Generate Leads with Successful SMS Campaigns: Expert Tips
Consumers spend more than five hours each day on their smart phones. Text message marketing makes a lot of sense in a world where cell phones are ubiquitous. After all, communicating with your audience on the platforms they’re most active on SMS.
Small business owners should make SMS messaging a part of their marketing strategies. It’s an effective way to generate leads, answer prospect questions and update current customers.
SMS marketing campaigns align with your various sales and promotions. You present special offers to your leads via text message with the goal of getting them to convert. Sending exclusive offers to subscribers makes them feel special. Getting someone to feel all warm and fuzzy inside builds brand loyalty.
When running SMS marketing campaigns, be sure to receive an opt-in. Cold messaging people who haven’t expressed interest in your products or services is invasive. Interrupting someone’s day like that will paint your brand in a negative light. Also, while sending texts is inexpensive for you, some people get charged every time they receive them. Because of these reasons, only send SMS text messages to people who have opted in to receive them.
To differentiate your SMS campaign from a regular ad, make it special. Run a flash offer that’s only available to consumers who have subscribed to your text message program. Add a call to action to encourage prospects to act now.
One allure of SMS is that its open rates are high compared to email open rates. A whopping 98 percent of sent SMS messages are opened! That said, people can opt-out of receiving texts from you if they feel the content is irrelevant or spam my. Every sent business text must be relevant to avoid user opt-outs. Of course, a killer special offer on a product or service your audience wants will do well.
To achieve lead-generation success via SMS, take the following five steps recommended in the graphic:
- Make your SMS information easily accessible across all channels.
- Have a strong call to action.
- Use SMS to qualify leads.
- Set up a fast process to follow up with SMS leads.
- Start now to get ahead of the competition.
How to Use SMS for Lead Generation?
- Use text to collect email
You can reserve a keyword for your business like those mobile companies have so it’s always your name that pops up on the client’s phone. Once you have established a connection via phone with your client, you can now collect their email for further details. So, there you go, you have collected phone number as well as the email address of the client. Now you can combine both email and SMS channels to engage better with your prospects and clients.
- Don’t leave the customers with forms to fill
Answering a simple text is always easier than filling out a complete form. People find it easier as it saves them time. So, don’t make your texts promotional or full surveys. Just try to make a conversation with your clients rather than just promoting yourself.
- Prefer texts over calls
It is very likely that the person you are calling will attend your call or call you back after some time. No one has the time for that, but with text, in their text messages they can easily catch up with you whenever they want. The lesser the pressure on the client, the better they connect with you and your brand.
- Make the information available everywhere
Whether it is your website, your advertisement, your social media pages or your Google listing, your SMS text number must be available in all places to make it easier for the customers to find you from wherever they are.
Having a contact number for SMS will provide you with many benefits :
- Better connection with customers
An immediate contact facility will enhance the connection between you and your customers. They will be able to better understand your services, as their questions will be answered right away.
- Easier communication
Text messages will make the communication between you and your customers a lot easier. The customers will not have to spend time finding an email address and contacting you via Hotmail or something. It’s a modern world, and you need to keep up.
- More customers
Believe it or not but having an SMS text number will increase your customers. Humans today always look for an easier way. When people know that your business is easy to work with and easy to communicate with, you sure will become popular in the social circles of your customers, and hence you will be increasing the traffic to your website and the people in your company as customers.
How to Use SMS to Enhance Your Business and Boost up Your Lead Generation?
If you use SMS in the right way, you can take all the advantages that come with it. However, there are some points that you should follow to get the maximum advantage out of this feature.
- Easy access to the text number
Well first things first, the text number should be made available on your website. Don’t leave the customers with a challenge to find your contact number, as it is somewhere hidden in your website, written as something unimportant.?
Make it clear with a proper heading, so that the viewer on your website can easily find it and access it. Treat it with the same importance as you treat the other parts of your website.
Make it available on the advertisements that you post so that wherever the customer sees you, they can contact you right away. Save the customer’s time and they will become a profit for you.
- Immediate response
Since all of this effort is being made for faster and effective communication the response to the text messages needs to be fast.
Taking a day to reply to one text message won’t serve the purpose here. The response needs to be in minutes if not seconds. Having a text messaging software to respond to the text messages automatically will be a good choice.
There are many bulk SMS software solutions available that deal with the bulk SMS and respond quickly to all of them. If the user is not getting an immediate response, he/she will get irritated and eventually lose interest in you, which is certainly not something that you want.
- Attract the customers with some deals
You see a lot of ads every day that you hardly ever notice, but you always notice an ad with the tag SALE or SPECIAL OFFER on it.
Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed of because that’s what we all do. It is the human nature. So why not use this psychology for your business.
Get the user to send you a text and give them something in return It always works, everyone likes some discount these days or something extra that they don’t have to pay for.
Once you are in the eyes of the customer, they will remember you, and they will return to you, if not today then probably tomorrow, to know if there is any other text that they can send. You need to be on their phones.
- Invite the customers for a review
Reviews always boost up the business mainly because it serves as a conversation starter between you and the customer. (All the big websites like Facebook, Google etc. always ask for reviews from their users.)
Make it easier for your customers, and make it just a single text. It will also help you to know more about your clients and know what they like and what they dislike about your company. It is a great way for betterment. And then, of course, it is a great way of having a connection with your clients.
It’s all about keeping your customers with you at all times.
SMS marketing is an effective and essential part of your marketing plan. It keeps the conversation between you and the customers going, and it is a great way to keep your clients informed about what you are doing.
What use will your email be if it stays in the spam folder? People are more likely to respond to a text message compared to an email or a phone call. Phone calls might irritate your customers, and if it’s just about giving the information about your latest offers, nobody has the time to listen to it. But a text message can serve the purpose.
SMS Text messaging is a great way to boost your business. It has been seen that businesses that use text messaging are found to be more successful as compared to the ones that don’t use it. Hence, consider introducing SMS into your marketing strategy and you will not regret.