Increasingly, healthcare providers are turning to technology to solve this issue. At the forefront of this technological revolution is the power of Text Messaging in Healthcare, a tool that has shown great promise in improving patient adherence and engagement. But how exactly does this work? Let’s dive in.

Powering Medication Adherence Through Text Messaging in Healthcare

Patient preference and adherence is a critical component of effective healthcare, but nearly 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed. This non-compliance can lead to severe health repercussions and increased healthcare costs. Enter the game-changer: Conversational Messaging. You’ll be impressed to know that the ‘Impact of Reminders on Adherence’, A study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that text message reminders improved medication adherence rates by 17.8%

SMS messaging for healthcare offers a straightforward, cost-effective, and patient-friendly solution to medication non-adherence. With personalized medication reminders delivered right to a patient’s mobile device, patients are more likely to stick to their prescription schedules. Messaging can further encourage Patient preference and adherence by providing clear instructions for medication intake, addressing common concerns about side effects, and offering timely support when patients need it.

Enhancing Appointment Compliance via Text Messaging in Healthcare

Missing healthcare appointments is a pervasive issue that leads to delayed care, disrupted treatment plans, and unnecessary healthcare costs. The U.S. healthcare system incurs over $150 billion in annual costs due to no-show appointments, as demonstrated by a study released in the BMC Health Services Research journal. This problem, too, can be tackled effectively through SMS messaging.

SMS healthcare text reminders for appointments significantly reduce the likelihood of no-shows. Moreover, by enabling two-way communication, text messaging allows patients to easily reschedule appointments if needed. This reduces the chances of empty appointment slots, enhancing clinic efficiency.

As the ‘Impact of Reminders on Appointment Attendance’ study in the Journal of American Board of Family Medicine, text message reminders reduced the rate of missed appointments by nearly 30%. Furthermore, it also fosters stronger patient-doctor relationships by maintaining consistent communication and demonstrating the healthcare provider’s commitment to the patient’s well-being.

Transforming Overall Patient Engagement through Text Messaging in Healthcare

Beyond improving patient preference and adherence and appointment compliance, messaging can transform overall patient engagement. For example, The survey conducted by the National Library of Medicine provided intriguing data about patients’ communication preferences. A remarkable 98.2% of patients found text messages to be a favorable mode of communication, and 95.5% felt a heightened sense of connection with their healthcare team through this medium. Additionally, 91.9% of respondents agreed that these text updates reduced their need to make calls to the office.

Equally noteworthy is that 91.9% of patients showed a clear preference for text updates over other communication methods such as emails, phone calls, or patient portal messages. By texting regular health tips, wellness checks, and encouragement, SMS marketing services can foster healthier lifestyles and a greater sense of connection between patients and healthcare providers.

This two-way communication also empowers patients, giving them a more active role in their healthcare journey. This empowerment not only enhances patients’ overall satisfaction but also improves health outcomes by promoting active participation in their healthcare.

Why Choose SMS-Magic: The Best SMS Marketing Services

With numerous SMS service providers in the market, it’s important to choose one that truly stands out. SMS-Magic offers the best SMS marketing services, tailored to meet the unique needs of healthcare professionals.

We understand the necessity of ensuring patient adherence and preference in the healthcare industry. That’s why our services are designed to deliver personalized, timely, and accurate messages. Through our robust platform, you can send appointment reminders, medication alerts, and follow-up messages that keep your patients engaged and compliant.

Moreover, SMS-Magic’s user-friendly platform allows healthcare providers to easily manage their communication with hundreds or even thousands of patients. Our services are HIPAA-compliant, ensuring all patient communication is private and secure.

At SMS-Magic, we’re committed to harnessing the power of conversational messaging to enhance patient adherence. We’re here to help healthcare providers leverage this powerful tool to promote better patient outcomes. So why wait? Join us in driving SMS healthcare forward with SMS-Magic, and let’s make non-adherent patients a thing of the past.

