Striking the rod when it’s hot leaves maximum impact. In the case of converting customers and improving customer experience, the same applies. How do you strike the metal when it’s hot, in the context of a business setting? The truth is that you can create a lot of opportunities as a business owner for maximum customer engagement that can turn into profitable outcomes.
One of the biggest tools to help you achieve this goal is an automated texting service.
What Exactly is Automation?
Automation is anything that helps reduce manual input and produce maximum output. Or to put it in other words, getting maximum results/output with minimal human intervention. To take an example of how automation has made our lives easier, let’s use the example of a blender. With the only human effort being putting ingredients into a blender and turning the switch on and off we get our desired results. Similarly, with just the right ingredients and the ability to start and end an operation, automation can do wonders in a business setting as well.
Why do You Need Automation?
As discussed above, with minimal human intervention you will be able to get maximum results. Automation can help you save a lot of time and effort. The tasks done through automation are done with maximum efficiency and will certainly make your life easier. With the time gained through automated operations, you will be able to divert your attention to other places. For example healthcare automation can help improve patient outcomes.
What is Text Message Automation?
Text automation or automated text messaging means messages are sent to intended recipients automatically with minimal human intervention. In other words, messages are automated or scheduled to be delivered at a certain time. Automated text messages can be triggered after an event, for example, when a customer call is missed and an automatic text message is sent to the caller or it can be scheduled to be sent for a purpose, for example, marketing campaigns such as discount offers.
Can you send automated text message for businesses through your existing iphone or android device? You can definitely send automated text messages through iPhone or Android devices, however they may not be ideal for business use.
How to Send Automated Text Messages on iPhone?
Automated text messaging is not an inbuilt feature in iPhone, however, there is a workaround that can be used to send automated text messages. A third-party app, Shortcuts app can be downloaded from App store. You can follow these steps to send automated text messages on iPhone:
1. Open the Shortcuts app.
2. Select ‘automation’ at the bottom of the screen
3. Create a ‘personal automation’.
4. Add time of the day and when to repeat the text message automation.(For eg, 2pm on tuesdays)
5. Add ‘action’.
6. Choose the contact to send your message to and tap Next.
7. Add the desired message
8. Select ‘done’.
How to Send Automated Text Messages on Android?
With your android devices, you can schedule a message to go on a given time by:
1. Open the google message app
2. Select the contact you wish to schedule the message to
3. Select ‘+’ beside the text box and select ‘schedule’
4. Choose the time you wish to schedule the message
5. Type in the message and hit send
Types of Automated Text Messages You Can Send
Businesses can use automated text messages for varied needs. An automated texting service will let you send:
1. Appointment reminders
For example, if you have a healthcare practice, you can automate appointment reminders depending on the date of an upcoming appointment of a particular patient. This will help ensure that a slot is not wasted and the customer/patient does not forget about their appointment.
2. Survey Forms
An automated messaging system can set up campaigns to be sent to all your customer lists. This message can contain a link to the survey. Sending survey forms to your customers is a great way to engage with your customers and get their feedback regarding your services. Based on the feedback of your customers you can identify gaps in your business operations and services and improve.
3. Payment Links
The billing process can also be automated after the delivery and completion of a service. As texting is a highly engaging communication medium, it is highly likely that these text will be read. With the convenience of clicking on a link and being lead to the payment link the entire process becomes easy for both you and your customers.
4. Birthday Messages
Birthday text automation allows you to send birthday wishes to your customers automatically. Once the customer data is added to your automated text messaging software or integrated with your CRM, automatic birthday texts can be sent to your customers.
Why Do You Need Automated Text Message?
You must be thinking, with such huge benefits of automation, why are we talking about something as simple as texting? To put it in the simplest words, texting ensures maximum engagement. Wait, we are not just making unfounded statements. Let’s have a look at the stats.
1. Better Engagement Rates
SMS has a 98% open rate as compared to email messaging
2. Better Read Rates
60% of customers read texts within 1-5 minutes after receiving them
3. Increased Accessibility
As of 2021, 67 million Americans redeem coupons via mobile phones.
4. Preferred by Customers
48.7 million people chose to receive business SMSs in 2020. (Source: Text Local)
5. Drives More Revenue
96% of marketers using text messages said it helped them drive revenue. ( Source: Attentive Mobile) Suffice to say leveraging the power of texting should be a top priority for any business owner. Couple this with automation and you will be able to achieve skyrocketing results. Let’s see some ways in which an automated texting service can help increase customer engagement in your business and eventually drive great results.
How to Use Automated Text Message for Your Marketing Strategies?
Every marketer, as well as every business owner, is aware of the main stages of a marketing funnel. A potential lead goes through this funnel which starts with awareness and ideally ends with loyalty. Automated text messages can help you in each of these stages. For the purpose of this article, we will be concentrating on the last stage i.e Loyalty.
Loyalty ensures that customers keep returning to your business. Loyalty however comes at a price. The price obviously is providing the ‘best customer experience’. If customers are unable to find value in your business they probably won’t return. So to gain customer loyalty the first step is providing the best customer experience. That however in itself doesn’t completely guarantee that customer will return. Every business out there knows how vital customer experience is, all of them are on the same quest to provide the best.
What can however distinguish you is how you choose to ‘engage’ your customers. It can make all the difference! This is exactly where text automation or automated text message for that matter, can help you out.
As with the marketing funnel stages, there are different stages of building customer loyalty where you could use automated text message. Some of them are as follows :
1. Building trust and credibility
Loyalty and trust go hand in hand. People will be loyal to you if they can trust you and trust comes with proving your worth. To show that you are a master in your field, you need to have a few marketing strategies up your sleeve. These marketing strategies can make use of automated text messages. Let’s see how.
