Here are our suggestions for writing great hooks and CTAs.

Crafting the Hook

Keep it short

With SMS messages, you have an established message length of 160 characters, fewer if you include opt-out and help instructions. This means your hook needs to start the message off with a bang — ideally in ten words or less. This guideline isn’t for the sake of the character count alone. It’s also necessary to capture the attention of your consumers. Everyone is busy, so using a short and straightforward hook to get their attention is ideal.

Use power words

Powerful and emotive words are a hook’s secret weapon. These words snag your audience’s attention by being more memorable and intentional than others, yet they’re also simple and easily digestible for all audience types. Power words lead consumers to establish a differentiation between competing brands and can be stimulating enough to create a desire to purchase a product. Here are some powerful words you can test in your next hook: free, now, new, save, effortless, you, easy, expires, today only, reliable, guaranteed, money-back, and risk-free.

Make it personal

Friends and family members send text messages to each other all the time, and the messages are highly personal. Similarly, customers want their communication with you to be personalized. The hook can help make your messages authentic and human. For example, try adding your customer’s name to the text using custom fields. And if you do, make sure the character count in your message leaves room for long names.

You can also try an intro that feels conversational, not computer generated. Your opener is an opportunity to build a bridge between your audience and your brand’s personality. Whether bubbly and energetic or more formal and technical, the hook should leave your audience with an experience that reminds them of your company. Check out the difference in these two examples:

Impersonal Language:

Summer deals start today at XYZ 
Company! Click here for more info.

Conversational Language:

Buy a gift for a friend and 
get yourself one for free! 
Click here to treat yourself
and a friend to BOGO spa 
services this weekend.

Conquering the Call to Action

Create a sense of urgency

SMS messages reach your audience instantly, so it seems logical for your customers to reply quickly, too. But what is their incentive? Why should they act now and not later? Your CTA must convey a sense of urgency.

The good news is that there are several ways to create urgency around your company’s offer or opportunity.

• Put deadlines on sales or offers.
• Offer “today only” deals.
• Promote contests and sweepstakes with entry deadlines.
• Show how much stock is still available. 
• Announce new products and services with discounts available for limited times.
• Follow up on purchases with discounts for additional purchases.

Example:

Take 20% off when you try 
our new relaxing spa products 
by Labor Day. Click here 
to start your best day ever.

Convey value

Your message should conclude with value for your audience. Sales and limited-time offers or deals are clever ways to create monetary value within your CTA.

Example:

Text REWARDS to 93247
for your 20% off coupon.

Conveying value is especially important when your messaging campaign is designed to build brand awareness. For example, if your CTA’s goal is to increase traffic to your website or a new blog, your customer needs to know what’s in it for them if they do. This is an opportunity to introduce your brand and the value it offers.

Keep it short and specific

Character count matters and your CTA should be brief. You don’t want to increase the cost of sending messages because you’re over the character limit. Also, if messages are long, they can be divided and sent out of order which is confusing for your customers.

So how do you make it short but also clear? By getting to the point. Tell your audience precisely what action you want them to perform: call us now, subscribe today, see the offer before it expires!

Now that you’re ready to craft powerful hooks and CTAs for your SMS messaging campaigns, our team is ready to show you how SMS-Magic can make connecting with your customers easier and more effective with a demo or free trial!

Conversational messaging focuses on encouraging leads and inactive customers to initiate conversations with your brand. Once leads and customers reply to conversational messaging content, your team members can connect with them by answering questions, offering insider information and even recommending products or services.

Behind every successful conversational messaging text is an effective call to action (CTA). Read on to learn what CTAs are — and how to create one that will encourage customers to interact with your content.

1. Pick Powerful Action Words

Compel the user to take action. Using the right words is key in improving the click-through rates in your CTA. Make sure to use compelling, authoritative and clear wording. You don’t want to confuse the user, so using words like “join,” “start” and “explore” can be beneficial to creating an eye-catching CTA.

