Getting your tech innovations into the world rests on capturing your audience’s interest. Here are 5 of the hottest marketing trends we see coming in 2023.

The 2022 Marketing Star — Short-form Video

Short-form video vaulted into the top marketing strategy slot last year with strong evidence that these videos increase engagement and lead generation. In 2023, all signs point to this  short-but-mighty-trend remaining a favorite in marketing departments across the board. In fact, the video production company Wyzowl’s 2022 report found that 73% of customers prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service, compared to 11% who like to read text, while only 4% lean towards infographics. Most notable for your IT industry is that of the 98% of respondents who watched an explainer video, 78% of consumers credited the video for their software download or purchase.

If you’re ready to add short-form videos to your plan this year, here are a couple of tips:

• The average video view durations on social media platforms range from 15 to 26 seconds.
• Most customers look for value in the first 3 seconds.
• Once your videos are ready, send the video links via email and text messaging campaigns to increase viewership.

Use DMs for to Grow Your Marketing and Customer Service Messaging Opt-ins

Direct messages (DMs) through your social media platforms can help you start a personal conversation and connection with a new lead or customer. DMs are a perfect pathway for gaining text messaging opt-ins and sending links to your newsletter or other materials.

After you have their permission to send texts, you can start campaigns through a messaging platform like SMS-Magic to boost your 2023 marketing game plan. One excellent approach to your DM marketing journey is to use DMs for giving, not asking. You can start by providing a little love to your followers, thanking them for their support with a special reward or discount.

You may also find that your direct message mailbox contains customer questions about an order or feedback about your IT product or services. Use your responses to provide excellent customer service and incentivize your followers. Thank them for their input or help them solve an issue followed by a discount on an upgrade or future downloads.

Digging Deeper with Data

In 2023, how well you know your audience should go beyond simple demographic data. It’s also essential to understand your audience’s interests and passions. Where do they stand on issues, and what difficulties do they face? What IT software are they currently using, and what groups are they a part of?

You can use this data wisely with targeted campaigns to specific groups through email and messaging campaigns. Showing your audience that you get them and want to solve problems for them with your product that suits their challenges can give your brand value. And since this data is ever-evolving and trends are changing quickly, your marketing team’s plan may need to change course during the year.

 Making Real Connections by Humanizing Your Brand

The trend of knowing more about your customers also has a flipside — your customer wants to learn more about you, too. Creating marketing content that reflects your brand’s values can help you connect to your audience in a raw, human way. Where does your IT company stand on certain issues? What role are you playing in the world? Reflect the human side of your brand in your content to leap ahead of the competition this year.

Automations Keep Pulling Their Weight in 2023

Humanizing your brand doesn’t mean you won’t use AI assistance to snag your audience’s attention in 2023. Instead, the trend to use AI to start, continue and maintain marketing conversations through automated text messaging flows or a website chat box is trending upward.

While your customers might be searching for products and watching short-form videos about your app or software in the middle of the night, you don’t have to lose a potential lead if you aren’t available in real-time. And even though you’re automating these conversations, they’ll have a significant impact when you craft with a personal touch. That way, even though you aren’t answering them at the time, it can certainly feel that way with real conversational responses.

Your marketing journey is kicking off this year in the IT industry, and SMS-Magic is here to help you reach your audience with messaging. Ready to get started? Contact our SMS-Magic team for a demo or a free trial today!

Offering your marketing digitally can also give your leads and clients access to resources and information about your products and services. If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry. With some front-end work and a reliable messaging partner, automations can make your digital marketing more manageable — and cost-effective.

1. Automate marketing messages to improve your customer’s experiences

It’s likely that your potential customers are looking for financial information at all hours of the day, and you can greet them each time with personalized messaging automation. Your first step in creating this positive experience is to ensure you aren’t sending any messages, directly or with automations, without their express written consent. Giving your leads and customers the ability to opt in to messaging can be painless when you add opt-in and compliance language to your digital and printed marketing materials or with a button on your website. Once you have the tools to capture consent, you can automate with a little upfront content creation.

One of the easiest ways to start your customer off with a positive experience with your company is by sending an automated welcome message. When a lead submits a form from your website or asks for more information and agrees to opt in to your messages, your preset welcoming message automation can send them an instant response. 

Filling out the form and submitting it triggers this message, and it doesn’t have to stop there. Your welcome message can also lead to an automated message flow that can gather information about your lead’s user metrics, like their financial goals and knowledge level. These messaging flows might ask your lead questions and ask them to reply using a keyword. Each keyword response triggers another automated message that may provide them with links to resources or applications, or it can trigger a response that explains when you will contact them.

