To make your real estate chatbot an effective lead-qualifying tool, however, you need to structure it differently than your average customer service or troubleshooting chatbot. Here are 7 suggestions for creating an effective chatbot to help you find qualified buyers.

Brand your chatbot

To discourage your leads from thinking your real estate chatbot is a pesky pop-up ad, brand your chatbot and don’t be afraid to give it its own distinct personality. Think of your chatbot as a mascot for your business – friendly, approachable, and unique to your real estate agency. Get creative. If your agency specializes in beach-front properties, give your chatbot an appropriate name or identity, such as “Sandy the Assistant.” Your website is the digital version of your office, which makes your chatbot akin to your frontdesk receptionist. Set up your chatbot in that spirit.

Ask quick questions

A great way to immediately qualify your leads is to get the nitty-gritty details as soon as they enter the chat. These details include the zip codes they’re interested in, their budgets, their timelines, and other indicators that can give agents an idea of their buying intentions. With a system that saves all your conversations in a single customer record, agents can get the information they need to follow-up the chat, saving both the agent and the buyer time and money.

Keep it simple

When a potential buyer is seeking information through a chatbot, it’s likely because they’re not ready to pull the trigger. Keep your chatbot interactions simple and high-level and leave it to the real estate agent to ask more in-depth questions. Not every chatbot conversation will end with an introductory phone call or email with an agent. Sometimes it will be a virtual tour, information about financing or other resources that real estate agencies can offer. Your chatbot shouldn’t try to close sales; it should exist to assist customers with whatever they’re seeking.

Choose the right solution

Many chatbots are designed for customer service troubleshooting. You need to choose a provider whose chatbot services offer lead nurturing and can handle the nuance in conversations for potential buyers. Using sophisticated conversational branches and industry-tailored language, buyers feel like they’re getting information from a trusted resource rather than an automated robot.

Offer digital over personal

Potential buyers who are seeking out real estate information via chatbot are probably not ready to meet with an agent just yet. Program your real estate chatbots to offer more digital resources, rather than rushing them through to an agent. For instance, if a customer has indicated interest in a specific property, your chatbot should respond with a virtual tour, rather than an appointment request from an agent. Or if your customer says they are looking in the 90210 zip code, the chatbot should offer to send a link of listings specifically in that zip code. These can be sent via email or directly in the chat.

Measure and improve

Setting up your chatbot with all potential customer-inquiry scenarios should cover your bases, but out-of-the-ordinary requests or gaps in the conversational flow will happen. Regularly review conversation histories and inquiry-to-introduction turnover within your chatbot to ensure there aren’t hang-ups occurring in the conversational pipeline. You may also discover that customers are asking for information in an area you hadn’t thought of yet, giving you greater insight into what your buyers are looking for.

Never end without closure

If the chatbot conversation doesn’t reach a natural end, set up your chatbots to end with an offer for an agent to call. Chatbots are often programmed to wrap up conversations with “Did I answer all your questions today?” or something similar. If the answer is “no,” your chatbot should reply “Would you like for an agent to call you at [customer’s phone number]?” Offering a call from an agent – rather than providing the customer service email and phone number – is a much more personal and effective way to eliminate frustration among potential buyers and puts the power in their hands to decide next steps.

Chatbots don’t take the place of person-to-person interactions when a home buyer is working with a real-estate agent, but they can answer initial questions a buyer might have about a home. Chatbots can help you determine where a buyer is in the pipeline and help move them to the next level. Cahtbots are one more tool to handle routine inquiries, giving you the time you need to answer more complicated questions.

If you’re interested in learning more about SMS-Magic and chatbots, contact us!

It doesn’t have to be that way!

We’d be willing to bet that your customer relationship management system (CRM) contains an incredible amount of information about your customers, even first names. By using a name in your emails and texting campaigns, you personalize the communications right from the start. But that’s just one way for your CRM to help connect you to your customers.

Try a Conversational Messaging Hub

If your customers contact you more than once, they may not always reach the same person on your team. For example, a law firm may have a team managing the case load – attorneys, paralegals, intake specialists or other administrative staff members. When clients reach out, their lawyers may not be immediately available, but the clients still need updates. The team member who responds needs information quickly to serve the client.