A few examples include:

• Join us
• Get started for free
• Explore the collection

2. Create a Sense of Urgency

Now that you’re using effective language, create a sense of urgency so that the reader feels compelled to click on the CTA instead of coming back to it later. You can add words like “now,” “instant” or “today” to verbs that make potential prospects feel that waiting will only put them at a disadvantage.

Some examples of this include:

• Start growing today
• Join for instant access
• Explore the collection now

3. Keep It Short

Most of the time, you don’t have much space for your CTA. This is why you should always aim to keep it short and get your point across in the fewest words. You only have seconds to get your point across, so using simple language will definitely work in your favor here.

Here are a few examples:

• Instead of writing “Donate to our cause today”, you can say “Act today!”
• Instead of saying “Fill this form”, you can write “Sign up today!”

4. Use a Conversational Tone

Addressing the reader directly is an effective way to build a personal connection. When you use the word “you” in your message, the reader feels special, making it feel like a personal interaction rather than a sales pitch.

Here are a few examples:

• You can get a 15% discount here.
• Build your free website today!

5. Make It Pretty

Nobody wants to click on a bland, static button, right? Make sure your CTA button stands out from the rest of the text. Even something as small as making the font bold can do wonders as it demands the reader’s attention. If your brand identity is light-hearted, you can add GIFs or emojis, which will prompt the customer to take immediate action.

Some examples include:

• Click here for more information.
• Flat 50% off on first purchase.

Writing the Most Effective CTA

Not all CTAs are the same. They come in various shapes and sizes, and no formula guarantees success. The best way to know whether it is working is to test your CTA against others. You can then iterate upon the CTA that works and create one that gives you the most conversions.

No matter what you use conversational messaging text for, setting up the right campaigns and effective CTAs can help you guide your customers through their buying journey and greatly influence your conversion rates.

Our customer support team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make reaching your customers easier and more effective with a demo or a free trial!

So we were surprised when she absolutely raved about an online retailer she used during the holidays last year. She wanted to send food to relatives, and the company didn’t have their favorite treat in stock. When she ordered everything else, the company recommended a substitution for the out-of-stock treat, and she sent it along to her family, but she wasn’t thrilled.

After the sale, the company sent her a one-second survey, and she decided to let them know how disappointed she was. She wrote in her survey response, “We are so disappointed that the Blackberry Farm sausage isn’t available. Guess the pigs got tired of giving their all for our breakfasts. Sigh.” She didn’t expect a response.

The customer service rep wrote back, “Thank you for your order. I too am disappointed that the Blackberry Farm sausage is no longer available. It was delicious. I will let our marketing team know since sometime stuff becomes available again. Have a great night.” Our team member was floored. This was either the best artificial-intelligence response ever or she was talking to a real person. She felt heard.

Fast forward many months. Our team member placed another order with this company. Everything went well, and again she responded to the company’s one-second survey. She gave them a “10” and wrote, “You guys rock! My interactions with you make me smile.”

Jane from the company wrote back, “Your email made me smile! Thanks so much for that.” She continued, “And thanks for answering our one-second survey. We’re glad you think we’re worth recommending! Please take 10% off your next order!” The message continued with a secret discount code, the expiration date and the note, “Feel free to share the love with your friends and family – forward the discount code to them. Feel free to like us on Facebook too, if you do that sort of thing.

What’s my point in telling you this story?

This company turned a grumpy holiday shopper into an advocate for their company with two orders, and one of them didn’t even contain everything the customer wanted. With a few simple interactions, they built a relationship with a single customer. And if they delighted one customer, we expect that they delight others, too.

The good news? You can, too – and conversational text messaging is a great way to do it. You can build relationships quickly using a format that allows you to send messages to customers using their preferred delivery method – text. And you can combine automated text messages with messages sent by individuals on your customer service team.

It’s probable that our team member triggered a personal response when she sent back more than the requested rating. If she had responded with just her rating, it’s likely she would have received an automated response, “Thanks for answering our one-second survey. We’re glad you think we’re worth recommending! Please take 10% off your next order!”

