How To Build and Nurture Customer Relationships With SMS
Customer expectations evolve each day. If customers lack loyalty to your brand, they may take their business elsewhere. Savvy business owners understand the importance of building strong customer relationships in today’s business climate.
Some businesses focus heavily on customer acquisition with their marketing strategy, but both new customers and current customers need you to nurture them. In fact, studies show it costs five to 25% more to acquire a new customer than it costs to retain current customers. SMS marketing takes customer relations to a new level.
It is equally important to keep your best customers as it is to acquire new customers. When you track metrics, such as customer lifetime value (CLV), SMS marketing may help you gain new potential customers and keep current customers close through the maintenance of good customer relationships.
Why is it essential to foster excellent customer relationships?
In competitive markets, customers who feel they receive less-than-excellent customer service may drop subscriptions or stop buying from you altogether. They also take to social media and share their dissatisfaction with their network.
Oppositely, when you optimize the customer experience and deliver excellent customer service, customers may turn into brand advocates for life. Along the customer journey, we find many opportunities for relationship-building and ways to foster customer relationships.
SMS marketing may increase your customer retention rate, help you spend less on customer acquisition efforts, and beyond.
Increases customer retention
When you take the time to foster customer relationships, it becomes a critical way to reduce churn. Churn occurs when customers no longer use products or services from a particular business — and you lose some of your best customers. Repeat customers provide stability to a business. Existing customers know your products and services already, and they come to you with a basic level of trust.
When you continue to build the relationship with customers, you may achieve brand loyalty. Through SMS message marketing, you may follow up with customers and stay in touch with them through customer interactions via text.
When you foster customer relationships, it helps ensure a high customer retention rate.
Spend less on customer acquisition and conversion efforts
When you build strong customer relationships and earn high marks in customer satisfaction, you encourage brand loyalty. You then may see an increase in first-time customers who come from referrals and word-of-mouth.
Your best customers become your biggest brand advocates — and the best marketing campaign you may ever experience. When you establish strong customer relationships, this translates to lower costs spent to acquire new customers.
Why is SMS efficient for building customer relationships?
SMS looks like the perfect marketing assistant to build customer relationships because SMS messages go to your customer’s phone. SMS messages see a higher open rate than email because they arrive where your customer already spends their time. SMS serves as a customer relationship management tool to foster long-term relationships with customers.
Convenience and speed
When you incorporate SMS into your communications plan with customers, they get updates in real time. On average, people check their phones 96 times throughout the day. This means your message reaches them quickly and conveniently. Studies name SMS as the preferred communication method due to speed and convenience.
SMS feels genuine and personal
Your customers receive SMS messages on their phones. Once you build trust with them and they opt-in to receive your text messages, the right frequency of SMS messages enhances customer relationships.
When you deliver messages, such as customer support or follow-ups, it feels more personal than other forms of customer communication, like email marketing. Studies show customers prefer SMS marketing over email. In fact, the open rate for SMS marketing may reach as high as 98%.
Increase engagement
SMS messaging provides the perfect opportunity to increase engagement with customers. Your customer SMS texting campaign may start with onboarding new customers as they sign up to opt-in and creates a wide variety of opportunities for your customers to interact with your brand.
Five ways to use SMS to enhance customer relationships
If you want to know more ways to use SMS to provide a positive experience for your customers, continue to read below.
1. Conversational texting
Conversational texting comes in handy when time-sensitive issues with customers arise. Order delivery, delays, or other pertinent information may impact the customer experience. These conversations offer opportunities for two-way messages. You may automate them, deliver them via a live customer service agent, or use a combination of the two.
2. Exclusive deals and coupons
When you use SMS to send out promotional text messages, you may engage more with your customers. Customers who love your brand welcome incentives, such as 20% off or a Buy One Get One (BOGO) text.
3. Send updates about products, services, and events
When you engage with your customers via SMS text messaging, you may share information on big sales or product launches. You may also segment customers and send SMS messages to a target audience.
For example, you may send a targeted text message marketing campaign to a group of customers who bought a product that’s complimentary to a new product you plan to release.
4. Ask for feedback
Every customer wants to feel valued. Customer feedback helps improve the overall customer experience. After all, if you don’t know what you need to improve upon, how do you get better? Your most loyal customers may provide valuable information if you give them the chance to share it.
Use SMS messaging to get important customer feedback and improve your customer relationships.
5. Personalized recommendations
You may build trust and enhance customer relationships through customer segmentation. This enables personalized recommendations for products and services via SMS messaging. Through customer loyalty programs, you begin to learn more about your customer needs and preferences. Then, you may build SMS campaigns around a segmented customer base.
How TextSanity helps
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a small business, TextSanity helps you add SMS messaging to your digital marketing strategy. We provide ideas for SMS use cases based on your business. We also help with templates and automation incorporation to easily integrate text messaging into your current marketing communications plan through our CRM.
What to do next
You can build stronger relationships with your customers today if you add SMS messaging to your marketing communications plan. Get in touch with TextSanity today to find out which pricing plan is right for your business.