If your CRM and your texting system work together, it would give you a single record that shows your staff all the interactions with the client, no matter what channel the client uses – text, email, phone or mail. When a text comes in, your staff members would be able to continue the conversation because they have the history at their fingertips.

If you have a customer service team, they will find this capability very useful, as well. One of the most often cited customer complaints is being bounced from person to person trying to solve a problem. If the customer must repeat the problem over and over, frustration can build quickly.

A conversational messaging hub stores all contacts for an individual into a single record. If a customer service rep must transfer a call, the next rep has all the information in front of them. It saves time, aggravation, and maybe, a customer relationship.

Compliance Laws are Getting Tougher. Are You Ready?

The European Union has recently adopted new privacy regulations, and we expect other countries to follow suit. Can your system handle customer requests?

You can send texts only to customers who have given you express written consent. In other words, customers who have opted into your communications. They can also opt out by asking you stop sending texts to them. If regulators ask to see your records, you must be able to prove you are following your customers’ requests.

Opting in and out of texts, however, are not the only customer requests you might be asked to verify if regulators come calling. A customer can ask that you “forget” them entirely – that all mention of them in your system is erased.

If your CRM works well with your texting capabilities, you won’t ever have to worry about compliance with GDPR or other rules and regulations.

Security is Everyone’s Concern

Even the smallest databases can contain enormous amounts of personal information that thieves want. In the past several years, criminals have hacked into the data of some of the largest and most successful companies in the world, and it isn’t pretty.

Keeping your CRM and texting capabilities secure is a shared responsibility, but your texting partner should be able to assure you that they have strong security policies in place. Their policies should be designed to keep all aspects of the system – technological, physical and administrative – secure.

What’s Your Next Step?

Knowing the vital role your CRM plays in your quest for more customers and higher revenues, what should you do next? Of course do your homework, but we would like to suggest that SMS-Magic is the best solution in the marketplace.

Why? Here are just a few reasons:

1. SMS-Magic works with your favorite CRM.
   We work and play well with others. We are a preferred provider for Salesforce and Zoho, and we integrate easily with Litify. Contact us to see what we can do with your existing architecture.

2. SMS-Magic helps you automate texts while keeping it personal.
   SMS-Magic is perfect for sending automated messages to your customers and prospects. We provide templates for your use and have lots of information about creating effective messages and campaigns. You can switch from automated to live in an instant so your customers know they’re talking to a person – not a bot.

3. SMS-Magic’s Conversational Messaging Hub Gathers Contacts into One Record
   Working with your CRM, SMS-Magic consolidates all contacts from a customer into one record, including phone calls, emails and messages. Our conversational messaging hub is the first of its kind and is designed specifically to meet your needs. Never again will your customers be forced to restate the problem – making them and your service reps happier.

4. SMS-Magic helps you stay compliant.
   We can help you keep up with the details like customer permissions as they opt-in (and perhaps opt-out) of your messaging campaigns. Our back-end systems are structured so that we can display individual requests, and we can prove you’ve complied with customer requests. You won’t have to worry about regulators asking to see your records. We use on-going processes to collect and store information about distribution and can share it with regulators, if necessary.

5. SMS-Magic provides technical, physical and administrative safeguards.
   Our technical safeguards include use of access controls, integrity controls, audit controls, identity authentication, and transmission security to avoid unauthorized access. We take extra precautions to ensure the physical security of our servers and systems. Our administrative measures include administrative actions, as well as policies and procedures, to manage the selection, development, implementation, and maintenance of security measures to protect electronic information.

We have experts ready to help you take SMS-Magic for a spin for FREE!

Schedule a demo or start a free trial today!

We think you’ll love what you see!

If you’re like most people in the United States, you use a combination of payment methods. Using a mobile app or paying bills from a laptop computer is just so much easier than trudging to the bank or writing checks used to be.

It’s how we do business. If you were anywhere else in the world, however, you would probably be conducting business using a text messaging app like WhatsApp or WeChat. Think that sounds farfetched? Text messaging is a communication trend that will soon be widely used in the U.S., and we don’t need a crystal ball to tell us so.

