How to Send Follow-Up Text Messages to Clients

In the not-so-distant past, the primary modes of communication between businesses and customers were snail mail, telephone, and email marketing.

Today, business texting and SMS marketing are the go-to resource for large and small companies to effectively communicate with customers, collect invaluable data, and convert leads into sales. They offer high open rates, facilitate the sales process, and are a great way to help your support team interact with your clientele.

But just sending SMS messages isn’t enough. Your team must implement a customer-focused approach that includes meaningful and empathetic dialogue — and lots of listening.

How to send follow-up messages

Follow-up messages are a great way to make customers feel that you’re listening to and incorporating their feedback.

For example, suppose someone tells you that they went to your store and had difficulty finding what they wanted and ends their feedback there. In that case, you should follow up by asking what made it difficult and what they believe could be done differently to mitigate this difficulty.

This response shows that you genuinely care about their concerns, improving your company name and your relationship with the customer.

Sending follow-up messages through business texting is an excellent opportunity to have meaningful engagement with your customers and has an added side effect of building customer and brand loyalty.

Sounds simple right? With TextSanity, it is! Our platform offers tools like text message templates, appointment confirmations, and credit card payment confirmations to help you remain actively engaged in communication with your customers.

Create a messaging calendar

Effective communication demands rhythm and harmony. We will discuss this more later, but it is essential to utilize the tools at your disposal to ensure you stay on track in communicating and following up with your customers, such as the messaging calendar tool with TextSanity.

The messaging calendar is your command center for scheduling future mass and individual SMS messages. Messages scheduled for future delivery can be edited up until the moment they send, and our clean, easy-to-use interface will get you up and running with effective SMS marketing in no time.

 Send follow-up text messages at the right times, to the right people

It’s also vital to send messages to the right people. That often means placing your customers in appropriate categories to reflect their preferences.

For instance, if you own a restaurant and like to create foodie groups based on dietary preferences, you may make a vegan category, meat lover category, vegetarian category, and sweet tooth category.

If you had a message to communicate to your meat lover customers, you wouldn’t send that message to vegan customers.

Send your message at the right time

The timing of when to send your message is also important. Aside from federal laws preventing communication between certain hours of the day, timing is everything regarding effective communication. Creating harmony and rhythm to your cadence of messaging is paramount.

As a business manager or owner, understanding timing is critical to ensure a positive customer experience with your text message marketing. It can be the difference between having customers excited about pricing and payment reminders and watching them unsubscribe.

Phone numbers are often personal, and while SMS marketing is not the same as unsolicited phone calls or voicemails, you still want to ensure you’re respecting your customers’ privacy. For this, timing is everything!

 Group customers into audiences using tags

Our platform uses tags to determine which messages are sent to whom. Tags allow you to categorize your customers into groups for mass text messages. Tags streamline the communication process and enable you to send your message to your target audience quickly.

As your company begins SMS marketing and business texting, you gather data on your customers based on data sets you and your team create. Tags organize this information.

If you have a customer who buys only one type of product, they belong in that category with every other customer who shares their interest. That way, sending a mass text message to this group of customers is simple – just choose their tag.

Why send follow-up messages to clients?

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• Remind customers about appointments
• Give customers a chance to reschedule
• Notify customers about empty shopping carts
• Split up your messaging cadence

Listening versus hearing is the foundation of all verbal and nonverbal communication. Also referred to as active listening. This form of communication converts hearing what someone says into having empathy for what they feel, expressed through what they say. We listen for a variety of reasons, including to learn, for fun, to gain understanding, and to gather information.

Follow-up messages are an excellent opportunity to employ active listening while business texting with your customers instead of merely responding with auto-replies. Sending these messages keeps your customers engaged with your business and products and increases your possibilities of increasing sales and converting prospective customers into repeat customers.

Below are a few examples of how you can utilize follow-up text messages to improve communication productivity.

Follow-up messages remind customers about appointments

Follow-up messages are a great way of reminding your customers about their upcoming appointments or reservations at your business. We all lead increasingly busy lives, and your customers are no different. Between work, kids, and extracurricular activities, it is easy to forget appointments — reminder texts can help prevent no-shows.

Giving your customers the peace of mind that they will get reminded of these visits will be greatly appreciated and increase the probability of them showing up. Missed appointments and reservations leads to reduced sales.

For instance, if you own a dentist’s office, using appointment text messages to remind your customers about their upcoming service can ensure your patients show up or inform you that they want so that you can fill that time block with someone else.

Follow-up messages give customers a chance to reschedule

Continuing with the dentist’s office example above, if your patient cannot make their appointment, they can reply to your appointment reminder that they need to reschedule for a future date. This helps you make sure they stay on your schedule. And it allows you to quickly put someone else in the chair so that your income stream remains steady.

The follow-up is imperative to customer loyalty. If you fail to respond to your customers’ messages, they’ll be more likely to turn to a competitor. People require genuine and effective communication to maintain relationships of all types, and business relationships are no exception.

Follow-up messages notify customers about empty shopping carts

Properly timed shopping cart reminders can reignite your prospect’s interest in your products. For instance, if they add an item to your cart and then leave your website, sending an empty shopping cart business text a couple of hours later may be just the push they need to go through with the purchase.

In other words, sending reminder texts may be the simplest way to ensure you eventually get to send that order confirmation text.

Follow-up messages split up your messaging cadence

We have talked a lot about cadence, rhythm, and communication harmony. Why? Because it is essential for effective SMS marketing strategies and business texting. Follow-up messages split up your cadence so that you can compose a beautiful communication composition.

Splitting up your cadence is similar to the verses and choruses in a song. Combined, they form what we know as a song, but independently, they are incomplete.

With business texting, setting a cadence is essential, and using follow-up messages to split that cadence essentially creates multiple rhythms for mass text messages. The result is an enjoyable business text messaging experience for your customers.

What to do next

Text us to discuss what our platform can offer your company’s marketing team. We offer all the tools you need — from SMS templates to text message keywords to easy automation — to help you effectively communicate with your customers through SMS marketing and business texting.

We look forward to speaking with you soon!