If you haven’t already implemented SMS marketing into your business strategy, there couldn’t be a better time. Text messages can help you build and maintain your customer base and stand out from the rest of the pack. What makes this form of marketing so powerful? Read on to find out what SMS marketing can do for your tech company!

Nurture Leads and Customers With High-Value Content

Your leads might be interested in your products, but may not be ready to buy yet. Maybe a customer bought from you several years ago, but they’re due for an upgrade soon. Your challenge is to nurture a relationship between them and your brand, so they’ll stick with you until the right time comes.

SMS marketing offers an organic way to become a valuable source of facts, tips and useful information for your leads. Since text messages have around a 98% open rate, your leads will see your outreach. By sending helpful information that meets their needs, you’ll keep them subscribed to your messaging list, and your brand will add value to their lives. Consider reaching out with:

• Common problems your leads might be facing and explanations of how your product or service can help.
  • “Worried about security on your company’s devices? We can help  . . . “

• Interesting statistics or facts relating to technology in your leads’ specific industries or interests. With advanced SMS marketing solutions, it’s easy to both personalize and automate your outreach.
  • “A federal judge recently ruled against scanning students’ rooms during virtual test proctoring. Does your institution need new remote testing solutions? We’ve got options.”

• Creative shortcuts, tricks and strategies to help your leads solve tech-related headaches
  • “Record podcasts that sound better with these simple tips!”

Remember to keep messages short, to-the-point, and properly spaced (typically, once a week is a good schedule for promotional outreach). You can also use text messages to invite recipients to more in-depth sources of information, like your company’s blogs or how-to web pages.

Keep Customers Excited About New Innovations

Text messaging is a great way to let your customers know when you’ve rolled out a new product or upgrade. Texts are unobtrusive and easy to read, and your customers typically prefer them over any other channel. With multimedia messaging solutions (MMS), you can not only send product stats and information, but also multimedia files, like product images.

To quickly gauge interest in new products, whether you’ve already developed them or they’re still on the drawing board, you can message your customers with a quick survey. Asking for their opinion helps you tailor your offerings to their specific needs, and it also helps them know that you care about them and hear their concerns.

Offer Quick, Seamless, Multichannel Support

In the tech industry, product support and customer service are key. Today’s tech users don’t want to sit on hold for an hour waiting for someone to help. They want responsive, in-the-moment support that fits seamlessly into their busy lives. Your customers need to know that you’re there for them, not just before the sale, but afterwards as well.

Advanced conversational messaging solutions make it easy for your support team to answer questions and solve customers’ problems. Using keyword automation, your customers’ questions can easily be routed to the right agent. Members of your team can seamlessly collaborate on the same conversation, and messages from multiple channels will appear in a single inbox. Easy access to message history ensures every agent who works on a particular issue has all the facts they need to quickly resolve it. Your customers will appreciate the convenience of a text-based support conversation, which can take place while they’re on the clock, in the field or juggling other tasks.

With SMS marketing, your tech company can drive revenue, boost customer satisfaction and improve agent efficiency and workflow. Want to get started with SMS-Magic? Contact our customer support team for a demo or a free trial!

Consider the proven results of messaging campaigns: MarketingProfs reported SMS marketing has a whopping 98% read rate, while 40% of text messages actually receive a response from customers. And when it comes to paying via text messaging, customers enjoy the convenience just as much. From mobile readers to crypto transactions, digital payments are fast and convenient.

Why would a business expand its customer tools to offer payment solutions via text messaging? A study conducted in 2020 by Weave found that 35% of customers are interested in paying with a text from their phone.

Convenience and Personalization

By offering flexibility and convenience to customers, businesses are more likely to improve their accounts receivable turnover ratios. Companies with high accounts receivable turnover ratios indicate that they collect payments from customers quickly without long waiting periods.

In addition, customers may also enjoy the personal, casual aspects of receiving text messages rather than formal bills sent via snail mail or email with a deadline to pay. In fact, a 2014 industry survey found that 52% of customers would be likely to text with a live customer support agent, and that the same percentage would prefer texting instead of their current method of reaching customer support.