We’ve been watching the billions of people who are using text messaging apps around the world. Like mobile phone adoption, the U.S. is slow to start using text messaging, especially with apps like WhatsApp, but it’s coming. To keep your business healthy and growing, you need to understand and leverage new communication channels as quickly as you can or risk losing customers and sales.

If It’s Broke, Fix It

If you’ve been trying to reach your customers and potential customers with conventional channels like phone calls, direct mail or email, you probably are wondering why your results are mediocre, at best. It’s because we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Phone calls have a lower response rate.

Conversely, we send more than 5 billion texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Asurion’s research shows that Americans look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

Most texts sent in the U.S. today use the native texting capability that comes packaged in mobile phones – Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Message Service (MMS). SMS messages are limited to text only but are quick and inexpensive, great for reminders. MMS messages can contain photos or videos and are often very eye-catching. They can create high response rates, but they are more expensive to send and take longer to transmit.

The rest of the world, however, is using an assortment of “over-the-top” apps that use the internet to send the message, not a cellular service. Facebook Messenger is the top app in North America and Australia, WhatsApp is most popular in most of South America, Russia, India and parts of Africa, and WeChat is the leader in China. If your company is based in the United States, you might not be familiar with apps like Viber, Telegram, Line, Discord, KakaoTalk, Phoenix, or Zalo, but if you’re trying to reach customers in specific countries, you may need to become familiar with the favorites in that area.

When someone in India uses WhatsApp to do their banking, they are using a Facebook service that offers end-to-end security. Security is one of the priorities for most OTT apps, but it isn’t always available in the initial download. Most of the apps are free to download but may charge for business uses. They allow users to share files, to set messages to self-destruct, to make voice calls and to chat with groups of up to 200,000 users. Some also allow voice calls even to those who haven’t downloaded a specific app.

Are You Ready to Use OTT Apps Now?

The downside of using OTT apps is that the people you send to must also have the app. That limits your audience in the U.S. right now, but trends indicate that OTT app usage will grow rapidly in the next few years.

Here’s what we recommend: start using text messaging to reach your customers and potential customers. We have a customer who increased customer responses to their campaigns from less than one percent to over 15 percent just by changing from emails to texts.

Work the kinks out of your campaigns now. As OTT app adoption accelerates, you will be perfectly poised to take advantage of the technology while your competition struggles.

Our system, working with your CRM, can keep track of all your customer interactions in one place. It can also keep track of messages sent from a variety of platforms, starting with native mobile text capabilities and expanding to OTT apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, SnapChat or the others as needed.

SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. We’ll share what we see in our crystal ball. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in a new way!

As we listened to her story, we thought she had done everything right because she worked with a reputable company. We thought they really did want to provide great service, but the sales staff left out a critical part of the installation process – the installer wouldn’t haul away stained carpet. The customer service staff wanted to help, but our colleague couldn’t reach them on installation day because she got caught in endless voicemail loops. When she finally reached them, customer service couldn’t get in touch with the installer quickly enough to resolve the issue. Our colleague faced a huge expense to find and hire someone else to dispose of the old carpet.

The End of the Story & Critical Solutions

The installers eventually gave in and finished the job, but they trashed the old carpet in a dumpster the homeowners’ association had supplied for a different project. Our colleague faced fines from the HOA for improper use of the dumpster. It’s easy to see why she won’t use this supplier again. But it all could have been avoided.

How? By using text messaging to standardize scheduling, deliver consistent installation tips, and connect customers with customer service and installers quickly. We think text messaging can help you turn a disgruntled customer into a delighted customer. Remember: you can’t help a customer that you can’t reach.

How Can Text Messaging Help You Schedule Installation?

If you sell products or services that need installation, text messages can help you reach your customer wherever they are. Your customers actually prefer texts to emails or phone calls. Consider this:

• Nathan Eddy writes in eWeek, “Over half of [survey] respondents (52 percent) said they would be likely to text with a customer support agent. Similarly, 52 percent would prefer texting customer support more than their current preferred method of communication.”
• Globally, we send more than five billion texts a day – not counting other types of messages – and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

Clearly, we like to text and find it helpful in personal interactions. We think the next big business opportunity is to make messaging a regular part of customer support.