Thank you for reading our blog! Stay tuned for more insights on how messaging is shaping the future of various industries. Remember, with SMS-Magic, your communication possibilities are endless. Follow us to get timely updates. 

SMS text messaging is more personal and has a greater chance of engaging your audience. While adding another channel to a marketing mix can be more challenging, the payoff is higher. A business text messaging solution that integrates with your CRM, will reduce your workload.

There are many reasons lead nurturing programs can fail. Here are four common mistakes marketers make while nurturing leads.

Don’t quit too soon

A relationship needs to be ongoing, but some marketers give up early because they mistakenly assume their prospect will buy on their marketing timeline. Marketers need to shift from a campaign mentality to a customer journey approach that meets buyers where they are in their buying process—including the mix of content and channels.

Numbing prospects with repetitive content

Marketers often blast their audience with the same content over and over. Track your communication and tweak it if it’s not getting results. Besides turning off prospects, you risk your communications becoming classified as spam.

Using only email for lead nurturing communications

In addition to mixing up your content, marketers can boost performance by integrating various communication channels. This approach will help you identify the channels your prospects prefer and where they’re most responsive. Try adding a call to action for them to choose text messaging for future communications. Build your opt-in list and commence with adding texts to your nurturing program.

Once you’ve done that, remember to sync all your communications with the prospect on one platform. This will help you customize your conversation with your buyers. You’ll increase the chances of continuing response rates as your nurturing program progresses. Using multiple channels increases your response rate by 37% according to a study. And that’s just what you want to see.

Treating your audience as if they’re all the same

Same content, same channel, to all prospects completes this short list of marketing mistakes. A prospect is more likely to respond if you send relevant and meaningful content. For example, a woman interested in purple sweaters is much more likely to respond to a promotional offer on a new shipment of purple sweaters than to a generic 10% discount offer. Or, a new home buyer looking for a 3-bedroom home with a pool who receives a property listing update for a 2-bedroom condo will just hit delete and wonder why they opted in to hear from you in the first place.

A marketing automation platform will help you apply segmentation so it’s easy for you to personalize your content for different needs within your audience. Seventy-three percent of consumers surveyed in an Accenture study said that they would rather buy from retailers who used personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.

Easy Fixes to Get Lead Nurturing Right

Now that we’ve seen what marketers are doing wrong, let’s talk about how they can leverage the data and tools that are available to them, to increase engagement.

Segment and personalize

Segmentation can help you deliver relevant communication to your audience. Targeted messages can increase engagement significantly, compared to a single communication blast. You can segment leads by source, function, level of product interest, or activity, for instance.

Use your CRM to better know your prospects and customers and apply that knowledge in your communication. Just a few tweaks to a content piece can personalize it by industry or lead source, earning better results.

A software company used progressive profiling to get prospects to opt-in for text messaging by providing their mobile number and website URL to access a resource. It then texted them, offering a free analysis of their website, naming the prospect, company and URL. Responses were swift as text messages are opened in short order. The immediacy of the personalized message enticed them to reply.

Blending channels brings advantages

Use email and text messaging together to get the best out of both. For heavier content that people may prefer to access via their PC or laptops, use email. After a few days, send a text to those on your list who have not opened their emails, reminding them to look with a teaser message about what they might be missing.

You can also promote a VIP program with exclusive offers and content to those on your nurture list as a way to identify prospects who are more interested in your products and services. Or you can invite your prospects to ask questions about the topic of the information you just sent them by asking them to text a keyword for a quick answer. There’s no need to worry – you can set up alerts to ensure a messaging user is advised to respond quickly to incoming questions.

Focus Nurturing on the Customer Lifecycle, not the Initial Sale

Anticipate your prospects’ next move. Create different nurture tracks based on the segments you identified. If your prospects’ behavior shows that they are interested in a product related to the one they first looked at, you can send them to the nurture stream for that product.

Your nurture should be flexible, so that as your prospects shift focus, your content is still relevant to them. SMS text messaging can help you do this more easily then email, through keywords. If a prospect selects an option from a choice of keywords in a text, you can send the next text based on that keyword.