One limitation to consider is the nature of SMS and MMS messages sent in the United States. Your messaging provider can make the physical and backend parts of their systems secure, but no one can secure messages once they are enroute without the special security environment provided by over-the-top apps like WhatsApp.

Compliance

Perhaps the number one priority for businesses accepting text payments is the need to be PCI compliant. If you don’t plan to process payments yourself, make sure you partner with a vendor who builds compliance into their interactions with your customers.

There are only 12 requirements your business must meet to accept debit and credit card payments, but being aware of these requirements is only half the battle. You must also adhere to them in your systems and transactions.

To ensure you take no shortcuts with compliance in text payments, practice these rules:

• Partner with a payment processor that has a solid track record of compliance
• Know the ins-and-outs of sensitive cardholder data
• Establish crisis and incident response plans
• Conduct regular security audits

Payment Data Storage

Storing cardholder data – account numbers, pins, CVVS, and more – is also a critical aspect of a company’s PCI compliance and security when accepting text payments. When data breaches occur, scammers are often skimming cardholder data.

In an ironic twist, your company’s own employees may be a major cause of non-compliance if they are not handling cardholder data appropriately. A Veritas Technologies study of international office workers found that 71% employees are exposing companies to risk by sharing sensitive data outside of the businesses that employ them.

Training employees in ethical and secure data handling is just as important as ensuring your internal controls and infrastructure meet compliance standards. Many companies choose to bring in an outside expert to establish data security standards and train employees for mobile payment practices.

The ability to accept payments or store personal information is becoming increasingly popular with global companies. In fact, banks and other financial institutions use WhatsApp to send bank balances, overdraft alerts and other inquiries to their customers via messaging. WhatsApp, which is supported by SMS-Magic, also has the ability to safely secure personal data.

BYOD Policies

With the rise of remote and mobile work, many companies have developed “bring your own device” policies. Guided by these policies, employees are allowed (or encouraged) to use personal devices that are not under the purview of the company, even if they are used for business purposes. When employees use their own device to communicate with customers, the employee becomes responsible for ensuring that they are practicing compliant behaviors when they’re engaging in messaging and in text payment processing.

Even secure transmission apps like WhatsApp can make proving secure communications difficult. For example, if a company ever had to conduct a security investigation – internally or externally – it would be difficult to extract information from an employee’s personal device unless individual consent or subpoenas are involved.

That’s why it’s important to make sure your business has an ironclad phone policy for employees using their personal devices for business purposes. Establishing dedicated work apps keeps their communication within a controlled work environment, ensuring you have access to communications if issues arise in mobile payments.

Whether you’re using WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, or any other messaging channel to accept text payments from customers, your business is making the customers’ lives easier. 

Ensure your company’s infrastructure is prepared to handle this sensitive data by choosing the right payment processors, cybersecurity specialists and messaging solutions to keep you compliant and safe. 

At SMS-Magic, we can help your business securely accept mobile payments from customers via our messaging solution that meets PCI and telecommunications regulations. To chat with an expert, set up a free demo.

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!

SMS messages are now one of the most powerful tools that can be leveraged to get the message out and fuel business growth. The problem is that, like email, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t lead to successful messaging. The key to creating the most effective messaging programs is to utilize industry-specific, personalized texting so that your audience knows you truly care and recognize their needs.

A common obstacle that business owners and leaders face when trying to implement text messaging programs is how time consuming and resource intensive the process actually is. With coding and testing, defining the right content, planning campaigns, and writing message flows, the struggle is real and can take months to even start texting. At SMS-Magic, we believe you should focus on your business, not cumbersome technology projects. That’s why we built Converse Industry Solutions.

SMS Messages Designed for Your Industry

We built Converse with Clickable Configuration Wizards to eliminate coding with a few simple clicks. Users can breeze through the set-up and implementation process and quickly launch powerful campaigns that are tailored to meet specific business goals.

Converse Industry Solutions include:

Desks built to meet specific functional needs:

Marketing, sales, and service teams have different goals with their messaging. That’s why Converse features desks with intuitive, intentional interfaces for each function that boost productivity and performance.