Because she added a personal note, however, it’s probable her response bumped her message into the “personal-response” queue and allowed a mail order team member to respond. Your CRM can help you sort customers and send messages that will build loyalty to your products and your brand.

But even automated texts can help build customer relationships. Your texts don’t need to sound like they’ve come from a robot, even if they’re automated. Here are a few ideas from this food retailor:

• You shopped, we shipped, how did it go? Take our survey and get 10% off!
• Our one-second email survey – this is not a tricky sales pitch, promise. If you have a second, we’d love to know what you thought of shopping with us. Our survey is low-tech, just like our food. Respond with a number from 1 to 10.
• We wanna hear about your holiday shopping experience. Tell us and get 10% off all the food you buy!
• Your order is totally confirmed!
• Thanks for your order! If you need to contact us, please reply or call. A real, live human will be with you promptly. We answer phones till 10 p.m. Eastern Time every day at this time of year.

It’s a competitive world and if you can help solve your customers’ problems, you earn an amazing competitive advantage. And if you communicate effectively using a channel your customers prefer, you can build relationships that will extend far beyond a single sale.

Being authentic in all your customer interactions is increasingly important in today’s business world. Staying in touch has become a requirement. SMS-Magic can help you reach out to applicants faster and with better results.

We offer 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. Let us show you how you can engage applicants in new ways!

You don’t have to be a professional writer to be effective, and we’d like to share 5 tips that can help hone your writing skills:

1. Understand your audience and their challenges.
   Before you write, think about what makes your recipients special. What common traits do they share? Is it their industry, their job responsibilities, their goals or their interests? For example, you might segment your audience by age. A 64-year-old person would have much more interest in information about Medicare than someone in their 20s.
   
   You might consider dividing your total audience into smaller groups. Your customer relationship management system can help you sort recipients and make it easier to target your messages.
   
   You will want to focus on how your product or service can help solve the challenges your audience faces. Your audience doesn’t care about your new technology or the great new system you’ve adopted – unless it has a direct benefit for them. Answer your customer’s question, “What’s in it for me?”
   
   Because you’ve already sorted your audience by their common traits, you know that everyone on your send list has similar challenges. With that understanding, you’re ready to communicate with them.

2. Distill the message.
   
   With a standard text message, you only have 160 characters to make your case. Even with longer MMS messages, you don’t have room for a lengthy discussion. Take a few minutes before you start writing and think about exactly what you want to convey.
   
   If you prefer a visual exercise, write down everything you think you want to say. Don’t worry about writing too much; just get it down. Once you have all the information in front of you, start to edit. Keep what’s most important. Cut out the extra words. Get the info in the right order. Then trim the message to fit your word count.
   
   Make sure you’ve included basic information – who, what, where, when and why. Start with what’s most important for your audience, not necessarily what’s most important for you or your company. Write from your customer’s point of view.

3. Throw away jargon, buzzwords & clichés.
   
   This tip is also based on knowing your audience. If they’re just getting to know your company or are new to your industry, don’t confuse them with acronyms. Make it easy for new customers to understand what you do and what you offer.
   
   Also, as a rule, avoid professional buzzwords. You don’t want the language in your message to make it difficult for your audience to understand. Of course, you’ll also want to consider the opposite if you’re sending messages to seasoned professionals. For example, you might not choose to use the term “heart attack” if your audience regularly calls it by a more technical name.
   
   And finally, avoid clichés like the plague. They aren’t helpful and they’re as boring as watching paint dry.

4. Consider your tone.
   
   Because you know your audience and you’re focusing on the things they have in common, you can vary your tone depending on the message. Is your audience ready for a little humor or a light tone? Is it okay to be provocative? Or are you sending messages from an authority and need a formal tone? Your message and your knowledge about your audience will dictate what tone you take but be intentional about choosing it.
   
   One caveat – Be careful with off-color language. It might work well with some audiences, but it can ruin your appeal if you use it inappropriately.