These flows and automations improve the customer’s experience from the initial interaction and can keep it going throughout their journey with your company.

2. Increase profitable hours without sacrificing personalized interactions

With marketing automations in place, you and your team won’t have to spend their profit-making hours responding to each customer request personally. Your automated marketing responders can handle many tasks on your behalf, whether an initial welcoming message or one aimed at nurturing clients with links to educational posts or newsletters catered to their interests. 

Remember that data collecting flow mentioned above? This crucial data, combined with your CRM database, can help you personalize each automated marketing campaign. You’ll save time without sacrificing the quality of each interaction when you add personalized touches to each automated message.

Automated marketing doesn’t mean you’ll relinquish complete control of your marketing and communications to automations. With messaging services like SMS-Magic, you can easily switch from automated to personal conversations. Plus, your automations should be reviewed and adjusted regularly based on your read and response rates to your automated marketing campaigns. This will require updated content creation and adjustments to your keyword triggers and flows to keep automation marketing working its best for you.

3. Promote efficiency and reduce event no-shows with automations

Reminders about upcoming meetings or seminars or gentle nudges to download or read marketing content are other benefits that make adding marketing automation a priority. Once a client agrees to a set appointment date and time, it, unfortunately, isn’t set in stone. You can reduce no-shows by setting up automations to send reminders days and hours before the meeting. Add in the ability for clients to reschedule, and you’ll have time to slide another client into a vacant slot — keeping you on track and increasing your productivity.

SMS-Magic’s analytics lets you see what marketing messages aren’t read or responded to. This vital data — paired with your CRM database — can fuel your follow-up campaigns, specifically targeting those groups that haven’t taken action. Follow-ups and reminders are crucial to maintaining your customers’ forward momentum so they can experience all you offer. Automating these follow-ups frees you up and keeps you moving toward your business goals. 

The Bottom Line

Engaging in thoughtful marketing tactics means you’re nurturing leads and delighting your existing customers, but that doesn’t mean you’re always doing it from your mobile phone or computer 24/7. With a little up-front message creation, you can set SMS marketing automations to work for you — any time of day.

Ready to get started using messaging automations to work for your wealth management firm? To get started with SMS-Magic, contact our customer support team for a demo or a free trial!

When you craft a messaging campaign, you should establish your goals and decide how you will measure success. Is your campaign designed to provide information to prospective customers? Are you helping customers with their buying decisions? Are you helping solve problems with a customer service team?

Whatever your campaign goals are, you are sending messages to reach your audience with a specific intent. You might want your customers to learn something, to do something or to decide something. Your messages help them take action.

Analytics help you understand how effective you have been in accomplishing the goals of the campaign. The SMS-Magic team is proud of our easy-to-use dashboard with standard analytics that are ready for you as soon as you send your first message. We can help you analyze and report on the metrics that matter most to you. We can even provide a free trial or a demo.

Of course, we think our messaging platform is the best, but let’s get back to what you should know about your campaigns. Here are some of the key metrics you’ll want to review:

• Message Delivery
  You’ll want to be sure that your messages are reliably delivered, so be sure your software solution for text messaging provides end-to-end delivery statistics across all involved carriers. You can’t help customers if you can’t reach them. Message delivery stats will help you understand how many of your messages are reaching your customers and may highlight issues that prevent delivery. You might have a problem that is easily remedied, if you know about it.

• Response Rates
  If you’re sending a campaign to a list, you’ll want to measure how many of your leads or contacts responded to your message. Low response rates should spur testing of both your message and content to improve results.

• Response Times – Messaging Users
  One of the key values of messaging is the ability to create a conversation. This means that when you receive a response from one of your target audience members, you need to respond quickly, either with an automated message or with a message from a team member.
  Be sure to evaluate response times for your individual users and teams overall. When you see slower response times, be sure to understand why they are occurring, perhaps refining your process to eliminate slow responses. Pay attention to response rates for your industry. What is a “quick” response in one industry may be a very slow response in another.

• Managing Consent to Text
  Privacy laws around the world require you to track who opts in and who opts out of your text marketing campaigns, and you must have explicit consent to collect and process a customer’s personal information. Campaign analytics help you monitor each recipient’s status and can provide reports to prove compliance individually and in aggregate. It’s critical that you abide by a customer’s requests for compliance reasons, as well as to foster good relationships with customers and prospects.

• Pipeline Progress
  As you create and deliver campaigns and individual messages designed to move your prospects through your pipeline, you want to be sure that you monitor their progress. Be sure to evaluate measures such as which content moves a prospect forward, which content gets little reaction, and which content or messages drive conversions.