Think long term when it comes to nurturing a relationship, not a one-night stand. You need to get a conversation going with your prospects, whatever be the medium. Rather than relying solely on email, diversify with other channels, including SMS text messaging. This way, you’ll amplify engagement and momentum towards conversion—again and again.

Traditional lead nurturing programs rely on email. Response rates for email have declined, but even more challenging is that email nurturing programs are usually one-way monologues, rather than two-way conversations.

If a prospect is not opening an email—or acting because of it—then it’s time to switch channels to find resonance. SMS text messaging is more personal and has a greater chance of engaging your audience since nearly all text messages are read within minutes of receipt. Even better, should your prospect reply, you’ve got a conversation started. And that’s a big advantage over email.

You may think adding another channel to a nurturing program will introduce challenges in consistency and coordination, but we can simplify that for you. An advanced text messaging platform with native integration with Salesforce keeps your effort low but ensures the payoff from your nurturing programs is high.

4 Common Mistakes Rectified with Lead Nurturing with Text Messaging

Marketers quit too soon.

A relationship is built via ongoing communications, but marketers often give up early. If what you’re selling takes a bit of thought, two touches and a sales pitch won’t get the job done. But it could also be the timing. Maybe it’s not convenient today, but they’ll buy next month. To capitalize on your target market, it helps to shift from a campaign mentality to a customer journey approach.

Automated lead nurturing campaigns with text messaging will help you keep in touch with your prospects. Incorporating calls to action to have them reply with keywords for more information when they’re ready means you have a higher chance of creating connected conversations that inspire purchasing. Where an email nurture doesn’t allow you to step in when appropriate, as soon as your prospect responds via text, you’ll get an alert, so you can step into the conversation in stride.

Sending the same content that repeats the same message.

Sending the same content that didn’t engage prospects the last time is not a solid plan for gaining traction. Track your communications and tweak them if response rates are low. It’s important to think of nurturing as a progressive story meant to drive education and engagement. Show prospects something different that piques their interest and you’re on the right track.

Lead nurturing with text messaging also allows you to insert simple surveys into the stream to allow you to personalize your content and offers based on your prospect’s interests.

For example, if you sell furniture, ask them which room they’re furnishing. Use keywords for the replies so you can automatically trigger the follow-up message. You can ask them, “Are you interested in options for BATH, KITCHEN or LIVINGROOM? Reply with your choice and we’ll show you our latest arrivals.”

Using only one channel.

Besides trying different content, you should also try various communication channels. Where some communications are better facilitated by email, others can play well to an SMS or MMS message. You can even send an email and then send a text to remind them to check their email using a teaser statement that gets their attention. When done well and thoughtfully, using both channels will help you customize your conversation with your prospect. Using multiple channels increases your response rate by 37% according to a study.

Advanced messaging solutions that also integrate with your marketing automation platform will help you facilitate a cross-channel nurturing program that’s in sync and designed to help you start and continue connected conversations with a full history of related behavior for both texts and emails.

Sending the same content to your entire database.

Different prospects have varying needs, interests and issues to solve. Sending the same message to everyone is what gives marketers a bad rap. 73% of consumers surveyed in an Accenture study said that they would rather buy from retailers who used personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.

Just as marketing automation can help you apply segmentation so that you can personalize information for different members of your audience, so will an advanced messaging platform. Even better, the two can work in sync to coordinate your content flows. You can segment leads by source, function, level of product interest, activity, for instance.

Because text messaging invites replies, questions and responses and all incoming and outgoing messages are recorded in the lead’s history in your CRM—along with response to emails sent by your marketing automation platform—you’ve got a record of the entire conversation.

By analyzing what they respond to and which messages they ignore, you can tweak and tune your nurturing program to get the most from each exchange, as well as using the channel that garners the best response. And, when your leads’ behavior indicates their interests have shifted, it’s easy for you to move them into a nurturing program that better meets their needs.

The Bottom Line

It’s not clear why nurturing has been pursued as a single-channel marketing strategy. But what is clear is that channel preferences are changing, along with expectations. It’s time to start taking a multi-channel approach to your lead nurturing programs for better engagement and outcomes.

