Send Them Your Best This Holiday Season
Your Guide To Winning More Business And Achieving Stronger Retention By 2023
Before you send cards, phone calls, or emails – try texting your customers first.
Did you know that texting is the most-preferred method of digital communication today? 87% of consumers say they ignore phone calls from unknown numbers ‘often’ or ‘very often.’ Text messages, on the other hand, have a nearly 100% open rate. And for businesses specifically, 90% of leads preferred to be texted rather than called.
Yet many businesses have yet to cater to these customer preferences: today, only 14% of businesses utilize SMS/MMS texting to communicate messages or offers to customers, whereas 76% of businesses report utilizing email and almost 100% of US businesses use voice calls to reach customers.
Conversion rates tell a story of their own: multiple SMS marketing research studies have found that the average conversion rate for SMS marketing is between 30-45%. If you work in or around Marketing, this should shock you: by contrast, email averages a 3.26% conversion rate, Google Ads average 3.17% conversion rates, and even well-targeted Facebook/Meta ads still only achieve an average of 9.21%.
You have likely seen holiday ads, emails, or other marketing creatives being planned for your business – but if you don’t have a plan for supplementing your campaigns with texting (by adding a click-to-text button for digital mediums, and a “text [keyword]” call-to-action for your print creatives, for example), you are missing out on substantial growth opportunities.
For more stats on texting, check out this blog post where we aggregated research from numerous recent studies. It was also published on FOX, USA Today, and Market Watch.
Keep your messages personalized, relevant, and timely.
Especially when you’re sending outbound messages, each communication with a customer should bring new and specific value to your relationship with them. Generic offers ‘blasted’ out to your entire CRM database are NOT going to achieve this, and will hurt your brand and retention in the long run. But that doesn’t mean you can’t send messages to larger lists of customers!
A great starting point for tailoring your messages to feel more personal is by adding their name – and maybe even adding yours, too. A merge field that inserts their name can immediately turn a text into a direct, one-to-one conversation. Better yet still, if your company has multiple teams or personnel, and there is a manager or sales/service rep who is sending the message and has worked with that customer in the past, have them add their name as a signature in the message. If a customer remembers you, and sees that you are following up with them and remember them, they are much more likely to respond and do business with you.
Another key practice for curating personally-relevant messages is sending to targeted lists. To do this, you’ll want to begin by segmenting your customers based on the products/services they own, based on their specific preferences or service intervals, or by any other major criteria that impacts how they do business with you. Once you’ve created lists, figure out what type of offer would be most valuable to those customers – and WHEN it would be most valuable, as well. For example, if you have a list of customers on a 6-month subscription, you might offer them a discounted 12-month subscription; those customers would be most likely to redeem that offer as they’re approaching the time of their renewal period, so you’d want to send it around month 4 or 5.
Ideally, you are tailoring the offer or recommendation you’re sending to fit each list of customer, are using their first names in your message, and are scheduling them out to be sent at an impactful time (and at a convenient, non-invasive time of day).
Automate for better consistency and quality.
Leave manual admin efforts behind in 2022: there are numerous customer communications you likely send on a daily or weekly basis that could ALL be automated to free up your time.
Booking confirmation and reminders, pre-appointment forms or instructions, and post-service surveys or review requests are all things that can – and should – be automated. Captivated allows you create ‘workflows’ for these types of communication processes, as well as for those follow-ups that you (or your Sales/Customer Care teams) send on a certain cadence after every appointment or purchase.
To find out how you can implement effective automation to generate better conversations, maintain strong customer relationships, and save time for yourself and your teams, see our resources below and schedule a demo today!
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*If you are an existing Captivated customer, head to our Help Center for more information about setting up your own automations and/or creating campaign templates
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