• Conversion Rates
  If you’re using conversational messaging to drive any type of conversion – a product sale, a subscription, signing up for a course, a candidate accepting a job – be sure to measure your true success rates. All too often we focus on getting a response, responding in a timely fashion, meeting dates, etc. Yet the ultimate measure of a successful conversational messaging campaign is converting your prospect successfully into a customer.

Test and Refine Your Message

If your analytics indicate that something is wrong – response rates have declined, conversions are not what you’d like, customer-service rates are fluctuating wildly – it may be time to do some testing. The most common type of message testing is called A/B or split testing. It’s a proven method of learning what content works and what doesn’t.

Create two messages or two pieces of content. If you’re testing your messages for example, Message A is your control message, and it stays the same. Message B is the test message, and you’ll change only one element in this message.

• Send the two messages to enough of your list to be able to draw conclusions about the entire list. That means your test group is large enough to be statistically significant.
• Check your analytics. If Message B rates a higher response, you’ll know that the element you changed made the difference. You can then send to the entire list, expecting a higher response.
• Response rates aren’t the only way to test effectiveness. Depending on the type of message you’re testing, you could check your dashboard for other changes due to the test message – requests for information, participation in a contest or survey, or sales.
• Use a similar procedure for content testing. 

Don’t change more than one element at a time. If you change two or more elements, you won’t know which change made the difference. If you have several items to test, conduct an individual test for each element.

The elements often tested include, but aren’t limited to:

•  Changing the first line of the message.
• Adding or deleting a single image or a video in a multimedia messaging service (MMS) message.
• Moving the call to action (CTA) from the bottom of the linked content to the top.
• Changing the color of the CTA button or link.
• Personalizing the message or removing the personalization.

The more you know about how your messaging campaigns perform, the easier it will be to reach your best customers. You’ll know more about what products or services they want and what approach is best for them.

We suggest that you segment your audience as much as possible and personalize all your messages to your customers, patients, clients and applicants. Integrating your messaging platform with your CRM makes communicating effectively very simple.

Our customer support team would love to show you how SMS-Magic can make reaching your customers easier. Ask for a demo. Or you can test drive SMS-Magic with a free trial.

As chief operating officer for Kwartler Manus, a personal injury law firm based in Philadelphia, Kwartler’s job is to help the firm’s staff convert prospects into clients. Often, he said, when people are seeking representation because of an injury, they contact several law firms to compare services and expertise. Law firms that can quickly connect with prospective clients have the best chance of earning their business.

When Kwartler started working with the firm three years ago, he realized that emails and phone calls were not the best way to start those relationships. He said it was difficult to get people on the phone.

“We’re all busy,” he said. “People can’t answer the phone right away or it’s inconvenient for them to return a message.”

Conversational text messaging, however, allows the firm to reach out quickly and personally. Clients can ask questions in a live interaction at their convenience.

Research about messaging shows that we prefer texts because globally we send 5 billion texts a day and open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open our emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones at least 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes or more. Kwartler knew that the firm’s prospective customers were just like the rest of us.

He said it was quickly apparent that his firm needed a conversational text messaging solution, and he contacted SMS-Magic. He chose SMS-Magic because it is integrated with Litify, his firm’s management software.

He was interested in getting the most out of both platforms by synching messaging with his management tools. He has had some advanced training with Salesforce and Litify and has become a Litify advocate. SMS-Magic is designed so that all client contacts are recorded in one place within the Litify environment. Anyone in the firm can see exactly what has been communicated, and they don’t have to open a second platform to do it.

“With SMS-Magic, we’re able to respond quickly to initial client queries via text,” he said. “We can start the conversation and tell the client who we are and then make sure we’re talking to the right person. It’s a conversation between the client and one person at the law firm. Clients really like the personalization.”

In addition to personalization, Kwartler Manus clients appreciate the quick response, as well as the opportunity to either move forward with their inquiry or end the contact altogether. And they really like handling it all without actually talking to anyone.

Everyone in the firm has a license to use SMS-Magic. “That way, if a principle or associate is in court, someone else can respond to the client,” Kwartler said.

Kwartler Manus doesn’t market by sending mass emails to potential clients. Instead, the firm includes space for phone numbers on ads and other materials prospective clients can return to the firm to indicate their interest. The firm uses phone numbers to contact prospects by text messaging.

“We wanted to start conversations.” Kwartler said, “So we wanted a texting platform that allowed us to have conversations with our clients. As a client’s case progresses, our staff can text them one-on-one.”

Working with SMS-Magic has been very easy, Kwartler said. He gives SMS-Magic high marks for creating a product that works well and then supporting it with engineers, developers and staff members who care about their customers.

“The SMS-Magic team responds to our texts right away,” he said. “They get back to us within an hour or two – at all times of day. When we’ve needed extra help, they’ve worked with us without the extra charges other companies use.”