Text messages, either SMS or MMS, are versatile. They are immediate because your message goes directly to your customer’s phone. Text messages are brief but they can link to much more information like calendars, web pages, PDFs, videos or podcasts. You can deliver the same critical information about the installation to every customer, every time.

And during the sale, your customer can opt into receiving text messages. You can include it as part of the sales process.

When you set up a new messaging campaign, we recommend that you plan the flow of text messages using both templates and automated delivery. You decide what information your customer needs and in what order – the next text message in the sequence is triggered by the customer’s response to the last text. If you don’t receive a response within a certain time, your system sends a reminder text. If you don’t receive a response or your customer indicates a problem, the issue can be referred to a live customer service rep automatically.

If our colleague’s carpet company had used this type of system, they could have given her options for carpet removal and disposal long before the day of installation. They might have been able to keep a customer.

Let SMS-Magic Help You

We think SMS-Magic can help you eliminate nightmares when you’re scheduling installation for your products. SMS-Magic can help provide a great experience for your customers, too. We offer conversational messaging so that your customers can respond to your texts. If you want to tie into your CRM, we work particularly well with Salesforce and Zoho, but we can help you with many others, and we work with all the messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp, so you don’t sacrifice anything to reach your best customers wherever they are!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how SMS-Magic can help you end the nightmare of scheduling installations!

That rule is courtesy of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a law enacted in 1991 to govern phone calls and then updated to include texts and emails. TCPA seeks to protect consumers from receiving unwanted marketing solicitations, and its fines and penalties help ensure businesses take it seriously. The fines can be as much as $1,500 per message sent. In one of the first class-action lawsuits concerning texting, Papa John’s settled the case against it for $16.5 million in 2013.

Fortunately, with a little planning and a savvy text messaging partner like SMS-Magic, you can gain consent, reach out to your customers legally, and keep the necessary records to defend any actions against you. And most importantly, you can establish a relationship with your customers that lets them know you’re not going to fill up their inboxes with unwanted messages.

What Does the TCPA Require?

TCPA guidelines require that you must:

• Receive consent before any message can be sent.
• Mention your company name
• State the coupon or value proposition
• Mention the frequency of messages that will be sent monthly
• Disclose possible carrier costs and fees
• Give an option to ask for help and opt out of future texts

How Can You Approach Customers to Gain Consent?

Remember: You can’t text until you have permission. So don’t even think about buying a list of phone numbers and starting without consent. But if you play by the rules, where can you solicit customers for your text marketing campaign?

In a recent blog post, we provided a list of 20 ways to attract new customers to your texting campaigns and there are many more. As you design your campaigns to grow your text marketing list, you can include the initial TCPA information your customer needs in a small text block on the emails, trade show materials, business cards, product packaging, or other marketing materials. Here’s an example of how you can structure that text for a fictitious pizza restaurant:

Headline: Want Great Pizza Deals Sent Directly to Your Phone?

Subhead: Text CHEESE to 999999 to Start Receiving Weekly Offers

Graphics: Include your logo or other graphic

Small text: Message and data rates may apply. Max 5 msgs/mo. Consent not required to buy goods/svcs. Terms and conditions at pizzastore.com/terms. Privacy policy at pizzastore.com/privacy. For help, text HELP to 555111. To opt-out, text STOP to 555111.

If your company requires additional legal text for offers such as “May not be combined with other offers” or “Limited time only,” you can include the necessary text in the small text block. Notice that you can provide the web address for terms and conditions and your privacy policy. If your customers have questions, you’ve given them a resource for answers. You’ve even provided information about opting out before they need it.

Consider Using a Double Opt-In

Let’s assume your customer has opted into receiving text messages from your company with the offer we’ve just discussed above. They’ve texted CHEESE to your short code. Now what happens?

Simple. You automatically send them a confirmation text immediately. In that first message, you can provide some valuable information to them and keep yourself legal.