Quickstart campaigns and automations:

With these powerful pre-built solutions, you don’t need to waste time reinventing the wheel. Just fine-tune to your needs and take off! Our Quickstart campaigns and automations include industry-specific:

• Content libraries and templates
• Automated workflows and campaigns
• Guidance for deployment and tuning
• Dashboards for tracking performance and control
• Rules-based automation for routing and other processes

Save Time for Your Team

Intuitive interfaces and guidance systems in Converse empower users to build and deploy robust messaging programs that generate results quickly. Converse’s configuration and setup wizards make it so simple even users can create and launch campaigns. No more waiting for the availability of a Salesforce admin resource.

Choose Industry-Specific Messaging Instead of a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

When the time comes to implement SMS messages or overhaul existing programs at your company, remember to consider the importance of an industry-specific, personalized messaging strategy. Not only will your audience feel valued and appreciate you for it, your business will reap the benefits.

To learn more about building successful messaging programs for your industry, you can download our best practices guides for General Business, Staffing, Higher Education, Financial Services, and Real Estate.

It’s not just your advisors who are getting younger, it’s also your clients and investors. This shift has pushed new communication channels into preference. It’s time for financial firms to take on modern communication channels, such as SMS text messaging, without concerns about compliance risk. And considering that 39% of financial firm employees are asking for SMS/text messaging, it’s likely because their clients are asking for this channel to be used.

The problems with compliance begin when you rely on a policy prohibiting your advisors from using their personal smartphones for firm communications. Recent research found that 56% of finance compliance professionals lack the confidence that they can prove their prohibition policy is working.

Instead, consider what an Intelligent Text Messaging Platform brings to help you painlessly evolve your communications channels. After all, mobile device usage in the workplace will only continue to grow. Financial firms need to rise to the challenge to address retention and oversight challenges.

Archival: Know what’s been sent and received

An Intelligent Text Messaging Platform automatically records all messaging conversations – including incoming and outgoing text messages. These messages are archived to your lead or contact record in your Salesforce CRM, providing a complete audit trail should you ever need to retrieve and present a message during an examination.

According to the 2018 Electronic Communications Compliance Survey, 48% of firms that allow text messaging lack an archiving system. Don’t just think “archival,” think about a complete conversational messaging platform with native integration with your Salesforce CRM.

Incorporating a comprehensive messaging platform mitigates risk and empowers internal and external communications by providing the following:

Context: Know what’s been said

Because all messages are archived, the context of the conversation is clear to the examiner or to your supervisory personnel, ensuring appropriate oversight. For the 29% of financial firms that have no written policy in place to govern text messaging, access to context can help you develop one.

Mobile: Know you’re in compliance

With a mobile app and automated alerts that let an advisor or broker know when a client has reached out, they can respond no matter where they are through the messaging platform by using the mobile app. This relieves both your concern that messaging is happening on personal devices that’s untracked, as well as to provide protection to your advisors by helping them follow policy.

The same survey found that 50% of finance compliance professionals expressed concern about non-email communications, including social media and text messaging. And 42% expressed concern about managing the use of mobile devices. Intelligent Text Messaging Platforms can help to close this gap between compliance and risk.

Oversight: Know how messaging is used

Dashboards enable easier oversight by showing compliance professionals the volume of messaging, the types of messages sent and the number of conversations that take place within your firm. If you see the volume of messaging escalate for an advisor, you can easily step in to apply oversight to ensure that the conversations follow policy.

The Bottom Line

Your clients and investors want to use text messaging to converse with your brokers and advisors. Your brokers and advisors are adept at using text messaging to communicate and prefer it for efficiency and matching communication preferences for conducting business.

Text messaging is growing as a preferred channel. Clients and investors want questions answered quickly and to exchange information in the way they prefer. There’s no reason that your firm can’t adopt text messaging to satisfy both internal and external needs. Just make sure you choose an Intelligent Messaging Platform like SMS-Magic Converse to give you a leg up on addressing compliance risks.

Online surveys have been around for years. Many brands send emails after a service experience or product purchase requesting customers to take a survey to provide feedback about their experience.

But response rates hover between 10 – 20%. This can be frustrating for businesses trying to go the extra mile to delight their customers.