Think long term when it comes to developing customer relationships. You need to get a conversation going with your prospects, whatever be the medium. Rather than relying solely on email, consider adding diversify with communication channels like SMS text messaging. This way, you’ll amplify engagement and momentum towards conversion.

Defining Nurturing

A nurturing campaign is a series of messages sent to a targeted list of customers designed to sustain engagement, build trust and ultimately result in a commercial relationship. The purpose of nurturing campaigns is to drive revenue and growth.

Nurturing differs from a promotion, discount, or offer in that it allows your customers to move at their own pace, learning what they need to know along the way to choose to do business with you…repeatedly. With an intelligent text messaging platform, your text messages are sent via an automation system, scheduled to deliver at the frequency you’ve specified.

Why Become a Textpert at Nurturing Campaigns?

• Grow Engagement: One of the biggest challenges in today’s noisy environment is getting customers to give you their attention by engaging with the information you send them. There are so many options to choose from, that your message needs to stand out. It also needs to be reinforced to drive preference and action. Text messages get attention—usually within minutes.
• Increase Responsiveness: With a read rate of 98%, messaging is one of the most responsive channels available for marketing, sales, and service. People read and act on messages quickly. You can send them content, videos, images, links to web pages, and more, and they will reward you with their responsiveness. In fact, 85% of consumers say they want to have conversations with businesses via text message.
• Retain Existing Customers: It’s common knowledge that keeping an existing customer is much more cost efficient than acquiring a new one. As you learn more about your customers your messaging can become hyper-relevant, offering them a variety of useful information. This includes tips for using your products, which additional products complement the products they’ve purchased…the options are endless. Nurturing with messaging is personalized, friendly, and intuitive for them to engage with you. What more can you (or your customers) ask for?

Converse Apps Remove the Risk

Creating a text messaging nurture program from the ground up can seem daunting. Under usual circumstances it requires IT development resources, coding, testing, content creation, and more.

Converse Apps remove the complexity, time and need for additional resources to get your messaging programs out the door. Converse Apps provide a kit of preconfigured, ready-to-go conversations to kickstart your efforts.

This means you get a fully functioning App based on best practices validated by more than 1,800 customers so you can focus on achieving your objectives to grow your business.

Each Converse App delivers a complete conversational text messaging campaign, ready-to-run with simple tuning. Included are industry proven:

• Message content templates that make it easy for you to quickly create your messages in a best practices way.
• Conversation flows for your campaign, including automated workflows, auto-responses (where applicable) and triggers for these actions. The Converse Drip/Nurture App also includes the ability to trigger emails for content delivery, if your prospect prefers email.
• End-to-end data, as well as the analytics and reporting you need to capture the key insights to optimize your results.
• Intuitive user interface designed to accelerate and simplify managing the volume of conversations you’ll create with conversational messaging.

Steps to Nurturing Message Campaigns Using Converse Apps

1. Define a Segmented Target List: Converse integrates seamlessly with popular CRM systems allowing you to pull a list based on any object or field to create the best possible profiles and lists for your campaign—just as you would for an email campaign.
2. Tune Your Messages: Your Converse App comes with templates that reflect best practices. All you need to do is tune and tweak the messages to speak to your specific audience. This may include name fields to match your CRM, keywords and short codes for responses, and links to the content you’re sharing in each touch of the nurture campaign.
3. Select Your Cadence: Choose how often you want your messages to be received by your target audience. You may choose a cadence based on a timed release (once per week) or choose to have your campaign triggered by audience behavior, such as a customer responding with a keyword for more information.
4. Set the Goals for Your Campaign: Goals can include response rates, number of replies by contact, speed of replies, conversions, etc. Converse Apps will track your results against your goals and display the information on the insights dashboard for your nurturing campaign.

Now you’re set to run your campaign. Yes, that’s all you have to do to get it up and running. Your Converse App will route contacts that act to the appropriate response mechanism, either an automated message or set of messages or a personal interaction with a marketing, sales, or service user, depending on what you’ve specified.

