Text messaging is a powerful marketing tool, but you just can’t engage with all of your customers manually. That’s where automated text messaging comes in. An automated text messaging service can engage your customers via text in ways that serve everyone, and remove some of the burden of texting with customers from yours and your employees’ shoulders.
Automating text outreach can lead to higher conversion rates and a more personalized approach to marketing. It can help you engage with customers even outside of your normal business hours. It can relieve your employees of some of their duties, so they can have more time for more complex things. You can use automated text messaging to gather feedback from your customers and keep them in the loop about what’s going on with your business. Automated texting for business saves time and money – and it makes it easier for you to engage with your customers via their preferred means of communication.
Engage with Customers Outside of Business Hours
When you’re running a small business, you can’t be available to answer customer texts 24 hours a day. When you invest in an automated text messaging service that uses SMS autoresponders, you can be available to address your customers’ concerns day or night. Even if you’re just sending an out-of-office notification to every customer that texts you outside of your regular business hours, that can still do a lot to improve retention. It lets your customers know you’re not ignoring them – you’re simply not open, and you’ll address their message as soon as you can.
Free Up Employee Time for More Important Things
Your employees’ time is too valuable to spend doing things like confirming or rescheduling appointments. An SMS autoresponder service can handle cancellations, confirmations, and reschedulings so your employees don’t have to. It’ll be one less thing they have to worry about, and it will free up their time for more important, complex tasks that only human beings can handle.
Gather Feedback
Automated text messaging is a great way to generate reviews and gather direct feedback from your customers via surveys. Generating positive customer reviews of your business will encourage new customers to try out your products and services. Ninety-five percent of customers read online reviews before making a purchasing decision, and 72 percent won’t make a purchasing decision at all without reading reviews. Customers are most likely to leave positive reviews at the moment of highest satisfaction – right after they have received a pleasing product or service. So you need to send review invites to your customers at the right time – right as they’re leaving your business, not the next day or the next week. Automated text messaging can help with that, because you can follow up every transaction with a review invite in a timely manner. Sending automated texts that are triggered by a transaction can be a great way to effectively get customer feedback, including in the form of short surveys.
Send Announcements, Updates and More
Review invites and out-of-office notifications aren’t the only things you can effectively communicate to your customers via automated text. You can use an automated text messaging service to send emergency alerts to your employees or announcements about upcoming sales and promotions to your customers. You can keep customers in the loop about new developments with your business, and send valuable notifications regarding ongoing issues, like support tickets.
Customers Prefer to Communicate with Businesses Via Text
Perhaps the most compelling reason to use automated text messaging in your business is because most customers prefer to communicate with their favorite brands via text. Seventy-four percent of customers prefer to communicate with businesses via text.
Of course, most customers prefer to engage with a business over text if they know that a real person will see their message and respond to it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use SMS autoresponders to handle the influx of text messages you might get from customers. It simply means that you need to set up your autoresponder program to trigger a response from a real person if certain conditions are met – including if the customer asks to communicate directly with a representative.
Does automated text messaging have a place in your business? It should! Customers love to engage with their favorite companies and brands via text, and you might be surprised at how much time and money SMS autoresponders can save your company. Automate some of your outgoing texts, so you can bring in more customers and make more money.