Companies that use SMS text message surveys with customers can achieve as high as 50% response rates. Response rates like this mean you’ll gain valuable information that provides solid traction for improving customer experiences.

Crafting Your Text Message Surveys

It’s not just the channel that makes the difference in response, but the quality of the message or survey you send. Just because a text message is read within minutes of receipt doesn’t mean it will be responded to. And, since you can only text customers who consent to being contacted via SMS, you want to make sure every text message survey you send results in an engaging experience.

3 Steps to Designing Your SMS Customer Feedback Survey

1. Identify Purpose and Use. There can be many reasons you ask your customers for feedback. They don’t all need to be service or transaction related. Learning more about your customers’ needs, preferences, likes and dislikes can help you improve marketing programs, sales communications, and the ways in which you respond to service requests.

Some ideas to consider include:

• Product interest
• Attributes of interest; color, size, features
• Net Promoter Score
• Experience satisfaction from product purchase or service provision
• Topic / Function interest

Make sure the information you ask for will be used. There’s nothing more frustrating than providing information yet never seeing its impact. By acting on the information discovered through a text message survey, your customers will feel appreciated and experience more relevant conversations with you.

In other words, if you’re not going to use the information, don’t ask for it. The cost could be higher than not communicating at all.

2. Define When and Who. Timing and relevance are everything in conducting successful surveys. Wait too long after a purchase and you may miss your window. But asking too quickly may result in skewed answers if the customer hasn’t had time to try your product.

Asking a question relevant to a recent activity is a solid choice. Luckily, with intelligent text messaging, you can automate your surveys based on triggers, such as recent purchases, purchase history, content interest, and service requests.

Additional examples of When and Who include:

• Lapsed customers who haven’t purchased in the last 6 months
• A specific segment of your customers to learn their interest about a new product you’re considering stocking
• VIP customers who are frequent purchasers to learn what else they find valuable

3. What’s In It For Them? Surveys are often better responded to when an incentive is offered. Incentives don’t always need to be discounts or promotional offers. An incentive could also be helping them find exactly what they want or need right now.

A survey can be as simple as a “pick one” choice. For example:

“What does Autumn mean to you? Reply COZY or CRISP to see what we’ve got.”

Customers who reply COZY could receive a link to hot chocolate related items. Those who reply CRISP could receive a link to apple cider related items, for examples. Creativity helps provoke curiosity. And that curiosity gap can help to increase your response rate. Just make sure that the correlations to your key words will make sense to your customers given what you sell.

The Bottom Line

Surveys have been used for years to better understand how customers feel, what they want and how they perceive the experiences had with brands. As customer expectations grow, there’s no better way than asking them, to learn what’s most relevant. Text message surveys are an easy, effective way to do just that.

SMS messages offer the fastest time-to-response of any communication channel. The majority of customers prefer messaging to any other customer service channel, primarily because it eliminates the frustrations of being on hold while waiting for agents to respond.

Responding quickly to a customer requesting support is a powerful way to soothe problem situations and show you care, providing a boost to customer satisfaction.

Text messaging empowers service organizations to do just that.

3 Ways SMS Messages Speed Customer Responses

1. Instantly confirm service requests. SMS messages can automatically send a response that confirms you’re paying attention, as soon as your customer submits a question or a ticket. You can immediately let them know that you’ve received their request, introduce the agent that will be handling their case and set their expectations about when they can expect a follow-up contact. And you can do all of that before a human agent can even answer the call.

2. Automate the queue. The submission of the service request can also notify the agent or agents who will be providing support that a new request has been submitted. They can then quickly review the request and begin moving resolution forward. While they do that, your customer will already know you’re on it thanks to your quick response.

3. Use messaging to drive self-service. It’s also easy to automate responses to the most common issues, such as a password reset or locating a user manual. By providing ways for your customers to quickly resolve simple issues through self-help resources, their problem is solved, and more tickets are closed without direct intervention with a support agent.Should a customer reply HELP, an agent receives an automated alert and can immediately respond to the message to resolve your customer’s issue.

The Bottom Line

These three examples are only the start to how SMS messages can help your customer service agents shorten time-to-response at the critical moments in your customer relationships.