You can check your dashboard in real time to see the progress of your messaging sends, responses to individual messages, groups of messages or the entire campaign.

Converse Apps give you a no-risk way to become a Textpert at nurturing campaigns.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform nurturing programs—and other communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with the relevance that drives business growth.

Imagine being able to learn a concept or a skill via a series of short, valuable text messages sent to you once or twice per day for a week or two.

Think about what your customers might need to learn to understand the true value of your products and solutions or how they can achieve even more value from the products they’ve already purchased.

At the end, your customers will have the entire course in one thread in their SMS messaging app, so they can review it as they need to. Your customers will love you for becoming a resource that helps them accomplish something they wanted to do, but perhaps hadn’t made time for in the past.

It’s a great way to move beyond transactional messaging to purpose-driven messaging. And you could offer a series of courses that step them through related concepts or to build on skills they’ve just learned in the first course they subscribed to from your company.

Building Your Text Messaging Course

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say your company sells a SaaS email marketing solution. You benefit when your customers improve their email response rates, therefore realizing more value from their investment in your platform.

An email is made up of a variety of components, including:

• Subject line
• Preview text
• Salutation
• Body copy
• Call to action
• Signature
• P.S. lines

What if you created two text message lessons for each of these 7 components to help your customers learn how to optimize their emails?

To create the messages, consider a few themes for how you might set them up:

If we take Theme A, above, your first two lessons could be:

Text 1: #1 Subject Lines: Best performing email subject lines contain 4 words or less. Focus on being clear and crisp but curious enough to click. Don @ ExactEmail

Text 2: #2 Subject Lines: A subject line that’s vague or overly eager will get deleted. Don’t be misleading or use CAPS. Check your personalization. Don @ ExactEmail

These examples are obviously for a beginner level audience, but there are many ways to adjust the lessons to fit the expertise level of your customers. The main questions to answer when constructing your course messaging are:

• What will your customers find interesting and helpful?
• How will your course convey value once it’s all strung together in a messaging thread? In other words, what’s the total value the course delivers?
• Is every lesson usable right away? The more action your customers can take in response to receiving your lessons, the better customer relationships you will build.

Delivering Your Text Messaging Course

When constructing your course based on the above suggested program, you’ll need the following messages:

• A confirmation message sent upon receipt of the keyword to subscribe to the course
• 14 lesson messages sent 2 per day over 7 days
• 1 survey message to learn how much customers valued the course sent on the 8^th day

An advanced text messaging platform will help you automate the delivery of your text messaging course so that you can focus on growing your business while your customers are learning how to get more value from their investment with you.

Text messaging already gets a 6x response rate over emails. Which means that when you use text messaging to compel opt-ins, you’re highly likely to get more compliant opt-ins than with any other form of communication.

The question then becomes, “How do I compel my audiences to opt-in?” Here are three ideas.

1. Give them something relevant using short code in return for their opt-in to text messaging.

Offering discounts and coupons is a tried and true approach for product and service-oriented companies. You see these discounts in coupon flyers and envelopes mailed out en masse, in advertisements via direct mail, as well as in online digital ads and emailed offers.

Steps to using promotional offers to drive opt-ins:

• Have your IT admin create a Keyword Response tied to a specific promotion conversation
• Add that keyword to your short or long code in SMS-Magic Converse
• Promote that keyword and short code, along with the offer, in all of your print, digital and event marketing promotions
• Deliver the offer automatically when someone texts the keyword to that short or long code

Be sure you’re using a compliant opt-in approach to the text opt-in, before you have any type of conversation with the prospect. Also, be sure to follow-up after the opt-in is complete to actually send them the offer via text message. SMS-Magic allows you to automate offer delivery based on keyword responses.

You’ll also want to message them to let them know that you’ll be sending other offers and informational content via messaging conversations.