When you are capable of educating customers about your field, they will be able to see you as a thought leader. This builds trust and credibility. One of the ways in which you can prove your mettle in this area is by sending personalized newsletters or information pamphlets to your customers. This will make them remember you whenever the specialized need arises and also keep the customers ‘engaged’. As we discussed this engagement is necessary to keep up the customer loyalty.
How can you automate this process? The good news is any kind of marketing campaign has the potential to be automated if used through the correct platform. For our example of newsletters, you can use software that helps you personalize it according to which customer you are sending to, schedule it to go on a particular date, and also send a follow-up message if needed. For text messages, you can provide the link to the newsletter in the text body. The text body also can be personalized.
2. Making the customer onboarding easy
If your business requires that your customers fill up a form before availing your services, for example, if you have a healthcare practice, then patient intake forms are a requirement, or if you have a real estate business and you wish to get the buyer information, these situations require the customer to prefill a form. This process can be made a lot easier and more comfortable, if you give the customers an option of filling these forms online, in the comfort of their homes.
You can text automate this process by scheduling or instantly sending a text message with the required form link. With the help of automated text messages, the customers can then fill this out and submit it before they come to visit your business. This will help save both your and the customer’s time and make for a seamless onboarding process.
3. Reducing no-shows in your business
Another aspect of maintaining customer loyalty is ensuring that they don’t miss their scheduled appointment. Sometimes customers need a reminder for the upcoming event because it’s possible that they forget about it.
Automated text messaging can prove useful in such a situation. You can schedule automated text messages that serve as appointment reminders. Different softwares offer different solutions but mostly you would be able to schedule these reminders to go hours before the appointment, on the day of the appointment, or even 2 days or a week before. Timely spaced-out reminders will help ensure that your customers do not forget about the appointment.
4. Reactivating customers
Customer reactivation involves ‘bringing back’ those customers who have been dormant for a while. But why is it so important? It’s up to six times cheaper to sell to a previous customer than a new one. A Harvard Business School found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits between 25 and 95%.
So how can you reactive customers through automated text messages? You can start by making a list of customers who haven’t engaged with you for a particular period of time. If you have CRM, you will be able to filter contacts according to their last engagement with you. Once you have the list ready you can schedule a text reactivation campaign and send it to the aforementioned list of contacts. A reactivation text message can look something like :
“ Hey {{firstname}}, we haven’t seen you at {{businessname}} in a while. Would you like to schedule an appointment for {{service}}”
Tip : A tip to re-engage customers is content marketing. You can send relevant content, social posts, blogs, or podcasts to keep your customers engaged.
What Can You Achieve With Automated Text Messaging?
We just discussed above how we can you use automated text message for your business’s marketing strategies. So, what results can you achieve with text automation then?
1. Customer retention
Customer retention can be seen as a function of customer experience and engagement. Both these parameters could use automated text messaging to do their bidding. For example, one of the ways in which customer experience is made better is by instant communication. Ease of communication with businesses helps improve the customer experience and in turn, stabilizes customer retention. Customers are highly engaged with texting channels as it has the highest open rate and reply rate.
2. New Customer Acquisition
Bulk texting becomes easy with automated text messages. Once you have all your potential customer’s data ready, you would want to be able to send them a message. Automated text messages can make this step easier for you. Incentivized text messages are a good way to start your bulk text marketing strategies. Along with this, the cost of acquisition is also relatively lower with text messaging.
3. Improved Review Generation
Automating the process of review generation can help increase the number of reviews for your business. You can set up the time and date of the review request text along with follow-up texts to ensure that your message is read. One of the customers of Emitrr was able to improve their business reviews by 100% just by using automated text message
How to Get Started With Automated Text Messaging for Your Business?
Emitrr is the best automated text messaging service for businesses to get started with automated texting. You can follow these simple steps to get started with automated texting.
1. Login to Emitrr
Go to https://accounts.emitrr.com/.
2. Go to “campaigns” on the left navigation panel
Select Campaigns >> Automated.
3. Select “create automated campaigns”
On the top right you’ll find a button labeled “Create automated campaigns.”
4. Write the text message
Use personalization, attachments, templates, form requests, link shortener if necessary. Send immediately or schedule for later.
5. Select conditions/triggers
Select the condition or trigger with which you want the text message automation to start.
And there you go, you have started your first automated text message for your business!
FAQs
Absolutely you can, but it depends on the platform through which you wish to send the message. For business purposes, you can use texting software that comes with the option of scheduling messages and automating text messages.
Automated texting means texts which are sent automatically without human intervention. With automated texting all you need to do is upload list of contacts and set your campaign.
Setting up automated texting services depends on software to software. However, most of them are easy to set up. You just need to buy a subscription for the software and run it on the desktop or as a mobile app (according to the availability)
These are the best apps that send automated texts:
1. Emitrr (for businesses)
2. Shortcuts app (for Iphone)
3. Google Message app (for Android)
Conclusion
Automated text messages can be used in the entire customer journey, from acquisition to loyalty. It helps ensure that the customer is always engaged with your business and also gives them a channel to communicate with you if needed.
These in turn help improve the customer experience and satisfaction scores that are necessary for a customer to keep coming back to your business.
Automated text messages will help save a lot of time and smoothen out the process of customer communication. For example, with Emitrr you will be able to automate all your texting needs mentioned above. Emitrr also integrates with 1000+ CRMs to help make the entire process even more hassle-free. You can request a demo here if you are keen to learn more!
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