Here’s an example of the confirmation text:

Please reply YES to receive updates from the Pizza Store. Std. msg&data rates apply. Max 5 msgs/month. Reply HELP for help, STOP to cancel.

You’ve repeated your company’s name and asked your customers to confirm that they want to receive texts from you. You’ve provided a reminder about possible texting charges. You’ve told them how many messages to expect, and you’ve given them the tools to ask for help or stop the messages. And you’ve done all of this in seconds without disturbing your customer.

Extend an Offer

Of course, you can offer a special deal, coupon, discount or promotion with either the first touch or the confirmation text. Often, this type of extra incentive will prompt customers to opt in right away by providing a sense of urgency.

In the first example above, the Pizza Store could have offered an immediate discount with the promise of more to come via text messages throughout the month. Adding an incentive would only require a slight rewrite of the copy.

Be careful, however, how you word your incentive. Don’t use a vague statement like “Text us to receive a 10% discount.” Instead, be clear about what the customer must do to earn the discount. This is better: “Get 10% off when you join our SMS text list.”

Test, Test, Test

Your text campaigns will require thoughtful planning, and it will be easy to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Texts are immediate. You won’t have to wait long to determine if your appeals are successful or not. Adjustments are easy to make when you have data driving your decisions.

So, plan some A/B testing with email appeals for your text messaging lists. You can determine which email subject lines and body copy prompt the most customers to opt in. And as you build your text messaging lists, you can do similar testing to see what campaigns produce the best results. The beauty of text messaging campaigns is their immediacy.

Keeping Track of Who Opted In and Who Opted Out

You’ll also need to keep track of who has opted in and who has opted out, as well as who is already in the system to keep one person from opting in multiple times. SMS-Magic can make compliance a breeze, particularly if you have tied your text messaging campaigns into your CRM. No matter what industry you’re in – banking, higher education, hospitality, finance or others, we’ll help you keep up with customer permissions as they opt-in (and perhaps opt-out) of your messaging campaigns.

SMS-Magic is designed to track opt-in and opt-out requests so that you send only to the customers who have specifically asked you to. Our back-end systems are structured so that we can display individual requests, and we can prove you’ve complied with customer requests. You won’t have to worry about regulators asking to see your records. We use on-going processes to collect and store information about distribution and can share it with regulators, if necessary.

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how SMS-Magic can help you build and automate your text messaging lists!

SMS-Magic is a great messaging solution for businesses of all sizes, but our experience tells us that it’s especially effective if you’re working with a CRM like Salesforce and a developer or two. Making all the moving parts work together seamlessly is critical to your success, and SMS-Magic works to make it so.

Michael Copley, chief technology officer for Barsala, an SMS-Magic client, said his Salesforce developers have easily been able to access the functionality of SMS-Magic and share it with other developers on their team. Developers working on Barsala’s API can ping a simple endpoint to send a message through the SMS-Magic package. It shows up in Salesforce attached to the appropriate records and in all relevant user interfaces for their support team.

Your developers will find that our team has created a product to make life easier. Here’s how:

1. SMS-Magic integrates directly with Salesforce automation.

Salesforce Flow is one of the tools that helps developers build complex processes easily inside Salesforce. Just to give you an idea of how it works, it makes things easier by providing automated triggers, reusable building blocks and prebuilt solutions, among other functions. With these tools, a developer doesn’t have to create everything from scratch every time something is needed. Similarly, Lightning Platform helps to build enterprise mobile apps. The good news is that SMS-Magic fully integrates with Salesforce automations like these, enabling messaging from just about anywhere in the CRM.

2. SMS-Magic contains well-documented APIs.

Developers already know what that means. For the rest of us, an application programming interface (API) helps two computers or computer programs talk to each other. For example, an API can update, add, delete or move a record, helping an outside solution, like SMS-Magic, work with Salesforce. Some APIs work well but aren’t well documented. That means developers have to figure out how the API works and how to use it without any help from the team that created it. On the other hand, well-documented APIs make the job much easier by providing background information necessary to integrate the API. Documentation saves time and effort, which means it saves money. SMS-Magic is a well-documented API, ensuring your developers will have the information they need to do the job.