Here’s an example of how this works in higher education:

Your students are digital natives. Using messaging to recruit them gives you the advantage over other institutions. Here’s how you can use SMS-Magic Converse to quickly reach out to students, get their consent, and then move on to recruiting them.

1. Promote your school. A web page, promotion or email campaign uses the offer of a Virtual Event to compel a text opt-in from a student using the keyword SCHOOL. The Compliant Opt-in App manages their confirmation automatically.
2. Fulfill your promotion. Following confirmation, an automatic message delivers the event information and registration which was offered as part of the opt-in promotion, using a Single Message App.
3. Promote a student event: An Event Announcement is triggered through our Event App, offering registration for an Open House. After the student registers, a confirmation is sent, followed by a series of promotions for the event. A message in the event nurture offers the option for the student to SCHEDULE a meeting with admissions at the event, or ask to chat with someone (HELP).

2. Make it easy for new clients to contact you.

Let’s say you’re in real estate, financial services, or some other service-oriented industry. The key to getting new clients is to promote yourself and your business, right?

In every promotion, whether it be a Home for Sale sign, an advertisement, a Yellow Pages listing, or Chamber of Commerce registration, include a keyword and short or long code to make it easy for new prospects to connect with you.

• For multiple options/services, you can use different keywords with the same short or long codes to delineate which service a prospect is interested in discussing.

  For example, different houses for sale could use the numbers in their address as the keywords. In this way, you can immediately know what the prospect is interested in exploring, then trigger an automatic set of messages (after a compliant opt-in) to give them more information that’s highly relevant to their interest.

• If your business is more focused, say landscaping, you can use one keyword for all of your opt-ins.
• You can also combine the concept of a discount or offer with your business promotions. For example, offer a discount on services when someone opts-in to your conversation about relevant topics to your business.

It’s important to note, these nurturing conversations should be relevant and information-based, not self-promoting. Self-promotion is a fast way to get prospects to opt-out of your messaging conversations.

3. Include keywords in your emails or other communications.

The best communication strategy blends all your channel options. So, use your email communications to get people to opt-in to your messaging programs.

Since most people prefer messaging over any other form of communication, why not give them what they want?

Try these simple tricks to promote your text messaging opt-in:

• Customer update emails: In your next customer update email, offer special insights into a topic that’s relevant to your customer base. Use text messaging to deliver those insights. Which means the customers need to opt-in to get them.

  You can use this technique when you’re announcing new products or updates, new services, or new partnerships. If your customers want the juicy information, they’ll get it through texting. Texting is intuitive; we all text. Your customers prefer it so you’re serving them by moving to more text messaging conversations.

• Lead nurturing: In your lead nurture emails, promote a text alternative with a simple opt-in. Again, offer something special like unique information and insights, a free trial or discount coupon for everyone who successfully opts-in to your messaging conversation.

You can also include a keyword and short cord in your IVR messages so that when people call your company, they get a quick option to reach out and converse with someone, quickly, without waiting on hold.

The Bottom Line

Text messaging offers a compelling way to interactively converse with your audience. Since people read and respond to text messages far more than they do emails, gaining opt-ins to text messaging programs results in getting the consent marketers need to be able to continue to communicate with prospects and customers—especially once GDPR comes into effect.

Using the above techniques will enable you to promote your offerings and services, while you also gain the consent you need for ongoing text messaging conversations.

SMS messages offer a natural way to converse with your clients. When you regularly reach out with relevant tips and information, you create a stronger relationship with your clients. That trust makes them like you, and you’ll have the client relationship that’s so important.

It’s easy to create a set of tips for different client types, then automatically send them to your clients. Once you create the messages, you don’t have to do anything, until you want to add new tips or shift the ones you’re offering today.

Here’s how it works.

Please note that the green messages are automated workflows and the yellow messages are manual replies from your customer or from the SMS-Magic user stepping in to respond personally.

SMS Messages for General Wellness Tips

Let’s say you have a majority of clients who are generally healthy. Their primary interest is in maintaining their health through diet, exercise and proper supplements. Following are examples of the wellness tips you can share on a regular basis.