5. Proofread – then send.
   
   Research has shown that our brains sometimes work against us by being too efficient. Here’s how: If you’ve been working on a text for a while, your brain will frequently skim over misspelled or missing words. It fills in the blanks for you. Your brain helps you understand what you’re reading, but it doesn’t necessarily help you find typos.
   
   So fight back. Take a break before you hit send. Let your brain settle. Then come back to your message. If there is a typo, you’ll be more likely to see it. If you have available colleagues, let them read the message. A fresh pair of eyes can help find mistakes. Many communications teams make text reviews part of their culture, and everything is read by at least two people.

It’s a competitive world and if you can help solve your customers’ problems, you earn an amazing competitive advantage. And if you communicate effectively using a channel your customers prefer, you can build relationships that will extend far beyond a single sale.

Being authentic in all your customer interactions is increasingly important in today’s business world. Staying in touch has become a requirement. We hope these tips will help you tackle writing tasks more effectively. SMS-Magic can help you reach out to applicants faster and with better results.

We offer 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. Let us show you how you can engage applicants in new ways!

These messages are conversational, and they are generated individually. Their tone is friendly, and they offer advice or information as if it’s coming from a trusted friend. In fact, it’s coming from an attorney who is a trusted member of the client’s team. In certain situations, that’s even better than a friend.

I can hear you object, “But our business isn’t like that. We have to send thousands of texts to reach our audience.”

I’m sure that’s true. But your text messages don’t have to sound like they’re going to thousands of people at one time.

When a new client reaches out to the law firm, they might do it by email or phone. Chances are they’ve also reaching out to other law firms. In order to win their business, our law firm quickly responds with an automated text message to say hello and to clarify who they are.

The automated response is written in a style that a friend might use – “Hi, this is Brittany from the AlwaysWin law firm. Can I help you with questions about a legal issue?”

When the prospective client responds, the system switches them to a personal exchange with a member of the intake team. This quick response allows the firm to ask initial screening questions and establish a relationship before other firms can respond to the client’s initial query. It helps win business.

To use this technique at scale, you need to think like your customers. Ask yourself what you know about them:

• Why are they contacting you?
• What problem are they trying to solve with your product or service?
• What help might they need initially or on a second query?
• Where are they?

Once you know who your customers are, you can craft automated messages with a personal touch. You can even add a first name to the opening sentence, if you track of that information.

Your CRM should help you personalize the message. And it can help you segment your queries into those that share common characteristics. Your outreach may be unique to customers in the U.S. or customers in Asia, Europe or Australia. Or you may need to modify your interactions with customers in different countries because of laws governing the use of digital information. Segmenting can help with all of that.

Once you’ve started the conversation, managing the flow of information is critical. If you use a CRM like Salesforce or Zoho, SMS-Magic can help you track of all your applicant interactions. Your incoming texts, emails and phone conversations, as well as your responses, can be archived in your CRM so that anyone on your staff can access the entire interaction. Your customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and your staff can hand off customer interactions confidently.

We know that customers prefer texts because globally we send 5 billion texts a day, 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. You can bet that your customers are just like the rest of us.

It’s a competitive world and if you’re able to respond to customers faster than your competition, you can earn an amazing competitive advantage. More than that, however, is the benefit that a conversational tone can provide. Handle the first few interactions well – like a trusted friend – and you’ve started a customer relationship that can last for years.

Being authentic in all your customer interactions is increasingly important in today’s business world. Staying in touch has become a requirement. SMS-Magic, through conversational and automated text messaging, can help you reach out to applicants faster and with better results.

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. Let us show you how you can engage applicants in new ways!

Many different organizations – companies, healthcare systems, financial institutions, higher ed, just to name a few – need to communicate with the people they serve. But the people they serve aren’t responding to phone calls, voice mail or emails. It’s so quiet out there, you can hear the crickets.

What results is a company spending hours of staff time trying to send reminders for appointments or deadlines, frustrated customers having to repeat their stories to rep after rep  or everyone playing phone tag for days. Older ways of communicating can be difficult and ineffective.