3. SMS-Magic is a managed package easily installed inside of Salesforce.

When SMS-Magic is embedded into Salesforce a developer can leverage any Salesforce object and extend the function of texting to work with the parts of Salesforce they create. That means any new function your developers might create inside Salesforce can work with SMS-Magic. Think of the possibilities that gives you! If your use case requires something new in Salesforce, SMS-Magic is available to you without extra effort.

4. SMS-Magic manages all your carrier interactions …

… so you don’t have to. We obtain all the short codes and long codes your team needs, and we deal with the provider or carrier if any issues arise. Long codes are the 10-digit phone numbers most of us use to text our friends. Businesses use them too, but it takes about a second per code to send those messages. Too long if you’re sending thousands. Short codes are five- or six-digit codes that customers use to reach you. For example, pizza customers might receive the message “Text CHEESE for a 10% coupon.” CHEESE is the short code. No matter how many codes your campaigns require, we take the hassle out of managing them.

SMS-Magic is an expert with Salesforce integrations. The company is a Salesforce Partner and the top-rated messaging application on the Salesforce AppExchange. We also work with other CRMs like Zoho, and we have a product designed to work without a CRM.

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you why your developers will love working with SMS-Magic!

So we have to ask: “If you’re interested in building relationships with your customers or patients or clients, why aren’t you already using conversational messaging powered by SMS-Magic?”

Your experience likely has taught you that consumers often ignore business emails and phone calls, even when they need help making critical decisions about their finances, their health, their education, and their environment, among other things. You know that messaging allows you to reach your customer (or patient or client) conveniently and in a way that they prefer. You also know conversational messaging, in addition to being convenient, allows your customer to respond to you directly, making their life easier and providing you with immediate feedback about their situation.

So what’s holding you back? Are you concerned about:

Managing Complicated Conversations?

Your interactions with customers aren’t always simple. (For the sake of brevity, let’s call everyone who might have a relationship with your organization a customer, even if they’re a client, student, applicant, or patient.) Your customers can have complicated questions about almost anything. Conversational messaging allows your team to answer the question using messaging or to divert the conversation to another medium, like a phone call or information on your website. The key is that you can direct your customer to the best information possible because you know more about their situation. SMS-Magic handles conversational messaging like the professional solution it is.

Empowering Multiple Team Members?

Everyone wants to solve a customer’s problem during the first interaction but that isn’t always possible. When the next team member enters the conversation, they want to know everything that’s been said. It’s easier to solve problems when you have all the information at your fingertips. Working with a CRM like Salesforce or Zoho, SMS-Magic can manage all your customer contacts in one place, no matter how the customer has contacted you.

Communicating Using Longer Time Horizons?

Sometimes customers aren’t ready for you when they contact you. They might be gathering information about your product or service and intend to decide later. They might not qualify for your service during the initial contact but might be ready in six months. Conversational messaging allows you to “ping” potential customers from time to time, checking on their readiness to work with you. Done well, your conversational check-ins with your customers can help you build a relationship with them. By the time your customer makes a buying decision, they’re already comfortable with your organization. SMS-Magic can help you stay in touch with prospects over time.

Ensuring Full Compliance?

With business messaging increasing 400 percent each year, you want to honor a customer’s request to opt out of messages. We do, too. That’s why SMS-Magic is built to provide full compliance with laws and regulations like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the U.S. or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. We give you the tools you need to be confident your customers have opted into messaging and that messages are going to a welcoming audience.

Why Choose SMS-Magic?

You can give us a test drive without spending a penny. SMS-Magic offers a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.

If you use a customer relation management system (CRM), we can integrate SMS-Magic into your system. We work seamlessly with Salesforce and Zoho, and we have the capability to work with most systems.

One of our customers has two Salesforce AppX developers on staff. Their chief technology officer said, “Our developers were able to work with the SMS-Magic AppX code to expose the functionality of SMS-Magic to other developers on our team. So other developers who work in Python and are writing API code, they could just ping a simple end point and then it would send a message through the SMS-Magic package, show up in Salesforce and have the right bookkeeping.”