Whenever Kim sees a new article or video, she can simply create a message and add it to the conversation. It will be sent based on whatever schedule she’s set up. New clients start with the first message in the series, while current clients get regularly scheduled updates.

Text Messaging for Special Health Needs

Not all of your healthcare clients are equally healthy. Some have very specialized needs. Let’s take an example of Shari, an acupuncturist who works with a variety of clients.

Shari’s clients tend to fall into the following health categories:

• Healthy, interested in supplements.
• Respiratory issues, interested in supplements and alternative medicine.
• Overweight, interested in weight loss alternatives.
• Heart conditions, interested in heart health, diet and alternatives for healing.
• Athletes, interested in natural performance enhancement techniques.

For each of the above client types, Shari simply creates a first series of messages that contain wellness tips related to their specific condition. She can then schedule each message to be delivered to her specific clients, at a regular interval. Let’s say monthly.

Shari starts with three messages for each client type. That’s three months of regular tips. She then adds new messages as she finds appropriate techniques or tips for each client segment.

Her clients love the fact that Shari cares enough to give them special tips. They also appreciate the messages she sends since it’s so easy to read them and get to the content that’s always relevant to them.

Shari’s clients are now referring more new clients to her. When each new client first meets Shari, she assigns them to one of the wellness tip segments. They begin receiving the messages on a monthly basis, and like their friends, they really appreciate Shari.

Summary

One of the biggest complaints about healthcare providers is the lack of ongoing contact. Seems like we only hear from our providers when they can make money from a service.

Using SMS messages to share wellness tips is a powerful yet simple way to show your clients you care about them, their health and their well-being. It’s also a superb way to create deeper connections with your clients. After all, trust forms the foundation of a healthcare relationship.

Smartphones are personal devices. No one wants brands to text them.

This simply isn’t true. Companies using messaging find that a solid majority of their prospects and customers want to communicate with them via text. Additionally, texting is a permissions-based form of marketing. So those who opt-in to this channel do want to hear from you. Research by Marketing Strategies International found that 66% of customers preferred communicating with brands by text over either phone or email (this rises to 68% for millennials).

This same research asked consumers if they’d feel differently about a brand when communicating via SMS messaging. Their response:

• 66% said they’d pay more for a product/service if it is supported with a mobile messaging channel
• 53% would feel more positive toward a brand that offers mobile messaging to customers
• 45% would choose one product/service over another based on mobile messaging availability

Texting and sending SMS messages is something only young people do – limiting our reach and potential effectiveness.

Wrong again. People of all ages find texting and sending SMS messages intuitive and easy. Baby boomers are the fastest segment adopting and using technology today. Parents and grandparents are adopting and learning how to use technology from their children and grandchildren. Recent KPMG research^[1] shows just how much influence this transfer of knowledge is having across generations.

Text messaging only works for B2C companies, like retailers and restaurants.

Recent research^[2] finds that 80% of business professionals text and 15% of them say that more than 50% of their texts are for business purposes. Companies across industries are finding useful applications for text messaging both internally and externally. This includes, SaaS companies, telecoms, logistics and transportation, construction, manufacturing, recruiting, real estate, professional services, financial and banking organizations, non-profits, and more.

Many of the use cases you may think of for text messaging may be transactional in nature. This includes appointment scheduling and reminders, delivery notifications, password verification, and other one-off, one-way transactions. However, Ovum’s Enterprise Messaging Survey 2017^[3] found that 23% of respondents say their use of two-way messaging has increased in the past year.

Customers want to have conversations with the brands they favor. SMS advanced messaging platforms can orchestrate those conversations with automated workflows, similar to a chat bot. The workflows can also alert a human to step into the conversation. Think about dynamic nurture flows vs. the static ones you use today with marketing automation for email. You can also prompt prospects to text you a keyword to trigger an informational exchange they initiate. Inbound marketing at its finest.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and how compelling you can make your 160-character SMS message, or the quality of your mobile content used in an MMS.

We don’t want to impact our prospects’ and customers’ data plan charges.