It’s nobody’s fault, but it is an indication of the world we’re navigating right now. We (as consumers) are changing what we respond to. Here are a few statistics to put it in perspective:

• In 2018, 73 percent of online traffic came from mobile rather than desktops, according to Parse.ly. The percentage has grown since then.
• We only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom.
• Globally, 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.·      In a recent survey cited by Nathan Eddy in eWeek, “Over half of 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.”

In short, as customers we like texting, and we respond to text messages quickly. As companies trying to serve customers, messaging allows us to interact in personal, memorable ways. Mobile phones give us ideal access to our best customers, and messaging gives us access to those phones. By using messaging, you can reach your customers wherever they are. With thoughtful planning, you can provide interactions that are both helpful and just in time.

Messaging is applicable to almost all industries because every business needs to interact with its customers. Positive interactions are critical to engaging customers, understanding their needs, and keeping them loyal to your brand. Engaged customers lead to higher sales, more applicants, more qualified buyers, stronger leads, and better attendance, just to name a few benefits.

How Can You Get Started?

If your customer engagement is currently based on emails, phone calls, or direct mail, we suggest you try messaging as a new channel. We offer automated text messaging, so your customers get the attention they need, but not at the expense of your customer service team. Our conversational messaging is just that – conversational. Your customers can respond to your messages if they have questions or want to give you more information.

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 like Messenger, WhatsApp, SnapChat and native phone texts, so you don’t sacrifice anything to help your best customers when they have problems.

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. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in a new way!

The trick is adding text messaging effectively. For that, you might need to know what we know. Here are eight of our favorite tips for building effective text messaging marketing campaigns:

Secret #1 – Get permission first.

You can’t just start texting your customers, even if they’ve given you their phone numbers. Government regulations say that you must have their permission first. So you’ll probably want to ask for permission in every way possible – on your website, in emails, with printed ads, on receipts, and many other ways. Find tons of great ideas for promoting your texting program in one of our recent blogs and examples of those first few texts in this one.

Once you have permission to text, here’s how to design your campaign:

Secret #2 – Decide what you want to accomplish.

What are your goals for the campaign? Do you want to increase opt-ins to your text messaging lists? Do you want to increase sales, applications, or appointments? If you can, put some numbers in the goal. How much of an increase in sales? How many new appointments or applications? Knowing what you want to accomplish will help you know when you’ve done well.

Secret #3 – Research your market.

If you haven’t already done so, you should conduct research to define your market. You need to know who they are, where they hang out, and what makes them tick. What are their challenges and how can you help? In a business-to-business environment, you need to be sure you understand their business. How do they want to be served? Do you know what they think value is? The more you know about your market, the easier it is to design campaigns that help them solve problems.

Secret #4 – State the call to action clearly.

What do you want them to do? Remember KISS – Keep it short and simple.

Secret #5 – Personalize the text messages.

As your opt-in list grows, take the time to segment your list into personas. You can send tailored messages to segments of the list. Using a CRM will help define and track your audiences.

Secret #6 – Don’t overwhelm your audience.

Think about your own experience. Nothing makes us angrier than texts we haven’t opted into or too many texts from anyone. Treat your customers like friends and be respectful of their time. Keep in mind that we read texts within two minutes of receiving them. Time your texts for your customers’ convenience.

Secret #7 – Choose an SMS provider who can help on the back end.

Your provider should make respecting opt-outs easy and should be able to provide the reports to prove compliance with local and national laws. Even better is a service that works easily with your CRM. You may not ever need to show you comply with regulations, but knowing you could, will keep you from pulling your hair out.

Secret #8 – Test, Evaluate and Tweak

When you decide what your campaign goals are, you should determine how you’re going to measure it. Whatever your method is, remember to test appropriately. You need to know if your campaign is working. If it isn’t, figure out why and adjust it. Then test again. Nothing is perfect, and you’ll get better results with flexible design.

Those eight secrets should help you get started. Text messaging is a powerful tool, and it’s available to organizations of all sizes.