If, however, you don’t use a CRM, no worries! You can deploy our stand-alone product that doesn’t require a CRM. Our installation is quick, easy, and supported by our experienced technical staff members.

Let’s Go!

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so!

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how we can help you make the most of the conversational messaging!

As a business owner, these questions matter a lot to you. Understanding who is visiting your website can help you track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and give you a good idea of who your potential customers are.

Tracking metrics is obviously important and URL shorteners and trackers can help you track while also strengthening your brand identity. Customized, shortened URLs are one of the most used tools to market your business content on social media. And most importantly these links allow you to track incoming traffic and marketing campaigns while maintaining a cohesive brand identity.

Getting Started With URL Shorteners

There are many URL shortening tools available, so you’ll need to select one that works for your needs. You’ll quickly be able to start creating new short links that you can add to your business marketing messages. If you choose to customize your links, make sure to add branded domains, content keywords, UTM parameters, and capitalization.

5 Reasons Why URL Shorteners are Useful to Promote Content on the Web

URL shorteners benefit in many ways but here are the top 5 reasons why URL shorteners are useful to promote content on the web. Ultimately, they generate traffic for your business and help promote your brand:

• They make URLs more meaningful and manageable
• They have the capacity to track and compile the click data
• They can be easily transformed in social media services
• They can offer users useful features
• Simply put, they also promote sharing

Create Short URLs for your Social Channels

Adding a URL to your social media messages is always a good idea. Long URLs are often ignored, look clunky, and give the appearance that your brand is not up to date. Think about creating short URLs, customized with keywords matching your brand! Brand identity and cohesion goes a long way.

When you plan your content marketing, every word of your message will count. Short messages with long URLs are always overlooked. If you want to increase the chances of the content being read, using URL shorteners is a smart move.

URL Shortening – Are there any Negatives? 

Although there are many benefits of using URL shortening, there are some disadvantages. By understanding these you can avoid mistakes and not be caught by surprise if you run into any problems.

1. At times, URL Shorteners cause redirection

Considering the many benefits of shortening a URL, at times, people tend to shorten the shortened URLs further. This creates multiple redirections. Suppose you click on a shortened URL. Then ideally, you should redirect to the source link. But if the shortened URL has another shortened URL, you get redirected elsewhere or it takes forever for the page to open. With this, you may lose your traffic!

2. Link Shortening and Spammers

URL shorteners are icing on the cake for the spammers. This is because they can easily hide their nefarious URLs in shortened links. As the destination page is hidden in the shortened URLs, the spammers latch onto URL shortening like leeches. People have experienced that shortened URLs can lead to random pages, increasing the possibility of spamming.

3. Link shorteners may involve middlemen

As link shortening services are offered by middlemen who sit in between the end result and your users, you have a dependency on them to keep your shortened link viable till the end.What Link Shorteners Do?

The benefits of URL shortening will always overpower its limitations. You can never overlook the usefulness of link shortening for promoting your content on social media channels. The additional feature of analytics that measures the traffic coming back to your website, gives URL shortening more power. Using a customized URL with capitalization and a branded domain is a comfortable way to avoid spamming and distrust.

With a branded domain added to the shortened URLs, they become branded as well. Your company name, its brand, the identity is carried forward with your shortened URL. Within this, you can assure that the links that you share are not spammed and instead remembered by the customers.

Earlier, URL shorteners were merely used as URL shorteners to address email systems that would break long URLs and wrap any email after 80 characters. Later, some social media platforms, including Twitter, introduced a 140-character limit. Innovations in the world of URL shortening gained momentum. Today, using URL shortening and tracking assists your business in many ways.

Sounds great, right? Bundled with so many benefits, who wouldn’t use these tools for their business success?

The Takeaway?

Using URL shortening and tracking will help you track and measure your business. Customers will appreciate the brand cohesiveness and your content will be taken more seriously. By using a custom branded domain for your URL shortener, people can be reassured that you are not spamming. More importantly, all this will lead to more clicks and hits to the shortened URLs added to your content.

Want to see how SMS-Magic Converse helps clients achieve all of this with text messaging? Reach out and we would be happy to give you a personal tour and share examples from our clients!