SMS Marketing for Banks and Financial Services
There are over 4,400 banks in the United States, which indicates that the banking and financial services industry is a crowded, competitive market. Finding marketing advantages that set your bank or financial services business apart is essential for your success and sustained growth.
SMS marketing text messages are the best way to amplify the functionality of your marketing campaigns, enhance the customer experience, and create a communication channel preferred by most smartphone customers.
What is SMS marketing?
SMS is an acronym for Short Messaging Service. SMS messaging is the foundation of all texting and is universally accepted across all software platforms and mobile carrier service providers. Its universal acceptance makes SMS texting the gold standard.
Although innovations have arisen in the last few years that have amplified the various uses of texting, SMS remains the only universally reliable communication protocol.
SMS marketing harnesses the power of text messaging and provides real-time customer data that can be collected and tailored into defined categories, groups, and audiences.
This allows banks and financial institutions to automate notifications, send payment reminders, follow up with customers, increase response rates, and provide customer support at a higher level.
Ultimately, SMS marketing is just another medium for sending promotional and transactional marketing materials and information to your subscribers.
Instead of sending this information via the postal service, a television ad, or a newspaper ad, you can send it as a text directly to the customer’s smartphone.
Why use SMS marketing?
It’s essential to understand the habits of smartphone users to get a complete picture of why SMS marketing has such a massive advantage over other marketing strategies and mediums. Painting this picture begins with smartphone addiction.
For starters, 83% of smartphone users feel uneasy when they leave their smartphone behind, 54% panic when their battery drops below 20%, and over half report never going longer than 24 hours without their smartphones.
This smartphone addiction translates into high open rates and customer engagement. For instance, over 98% of smartphone users open a text notification within 90 seconds of receiving it.
The same users only open an email slightly over 20% of the time. Moreover, of the 98% who open their text message, nearly half engage with it, compared to less than 10% engaging with an opened email.
To put those numbers in perspective, approximately 45 of every 100 people who receive a text message engage with it. Only around two to five of every 100 people who receive a marketing email engage with it.
Those numbers are worlds apart and illustrate the enormous potential of SMS marketing.
How can banks and financial institutions use SMS marketing?
Now that you have an excellent foundational understanding of SMS, how it works, and why it should be a staple element of your overall marketing strategy, let’s explore various ways you can employ it to accomplish your marketing goals.
Welcome messages
Welcome messages are considered transactional text messages, meaning they don’t have the goal of promoting but instead have the intended purpose of engaging in conversation or providing relevant and vital information to clients and customers.
When a new customer becomes a member of your bank or financial institution or applies for a new credit card or loan, the TextSanity platform can send automated text messages welcoming them to the institution via drip campaigns.
Sending welcome messages is a great way to personalize the customer experience with your institution. Successful businesses are good at forming long-lasting and trusting relationships with their clients and customers, leading to customer loyalty.
To accomplish this, you can’t only communicate through marketing or promotions. Customers don’t want to constantly feel like they’re being sold on something.
Sending transactional messages demonstrates to your customers that you want to communicate and connect with them from time to time without ulterior motives to make a sale.
Customer support
Customer service and a high-touch customer experience are the hallmarks of businesses that excel above the competition in their industry. Having the best product or service on the market means nothing if you don’t have the customer service to back it up.
Since we’ve learned that customers prefer to communicate via text messaging, offering customer support via SMS texting increases customer satisfaction and makes providing customer support more efficient and cost-effective.
SMS texting can also send temporary passwords or usernames to help customers regain access to their online mobile banking apps. There’s nothing worse than needing to check your account balance or due date on a Saturday and not having access to your online account.
Important notices
Essential notices from banks and financial institutions are perhaps more important than most other industries because they involve personal and business finances and banking regulations.
Since customers generally always have their mobile phones with them, utilizing SMS texting means you can push important notices directly to them with the confidence they’ll be received promptly.
Two-factor authentication
Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. As our world becomes increasingly digital the need to protect personal, private, and sensitive information has never been more critical.
Two-factor authentication adds a substantial layer of protection and security for your customers. It gives them the peace of mind to know their private banking information is protected against unlawful or unethical intrusion.
SMS texting allows your financial institution to send a unique code to a customer attempting to log in to their online banking account to verify that it is indeed them trying the login.
This two-factor authentication method is the quickest, most efficient, and preferred way to enhance online banking security.
Confirmation messages
Confirmation messages are a great way to assure customers that their financial transactions have been processed or that their financial instruments have shipped and been delivered.
For instance, if a user makes a mobile deposit on their mobile banking app, a confirmation of receipt SMS text message can be sent directly to their device confirming the deposit.
If a customer applies for a new credit card, confirmation messages can be sent to inform the customer when the card ships and when it will be delivered.
Confirmation messages are also beneficial when confirming appointments. For instance, your financial institution may offer wealth management services requiring much more detailed meetings than the average bank transaction.
To accomplish this, you’ll need to schedule a time to sit down with your customer to discuss your bank’s various options to manage and increase their wealth.
To reduce no-shows and increase the efficiency of your staff’s time, send confirmation messages and appointment reminders via SMS business texting.
What are other ways banks and financial services can use SMS marketing?
The capabilities of SMS marketing for the financial services industry are practically limitless. You can use them for just about any communication your bank or financial institution needs to make with your customers and clients.
Some other uses for SMS marketing tools include:
- Providing notifications for various products and services in real-time
- Providing links to mobile apps for download
- Offering map links to your ATM network
- Sending notices for low account balance
- Give information on suspicious account activity and late fees
- Link to new credit applications
Additionally, SMS marketing and two-way business texting can provide on-demand educational information to customers when they have questions. Regardless of how your financial institution utilizes SMS business texting, the result will always be an enhanced customer experience.
The customer experience throughout their customer journey with your organization is crucial to remain competitive, build brand loyalty, and set yourself apart from the competition.
The bottom line
The TextSanity platform’s functionality makes accomplishing your SMS marketing goals and strategy straightforward. Our automation tools are designed to streamline the SMS texting process and reduce the time and employee resources needed to be successful.
Drip campaigns, keyword campaigns, tags, message calendars, messaging templates, and cadence recommendations are just a few of the tools we provide to make sending SMS text messages as easy as putting on your shoes in the morning.
The first step we recommend taking in your journey towards implementing SMS marketing in your bank’s marketing strategy is to explore our blog and website, then connect with our team.
We are highly experienced in SMS texting and marketing for all types of industries, and we are happy to answer any questions you may have.
We are convinced that there is no better marketing strategy than SMS marketing regarding efficiency, affordability, engagement rates, open rates, or functionality. Texting is our passion, and we can’t wait to help you use it to amplify your passion.