Let SMS-Magic Help You

The SMS-Magic team works every day to make building effective campaigns easy. We are Salesforce and Zoho experts and can make those integrations seamless. We would be excited to share our experience and help you decide what is best for you.

Does the SMS-Magic team sound like the partner 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 campaigns!

Challenges with Personalization

Traditionally, the most common way to provide personalized content to audiences has been to progressively profile with web forms. This method has presented several challenges, including:

• Regulations Regulations are increasingly limiting for form profiling via web pages. GDPR eliminates the ability to “gate” content by forcing a form fill to receive content. A vendor MUST deliver content without the form if requested.
• Configuring the Technology Configuring Web forms and marketing automation can be complicated and sometimes requires deep technical help and customization.
• Site Traffic Your leads, contacts, and customers don’t visit sites that frequently or may not visit again for a long time, decreasing the chance to collect more data points.
• Gated Content If you don’t have much gated content, you can’t collect as much information, and people that visit the site may not go for gated content, meaning they don’t see the second form. Also, many prospects exit the process when presented with a form.
• Behavior Tracking Concerns Many customers are concerned with behavior tracking on websites. This is an increasingly significant issue for marketing.

How to Send Personal and Relevant Content with SMS Messages

Text messaging is a great way to provide a personal and relevant experience to your audience. You can leverage SMS progressive profiling and increase results. Text messages have a 95% read rate, and over 60% response rate, which means you can streamline profiling with texting. Get the most specific and accurate insights about your audience with simple questions, provide the most relevant content, buying journeys, offers, and event invites, and build robust personas to understand your prospects’, customers’, or market’s needs. Here are some pointers on where to start:

1. Start by asking simple questions that matter to your audience.
Instead of assuming, ask them about their preferences. Start with the basics; how they want to communicate with you, how often they’d like updates, their specific areas of interest.

2. Share insights to get more information.
You know that customers who buy a specific product often need help in 3 potential areas. Tell them that and then ask what they need.

IF you know a candidate needs 4 specific skills to qualify, ask them about those skills. You’ll save both of you time and energy.

3. Show them you understand their world.
Offer a relevant set of keywords to answer a question. They’ll recognize that you understand their needs.

Simple keywords also make it easy to quickly respond, and to analyze responses to deepen your personal profiles.

4. Be thoughtful.
Building relationships takes time. That’s true in business and in life. Send 1-2 questions a month. Don’t SPAM. Ask questions that matter to them, not to you. After all, it’s about their needs, not yours.

5. Go deeper.
Create stages of profiling. Start with the basics to develop pertinent segments or personas. Develop profiling questions that relate to these specific personas, so you can deepen your insights in an even more relevant way. When you identify the next layer of personas, go even deeper.

Bridge the Personalization Gap with Converse SMS Messages

We built Converse with features that empower you to easily send the most personal and relevant messages to your audience.

Compliance peace of mind
Assured compliance means you never have to worry about consent, audit trails or opt-outs. Converse manages compliance for you. We also offer a report designed to give you the tracking and control you want and need to measure text messaging compliance

Easy configuration
Converse automatically generates native Visualforce components as you use the Clickable Wizards to define your configurations and settings. Messaging components including Send SMS Button, Send SMS Page, Conversation View page, and Converse Desk are all automatically generated in Visualforce pages. All you have to do is drag and drop them to the appropriate pages and you’re ready to message.

Content Templates
Converse provides industry-specific content templates for several popular use cases, including profiling and surveys, which can then be tuned to fit your specific messaging needs. You can also develop your own message templates and save them to use across multiple campaigns.

Automated profiling
Take our pre-built automated profiling program and tune it to collect the right information from your audience at the right time.

Seamless SMS messages across the customer lifecycle in Salesforce
The Converse Inbox is a Visualforce component that dynamically configures itself to its environment, across Classic and Lightning, Sales and Service consoles, utility bars, records or full desks. We offer pre-configured desks for specific user needs.

