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Introduction to Business Messaging
The era of digitization has created room for a world of possibilities with respect to the way business owners communicate with their customers, this digitization bought with it the ability to shop from the comfort of our homes, easy tracking and quick shipping these experiences have transformed customer experiences at large.
This has also led to a significant change in consumers’ expectations from any business they engage with, The Business messaging system that a company deploys has a major role to play in meeting these expectations and ensuring a good customer experience.
Customer expectations are set the moment they start looking for goods or services that align with their needs. Thanks to the world wide web, it is easy to find and engage with a business. Gone are the times when people used to call or visit businesses before engaging.
People today, have access to reviews, chatbots, texts and various other ways to communicate with a business, and potential customers like to have quick resolutions to their initial queries otherwise your company might immediately fall out of their consideration set, as a result, An effective Business messaging system has become the ‘new normal’ for both consumers and service providers.
Interesting Fact – 66 percent of customers would not mind paying more for products or services that are supported by business messaging.
While it might be impossible for all businesses to match the efficiency of giants like Amazon, Business Messaging practices deployed can certainly help in managing customer expectations.
What is it that customers want? How do customers interact with businesses in general? What best messaging practices do businesses need to adopt? How to establish meaningful and long-lasting relationships with their customers through business messaging?
Let’s find out!
What is Business Messaging?
Business messaging is the way businesses interact with their customers across various communication channels. Businesses deploy the most favourable communication channel to share reminders, updates, answer queries and constantly keep their audience engaged.
Fun fact: About 86 percent of customers find messaging aka texting to be the most preferred channel to communicate with a business.
Below are examples of a few business messaging channels –
- SMS
- Webchat
- Facebook Messenger
- Direct Messages
- MMS
- Google My Business
Business messagings' impact on customer experience
The advent of globalisation, coupled with the internet revolution have together changed customer demands. What they now want is the ease of connecting with a businesses. On the other hand, businesses are trying hard to acquire leads and amping up their marketing initiatives.
If we put ourselves in our customers’ shoes we’ll realize that they simply want to connect with your business using the most convenient medium available, get a quick resolution to their queries and gain access to information that might not be easily available on your business website.
If calls and emails are still the only way for potential customers to get in touch with you, then you might be losing out on substantial business.
Business Messaging in the new age is a way for brands and consumers to communicate with each other through a wide set of messaging channels. From sales and marketing to customer support, business messaging seeks to resolve a multitude of problems, thereby providing a great experience to customers.
Benefits of Business Messaging
Business messaging is beneficial for both customers and for businesses. Let’s look at some of the key ways business texting acts as a boon for both.
Benefits of business messaging for customers
- Access to multiple communication channels: Customers can reach out to businesses through their preferred communication channels such as SMS, MMS, direct messages, Facebook Messenger, Web chat, Emails and GMB Messages.
- Ease of responding to conversations: Certain business messaging channels allow customers to easily respond to conversations at their convenience.
- Access to communication history: Customers can access the communication history for their reference and ensure that they do not need to repeat the details they have already submitted in their previous interactions.
- Ability to exchange content in various forms: Business texting offers the seamless exchange of rich content, which is not possible in the case of phone calls.
- Convenience with respect to submitting requests 24/7: Customers can submit requests round the clock from a communication channel of their choice, without having to wait for an agent.
Benefits of business messaging for businesses
- Enhance customer acquisition: The conversational nature of certain business messaging channels make it easier for businesses and customers to connect easily, creating an environment for real-time one on one communication.
- Handle multiple chats: When businesses use business messaging softwares, they can handle multiple chats at once from various customer touch points. Thus not only is it time-saving but also cost-effective.
- Achieve customer satisfaction: When businesses offer instant solutions to their customers, the customers feel satisfied and trust the business.
- Enhance customer engagement: Business texting acts as a platform for businesses to connect with their customers, drive more active conversations and make them feel valued.
Examples of business messaging
Having talked about the benefits of business messaging, let’s now explore the different ways in which businesses can engage with their customers.
- Welcome message: This type of message can be sent to new subscribers or customers. It sets the stage for further communication.
- Promotional message: As the name suggests, this type of message includes sending discount codes, referral codes, or special offers to the customers. It is a great way to encourage users to make a purchase.
- Reminder message: This message includes sending appointment reminders, and is highly effective in reducing no-shows.
- Conversational message: This type of message is used for general communication between the business and the customer. It could be about some product specifications or address general FAQs.
- Verification message: Businesses use verification messages for sending One Time Passwords (OTP) in the case of logins and payments.
- Security alert: Such type of messages are sent to customers when there is any suspicious activity detected on their accounts.
- Customer service message: From resolving general queries to addressing problems faced by the customers, this type of message is purely to ensure customer satisfaction.
- Confirmation message: This type of message is to keep the customer posted about their booking or orders.
Top use cases of business messaging
When customers engage with businesses, what they want is a seamless communication experience. They need faster response times and prefer human beings for communication instead of self-service-enabled chatbots.
