlike email, neither party will need to wait long for a reply. At the same time, texting allows both parties to compose messages instead of just blurting out what they initially think. The interaction allows for more engaging conversations. Ultimately, having a direct way to talk to customers can lead to better relationships and more meaningful communication.

Constructing the Perfect SMS to Drive Engagement

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It takes effort for prospects to take notice of a company’s marketing efforts. Generic, spammy messages will often fall on deaf ears. However, a truly personalized message can make even the most hardened individual pay attention. Starting a message with the prospect’s name and proposing specific solutions that correspond to their documented problems can increase the chances of an immediate response.

SMS texting is an easy, inexpensive, and efficient way to create and send personalized messages that connect with individual customers. If a customer responds positively to a message, they can sustain the conversation by simply replying. SMS texting offers the most convenient way of sustaining a conversation. If a customer knows that contacting a seller is as easy as sending a short message, they won’t ever attempt to send an email or wait while the call center system transfers them to an available agent.

SMS is Not Dead—The Advantages of SMS Texting Over Email

Email marketing is also an inexpensive marketing tool that can send a single message to multiple recipients. While both SMS texting and email are inexpensive channels that help customers engage with companies, SMS holds several advantages, such as:

SMS Offers A Faster, More Efficient Way to Communicate

Unlike email, SMS texts appear almost instantaneously on a person’s phone. In addition, SMS texting requires only a mobile carrier signal and not an internet connection. Apart from connectivity, conversing in SMS is far more natural and intuitive compared to email conversations. Customers can simply whip out their phones to read a message and reply immediately. In contrast, emails need downloading before a customer can read a reply. Replying to an email is also a bit less intuitive. Even worse, following a conversation requires a user to review several whole emails instead of just reviewing an SMS conversation thread.

When It Comes to Open Rates, SMS Texting Beats Email Every Time

MailChimp reported 2022’s average email open rate was a meager 21.33%. This meant that only one out of five marketing emails were opened by prospects. While this percentage represented a good enough rate for emails, it pales in comparison with SMS texting. Meanwhile, PCMag said that in 2022, the average SMS open rate is at a whopping 98%, which means that nearly all SMS texts were opened by target recipients. Additionally, 90% of SMS recipients opened texts within 3 minutes of arrival.

People Trust SMS Text Over Spam Email

Spam email anyone? While unsolicited messages can come in both email and SMS messaging forms, the former carries a far worse reputation. Most people will ignore or immediately delete unsolicited emails they consider spam. However, many people will still read SMS messages even if they do decide not to reply. Why is that? Reading text only takes a few seconds of a person’s time. In contrast, opening an email a user considers junk will take far more effort. Hence, it’s easier for people to ignore spam emails while SMS gets a pass.

SMS Texting: A Sound Marketing Strategy

By now, it goes without saying that the proliferation of guidelines regarding data privacy means marketers should be extra careful when deploying their SMS texting strategies. It pays dividends to ensure that numbers registered as DNC should not receive any messages. Furthermore, landline numbers often end up included in extensive SMS recipient lists. This only burns stands to burn a hole in your pocket with no potential for leads.

Fortunately, Landline Remover—your go-to, low-cost solution to help automatically you weed out landline and DNC numbers from your recipient lists—has you covered. It features the most extensive database of landline and DNC numbers and helps ensure that only phone numbers capable of receiving SMS texts can receive your messages. In addition, Landline Remover’s simple and affordable flat pricing eliminates the need for complex computations. You only pay for what you need.

Learn more about how Landline Remover can increase the efficiency of your SMS testing campaigns. Sign up and we’ll be happy to give you a free trial account worth 1,000 credits. That’s right, we’ll check 1,000 phone numbers for absolutely free!