According to research firm Ovum, the big three carriers in the US have offered free voice calling and SMS with almost any phone bundle since 2010. Many other countries have fixed-fee, unlimited texting plans. T-Mobile has such plans in more than 140 countries, for example.

The Bottom Line

SMS messages are here to stay. Yes, messaging applications have massive growth in users but there are a few factors predicting a bright future for conversational text messaging in business. A report by the MEF^[4] finds that 35% of consumers trust SMS the most of all messaging platforms, likely due to its neutrality.

Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, which describes the use of SMS by enterprises to send texts to customers, employees and partners is ubiquitous and can be used by anyone with a mobile phone, regardless of handset, operator, OS, or country. Ovum forecasts that SMS traffic will grow to 1.28 trillion messages per annum by 2019.

Isn’t it time for you to dispel the myths holding you back from the messaging channel your prospects and customers prefer?

^[2] A New Era for Mobile Unified Communications
https://www.broadsoft.com/a_new_era_for_mobile_uc_a_dbrn_associates_whitepaper

^[3] Mapping the Future of Enterprise Messaging: SMS, RCS, and Chat Bots
https://ovum.informa.com/resources/product-content/mapping-the-future-of-enterprise-messaging-sms-rcs-and-chat-bots

^[4] MEF Mobile Messaging Report 2016
https://mobileecosystemforum.com/mobile-messaging-report-2016/

An AMP enables you to send messages to buyers from your CRM the same way you’d send an email campaign from marketing automation platforms.  Because every message sent or received is captured, you’ll have a complete conversational history so you can create personalized communications they find relevant and engaging.

Use Advanced Messaging Platforms to Achieve Agile Engagement

Attract New Leads: Let’s say you own a retail business and want to increase online sales through your website. To attract new leads during a promotional event at a mall, you advertise at your booth:

Text INFO to 35343 for special deals.

Once someone – let’s call her Karen – texts the keyword INFO, she receives an automated message to confirm her opt-in, followed by a message triggered by the keyword with an offer and a link to your website.

Karen clicks the link and becomes a visitor on your site with an incentive to buy. Even if she doesn’t become a customer today, you can periodically send her additional offers, notices of new product arrivals, seasonal promotions, and other offers.

Karen replies to a notice of new arrivals of jackets asking if it comes in green. Your sales associate is alerted to the incoming message so they can respond right away to Karen’s inquiry.

After three days, she still hasn’t purchased the jacket. You also know other customers who have purchased jackets in the past. You segment a list of all the leads in your database who have shown interest in jackets, including Karen, and create a message for an exclusive offer.

Convert Leads to Customers: Because your message is exactly what Karen wants, she follows through and buys a new jacket. So do a bunch of your other customers.

Turn New Customers into Repeat Buyers: Now that Karen is a customer, an automatic welcome message is triggered as a Lead is converted and an Account is created and she is attached to that as a Contact in your CRM.

With this time-based offer and other similar periodic messages based on Karen’s behavior, she becomes a loyal Diva customer. Diva continues to cross sell and up sell to her, using the data it has on her purchases.

Using dynamic lists, Diva sends customers a message on their birthdays with a coupon for a freebie. Diva creates templates for these types of events making it easy for team members to send messages, based on the segment and use case to continually inspire customers to make additional purchases.

Karen’s entire conversational history is available in the CRM enabling sales, marketing, and support to refer to it to get a complete picture of her interactions with Diva. This enables every store associate or service agent to engage with Karen in relevant and meaningful ways.

For example, if Karen has indicated that her preference is text instead of email. Confirmations for transactions can be triggered to be sent as messages – continuing to give Karen just what she wants.

Marketing Automation vs. Advanced Messaging Platforms

The Bottom Line

Messaging is not just a personal communications channel, but a preferred interaction channel for today’s consumers. It’s one of the fastest-growing channels available that enables relevant interactions and conversations across the entirety of the customer relationship. Advanced Messaging Platforms mirror the capabilities of marketing automation, enabling you to attract, engage, win and retain more customers – more easily than ever before.