It is business messaging that can help you offer such an experience to your customers. Let’s dig in further and observe how you can use business messaging:
Appointment booking
Incorporating business messaging eliminates the manual hassle of scheduling appointments and managing schedules.
Your customers can easily book appointments with whichever channel they prefer on your business messaging platform, and you can direct your focus on growing your business.
You can also schedule instant appointments by integrating live chat with your calendar.
Text messaging can especially be a great way for dental practices or healthcare practices in general to communicate with their patients, as it has a high engagement rate.
Customer Support
As a business owner, your priority must be to serve your customers and assist them right from making an inquiry about your services to their post-purchase concerns.
With a simple ‘message us’ button on your website, you can address your customers’ concerns or queries in real-time, thereby gaining their loyalty in return.
Business messaging can help you transform customer support for you in two ways:
- It will help you respond faster to queries
- You can analyse the messages that have come across and direct those to the right agent for addressal
Sale conversions
To be able to convert potential leads into customers, you must have a stellar website that is optimised for SEO and has compelling content.
In addition, you need to have a business texting platform in place to be more accessible to your audiences.
Having a live chat integrated on your website and including excellent imagery during conversations are some ways to promote and increase sales.
Enabling notifications
Notifications are an excellent way to engage and re-engage with your customers, which can further help you drive conversions and retain customers.
You can make use of business messaging to stimulate user engagement by sending them updates in real-time.
You can utilise business texting to send personalised offers, news updates, and even reminders.
Also, notifying your customers about some special offers, urgent updates, or any last-minute deals is another great way to use business messaging.
Social engagement
It is your accessibility to your potential or current customers that decide whether you’re a business that can be trusted.
The more reachable you are, the more credible you’ll be considered.
Having a social media presence is as important as having a website in an era where more than half of the world’s population uses social media.
Have people reach out to you through simple Direct Messages, and open your business to conversations that are not time-sensitive. This will make people trust your brand and will also help you land conversions.
Marketing efforts
Business messaging allows you to interact with people, present yourself as a brand, and enhance your online presence.
With business texting, you can easily use data to segment your users and also improve interaction by providing them with personalised content.
You can also engage with your customers by incorporating Google’s Business Messages into your business messaging strategies.
Google’s Business Messages are a real-time chat service that assists users in getting in touch with businesses through their Google Business Profile listings. It is a free service that allows people to approach businesses through Google Search and Google Maps.
TIP: How to choose the right business messaging platform for your business
These are the prerequisites of choosing the ideal business messaging platform that caters to your needs:
- Pricing: Understand the features that you want for your messaging campaign. Check the price for each feature and make sure that there are no hidden costs involved.
- Features: What goals do you seek to achieve through the messaging platform? Do you want it for marketing, sales, or customer support? Ensure that the features you select align with your business goals.
- Access to API: Having access to API is a way to achieve a better user experience. Make sure you have this in your messaging platform.
- Channel support: What all channels of communication does the platform support?
SMS texting for business messaging
Out of many channels that businesses use to engage with their customers, texting is quickly becoming the most popular, wondering why? Well, text messages have an open rate of 98 percent and a response rate of 40%. This is in sharp contrast to the open rate of emails, which is just 21 percent and a response rate of 2%.
Considering the success rate of text messages, businesses use this channel the most as they are then certain about their efforts yielding results.
Learning how to word your business texts is also a important part of business text messaging. One must follow business texting etiquette’s while communicating with their customers.
Business texting platforms
If you are a business owner, then business texting goes a long way in helping you achieve your business goals. there are a couple of factors that you should consider while choosing a business messaging solution. But before we move to that, what exactly is a business messaging platform?
A business texting platform is a customer experience solution that offers seamless communication between businesses and their customers. Aimed at building interactive customer experiences, business texting platforms or software are equipped with integrated development environments and APIs. A business texting platform is not just your usual SMS; it is a step ahead. We’re talking about audio and video content, chatbots, carousels, and quick replies.
How Emitrr’s capabilities can help you achieve your business goals
Emitrr’s business messaging capability allows you to seamlessly respond to messages from various channels such as Google, Facebook Messenger, and SMS, form a single interface.
You also have the option to text-enable your landline from your present business number to send and receive text messages.
Emitrr’s business messaging feature also offers templates for you to easily respond to FAQs. Also, you can create reference notes, set up call forwarding, and even assign conversations to your internal team through this feature.
Check out how one of our customers is using business text messaging for their business needs.
Book a demo to understand how you can multiply conversions and build revenue in a short period of time.
Conclusion
In a world where people prefer texts over calls, it is absolutely crucial that you use messaging to your advantage to acquire more customers and ensure customer satisfaction.
Establishing and being active on multiple customer touch points is absolutely necessary in order to generate more customer conversations and keep building that sales funnel.
If you are new to messaging, then Emitrr’s capabilities will surely help you engage seamlessly with your customers. So book a demo and get ready to transform customer engagement.
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