Full message history
The 360° message history provides a holistic view of all of a lead or contact’s interactions with marketing, sales and service across your business. You can quickly get the context you need to provide more relevant messages.

Dashboards
Use our dashboards to know what your audience really wants. Analyze keywords and behaviors. Gauge the success of your campaigns and learn where your messaging can improve.

Implement profiling with text-messaging to send the most personal and relevant content to your audience. Profiling with Converse gives you reliable insights that you can leverage to increase engagement and build stronger relationships. If you are in the midst of or planning to implement personalized messaging, make sure to check out a demo that includes progressive profiling with Converse. Just text CONVERSE to 36343 to experience it on your phone.

People check their phones every 15 minutes or so, even without the ping of a notification. Smartphones have become the device of choice for nearly all of us—young or old. We use them to message our friends and family, search online, play games, use apps, read email, and occasionally to make a call.

Because our mobiles have become second nature to us, we also prefer to use them to contact businesses and brands. But that doesn’t mean we want to call them. According to a recent survey by Ellie Mae, 97% of consumers asked want texting to be part of the sales conversation.

Interestingly, Gartner’s 2017 Channel Survey found that there’s a place at every stage of the customer journey for messaging.

This means that both marketing and sales can use text messaging to advantage. The better aligned the two functions, the more consistent and relevant the communication. An advanced conversational text messaging platform enables this to happen because the entire texting history for every prospect or customer is captured in an ongoing conversational flow that allows everyone involved to see what’s been said and responded to in the past.

You’ll know instantly how to be relevant and what will add value to the conversation given the customer’s relationship with your company. And that’s powerful, considering that visibility into prospects and customers remains one of the biggest challenges to both marketers and salespeople.

Before you start messaging your prospects and customers, you’ll need to get their consent via a compliant opt-in. This is critical, and it’s a regulation, so make sure to do this first.

Tips for Real-Time Marketing and Sales

1. Make it Conversational. SMS messages are seen as personal because it’s on the device we’ve integrated so completely into our lives. Business casual as a style works for both dress codes and texting. Be respectful and professional, but don’t be afraid to have a bit of fun. An SMS message is 160 characters, so you’ll need to be brief, but also compelling.
2. Make it Useful. The fastest way to get someone to text STOP to opt out of your messaging programs is to send them communications they consider to be irrelevant or spammy. Ask yourself if the message is something they can act on right now or in the near term. Does whatever you’re sending provide something your prospect or customer will find valuable based on where they are in the customer journey?
3. Make it Actionable. What are you asking them to do? Is it easy? Or will it take more effort than a person will want to expend on a mobile device? The call to action (CTA) is the most important part of your message, so plan it carefully. Walk through the entire experience yourself, just as your customer will to make sure the experience is what you want it to be.
4. Make it Personal. With an advanced messaging platform, you can see the prospect or customer’s record in your CRM, in addition to their conversational history with you. If you’re lacking insights, send a message asking them to take a brief survey so that you can tailor your messages and offers to their specific wants and needs in relation to your products or services. You can also do this by asking for keyword responses that will trigger related follow-up messages or conversations.
5. Make it Fit the Relationship. Based on your relationship with the prospect or customer, your messaging should match their expectations. For example, if they’re new to knowing your brand or business, be careful about making assumptions or being too familiar. However, if you’ve just met with them, sending a follow-up text message with an answer to a question they asked that you couldn’t answer at the time will be welcome.

With SMS Messages, Make it Human

The best part about using SMS messages for real-time marketing and sales is that keywords can be used to trigger alerts to a member of the team to step into the conversation in real time and engage with the prospect or customer. The speed of response and the ability to blend automated messaging with human messaging is something that is complex and difficult to do with other channels.

Advanced messaging platforms are built to enable this combination. This means that real-time can become a reality for marketing and sales, rather than the pipe dream we’ve had for years that technology has promised but not lived up to. Well, now it has.

Get a free trial and see the magic of real-time messaging for marketing and sales. We’ll support you every step of the way.