After the dramatic initial increase in messages during the first three months – from 89 messages to 2,634 – Kwartler Manus has sent more than 182,850 conversational messages to its clients. The increase in usage has been steady and is currently averaging just under 7,000 messages a month. Kwartler said he couldn’t be happier with the integration of the two systems and the addition of messaging to the firm’s communications tools.

“Integrating SMS-Magic with Litify has given us a real competitive advantage,” he said. “It’s made life easier for our legal teams and has helped us serve our clients better.”

“I think the numbers will show that we’re converting more prospects and earning business we were leaving on the table before we made the switch,” he continued. “I highly recommend SMS-Magic to any law firm or company that needs fast, personal communication that’s trackable.”

If you’re interested in exploring how SMS-Magic can help you respond to your customers, book a DEMO or FREE TRIAL.

We’ve got tons of suggestions. But first, let’s make sure we spell out what express written consent means.

You must have express written consent before your company can legally send text messages to anyone. That means more than just asking for their phone number. It doesn’t matter who it is – an existing customer, a former client, a trade-show lead, or someone on a purchased marketing list. Before that first message goes out, your customer must say it’s okay.

The U.S. Congress created the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to combat unsolicited phone calls. Through the years, however, it has expanded to include new technologies like text messaging. It contains specific restrictions and penalties that companies ignore at their peril. The fines can be as much as $1,500 per message sent. In one of the first class-action lawsuits concerning texting, Papa John’s settled the case against it for $16.5 million in 2013.

What do you need to include in your messages asking for express written consent? Our recent blog will give you the details for your calls to action.

Here are our suggestions for gaining express written consent while abiding by TCPA regulations:

Trade Show Touches

If you regularly exhibit at trade shows, you can promote your text messaging program to prospects,  existing clients and lapsed clients with your booth signage. A stand-alone sign or banner can provide the initial instructions, and your text messaging program can automatically handle the exchange when the customer responds.

Business Cards

If you use business cards at trade shows or other business meetings, you can include initial instructions for opting into your messaging campaign on the business card.

Product Packaging

Include instructions for opting into your messaging campaign on product packaging, shopping bags, tote bags, napkins, or other peripheral materials you regularly give to customers.

Coupons & Discounts

You can offer coupons and discounts if someone signs up for your SMS marketing program, but be careful how you word your offer. Make sure you explain the coupon or discount is only available if they sign up to receive SMS marketing messages from you. So “A 20% discount is available when you join our text messaging list” is okay. “Text us to get a 20% discount” is not.

Emails

If you have permission to email your customers, you can send instructions for opting into your messaging campaign. Be sure to take care in the wording when you offer a discount, coupon or added bonus in your email.

Website

Pop-up windows on your website can prompt users to opt into your messaging program. You can also include information on static web pages that have high traffic.

Contests

Start a contest that includes opting into your texting program. Social media channels work well for this type of customer interaction.

Social Media

Use your social media channels to extend your offer.

Online Ads

Include your offer in online ad campaigns.

Signage, Point of Purchase

If you have a physical location that your customers visit, include your text messaging offer on store signage or point-of-purchase materials. Using a short code phone number can make it easy for a customer to respond.

Customer Receipts

Print your offer on customer receipts or include them on email receipts.

Radio, Television, Newspaper

Media that’s not online can provide a receptive, if different, audience.

Billboards

Drivers don’t have much time to read a billboard, so use clever short codes so that they can remember how to respond. Short codes, unlike long codes, use five or six digits to send a text. Sending “opt-in” to CHEESE could get you extra toppings on your next pizza.

Blogs

Include an opt-in message in all your blogs. Or create pop-up windows that appear while someone is reading a blog. You can provide a special white paper or case study as a premium for opting in. As with coupons and discounts, be careful how you word the offer.

Yard Signs

Yard signs are not just for homeowners. You can use them on your business property to encourage customers, clients or patients to sign up for text messaging.

Tee Shirts

Clever text on your team’s tee shirts can help spread the word at trade shows, charity events or community projects. Short codes would be a great way to keep the message brief.

What Should Happen After a Customer Opts-In

After your customer has opted-in, you’ll want to send a text confirming their participation. In that text, you can mention all the information they need to make an informed decision, such as what they can expect to receive, how often messages will arrive, applicable message and data rates, who you are, and how to opt out. That isn’t a complete list of the information you need to share, but you can find a list in our recent blog. Products like SMS-Magic can help you automate the messages that follow an offer response. What could be easier?

Keeping Track of Who Opted In and Who Opted Out

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

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

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

Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you why your compliance worries will disappear with SMS-Magic!