How SMS Marketing Helps Build Customer Loyalty
Statistics show 54.7% of people stay loyal to one to five brands. Building customer loyalty occurs when customers develop trust in a brand they rely on to meet their needs.
Loyal customers impact your business. Often, the majority of marketing budgets go toward customer acquisition. Business owners spend plenty of time and money to craft a marketing strategy that attracts new customers. For example, lower-margin businesses may spend as much as 12 to 15% of revenue in their first year just to acquire new customers.
Typically, fewer marketing dollars go towards current customer retention than customer acquisition, despite the major impact customer retention has on business revenue. SMS marketing acts as an affordable, easy-to-use strategy for customer retention efforts.
A strong omnichannel marketing plan with social media, other digital marketing strategies, and testimonials create a strong foundation to acquire customers. However, SMS marketing appears as the smart, efficient, and cost-effective way companies today gain a loyal customer base.
Why is customer loyalty important?
Customer loyalty provides many benefits for businesses, such as how loyal customers decrease the cost to obtain new customers. New customers often find businesses through word-of-mouth marketing and customer referrals. Some businesses provide incentives to existing customers when they offer rewards through formal referral programs.
Additionally, more loyal customers often means a lower churn rate. Churn rate refers to customers who no longer purchase your products or services for a variety of reasons.
Sometimes, customers leave for reasons unrelated to your business. Still, many times, churn rate increases due to an unsatisfactory customer experience. Customer loyalty equates to customer retention, and metrics matter.
Repeat purchases and customer retention become more important than most realize: Repeat customers spend up to 67% more on your products and services than new customers.
Why SMS helps develop customer loyalty
When a customer opts-in with SMS messaging, they provide you with a direct connection to their phone. They trust you to send helpful information, and SMS communication may enhance their relationship with your brand. When you develop customer relationships through SMS, it provides a wide array of opportunities for brand loyalty.
Seven ways to use SMS marketing to build customer loyalty
As you consider strategies and tactics to achieve your customer acquisition goals, check out these seven ideas to use SMS marketing for building customer loyalty.
1. Use two-way texting
Two-way texting gives you an edge over your competition. The majority of businesses invest in a basic SMS messaging program. However, with two-way messaging, you open the door for communication to go both ways with your customers. It’s basically the difference between talking with your customers vs. talking at them. Two-way texting takes customer satisfaction to a new level.
Two-way texting also provides opportunities for customer feedback. You may use a chatbot, a live person, or a combination of both for your two-way texting, depending on your business model.
2. Welcome messages
When customers discover your store, you may prompt them to sign up for text message promotions at checkout. If they oblige and opt-in, the CRM deploys automation and sends a follow-up welcome text message to your new customer. This begins your SMS relationship with them.
Welcome messages start the SMS messaging relationship and help build customer loyalty.
3. Offer loyalty programs to opt into
Loyalty programs continue to increase in popularity. Just think about how many opportunities exist to earn rewards through a point system or punch cards. Customers get special treatment and discounts or become VIP customers through various loyalty programs.
Even when you order pizza, you can benefit from a customer loyalty program. Rewards like a free supreme pizza make for happy customers. Customer loyalty programs become strong incentives to encourage repeat customers.
When you use SMS marketing for loyalty programs, it enhances customer loyalty.
4. Promote exclusive deals and perks
Imagine you plan to launch your latest new product at a special price, with the option to pre-order through your rewards program. To get the word out fast, you may send an SMS campaign to your targeted list of customers.
Your loyal customers and brand fans love to get special offers and advance information about their favorite brand’s updates. These may include storewide sales, closeout sales to move product, or even pre-Black Friday sales only for top customers.
When you make your customers feel like VIPs SMS, you build even more upon your customer loyalty foundation.
5. Send personalized recommendations
One way to deliver excellent customer service is to send personalized recommendations based on customer needs. With a segmented customer list, you may store your customer’s preferences in a database to send them customized messages based on their purchase history. This is a strong way to promote customer loyalty and increase your customer retention rate.
When you send personalized recommendations via SMS, you communicate to your customer you understand their needs and preferences.
6. Essential updates
If you want to build a loyal customer base, keep your customers up to speed on essential updates about their products or services.
Essential updates sent via text messaging provide efficient communication for businesses such as retailers, e-commerce stores, medical offices, personal services, and more. Helpful updates include appointment reminders, shipping notifications, and product delivery updates. You may also send billing information and reminders.
People are busy, and they appreciate it when they receive these essential updates conveniently on their phones. When you make your customers’ lives easier, you build loyalty.
7. Segment customers with specific tags
Customer data takes your business to new heights. One of the superpowers of SMS marketing campaigns involves segmenting customers through specific tags. You may tag customers for various categories, such as the type of products they buy. You may also flag how much or how frequently they make purchases and other important information that helps you customize the information you send.
When a brand sends text messages about products or services that don’t pertain to us, we become less likely to read subsequent messages. Alternatively, when brands consistently deliver texts that interest us, it adds value and enhances the customer experience.
For example, if you sell a few different product lines, you can tag each customer based on the type of product they purchase from you. You may send any similar products you promote to the tagged group of customers.
Experts call this process customer segmentation. This powerful tool may majorly boost your customer loyalty. It’s easy to implement, and you may go back to edit data at any time.
How TextSanity helps
TextSanity helps businesses level up with SMS marketing, from small operations to large enterprise businesses. We give our customers an edge in digital marketing strategies and customer communication. We offer templates and SMS plans to meet every level of business needs.
What to do next
Get in touch with Texperts in SMS marketing today to build customer loyalty and create stronger relationships with your best customers. You’ll wonder what you did before SMS marketing.
