With an astounding average response time of a mere three minutes, it overshadows traditional approaches like email and voicemail, not merely by a few strides but by miles. But the benefits of SMS messaging extend far beyond the time limit to get a reply from your candidate. It has the potential to redefine your recruitment landscape, slashing your time-to-hire, and magnetizing the digitally-inclined millennial and Gen Z talent pool. 

In this comprehensive guide, we will navigate the intricacies of messaging as a recruitment powerhouse and equip you with 9 actionable insights to ensnare top-tier talent. But before we dive right into the crux of our discussion, it’s essential to highlight the powerful role of text messaging in modern recruitment. 

Why Text Recruiting is the Key to Streamlining your Talent Hunt

With escalating costs and extended time-to-hire, traditional recruitment channels are increasingly proving inefficient. Over 83% of talent leaders acknowledge recruiting and retaining talent as their chief priority, adopting cost-effective and time-saving strategies is paramount. Here’s where using text recruiting messaging steps in, slashing cost-to-hire and significantly boosting efficiency, even with heightened hiring volumes.

Messaging’s real-time simplicity stands out from other communication methods. It efficiently engages candidates, especially since 39% lose interest from prolonged hiring. It’s especially useful for connecting with passive candidates, letting recruiters nurture relationships for future needs. Later in this blog, we’ll discuss using Text Recruiting Software to enhance recruitment strategies.

Harnessing the Benefits of Conversational Messaging into Text Recruiting

Conversational messaging, with its superior response times and increased reach, can slash your time-to-hire significantly. It enables real-time interaction with potential candidates, accelerating the screening and interview coordination process, thereby landing you the desired talent swiftly and seamlessly.

Transition from Passive to Proactive

The transition from passive to proactive recruiting can be a game changer. Using messaging as a tool, recruiters can actively reach out to candidates, fostering an engaging two-way conversation. It not only enhances the candidate experience but also allows recruiters to glean essential insights about the candidates, paving the way for informed decision-making.

Speaking the Digital Tongue in Text Recruiting

Millennial and Gen Z candidates are digital natives. To attract this tech-savvy talent, recruiters must communicate via their preferred channels. Messaging serves as an effective platform to engage with these candidates, by offering the quick, informal, and interactive communication they prefer.

Agility Personified

Filling temporary positions quickly is crucial to maintaining business continuity and productivity. With text messaging, recruiters can instantly connect with a broad network of potential candidates, streamlining the sourcing, screening, and hiring process. It’s a game-changer when speed and efficiency are the keys to success.

Crowning Practices

While the potential of SMS messaging in recruitment is vast, it must be employed strategically. From crafting engaging messages, and respecting candidate’s privacy, to timely follow-ups – best practices should be at the heart of your messaging recruitment strategy such as the Best SMS Marketing Services provided by SMS-Magic. This ensures optimal use of the tool while enhancing the candidate experience.

Text Messaging Templates 

Effective messaging demands the right blend of professionalism and personalization. To help recruiters navigate this balance, we provide proven text messaging templates. These templates, tailored to various stages of the recruitment process, ensure consistent, concise, and effective communication with candidates. So, to get these templates, get your sms-magic login and start conversing today to recruit the premier talent. 

Cultivating Personal Bonds

The power of messaging lies in its ability to cultivate personal relationships. Unlike formal emails, text messages foster casual and warm exchanges, making candidates feel valued and engaged. This personalized approach can significantly boost your brand image, leading to higher acceptance rates.

Decoding the Generation

Messaging resonates with younger candidates due to its immediacy and informality. This digitally-adept cohort prefers quick, concise interactions over lengthy, formal communication. Understanding this preference is crucial in tailoring your communication strategy, enabling you to attract and retain young talent more effectively.

The Recruitment of Tomorrow

With digital transformation permeating every aspect of business, recruitment is no exception. Embracing messaging as a key tool is not just about staying current; it’s about anticipating and adapting to the future of recruitment. Leveraging the power of Text Recruiting Platforms today can set your recruitment strategy on the path of success for years to come.

In the dynamic realm of recruitment, standing still is not an option; evolution is the key to success. As we’ve journeyed through the various ways text messaging can revolutionize your recruitment process, it’s clear that the power of Conversational Messaging is undeniable. By harnessing this tool, you can attract and engage top talent, reduce your time-to-hire, and enhance client satisfaction, all while future-proofing your recruitment strategy. As we navigate the digital age, embracing messaging is not just a strategic move—it’s an imperative.

Ready to revolutionize your recruitment strategy? Let’s embark on this journey together! Contact one of the Best SMS Marketing Services Provider SMS-Magic today and allow us to guide you through the transformation. With our cutting-edge messaging solutions and expertise, we’ll help you unlock the full potential of text messaging in your recruitment process. Start your journey to recruitment excellence today — because your future talent is just a text message away. 

Connect with us now, and get full insights about what we have to offer. 

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

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

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

If It’s Broke, Fix It

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

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

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

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

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

Are You Ready to Use OTT Apps Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve been checking in with several of our most successful clients, and we’d like to share some of their best ideas for serving customers and increasing the bottom line.

Text Follow-Ups Produce Stunning Results

HeyTutor is a company dedicated to the supplemental education of children and adults from pre-K to college and beyond in more than 250 subject areas. The core of their business is one-on-one, online tutoring sessions, but the company is expanding its business with in-person tutoring, early childhood prep activities, and social and emotional learning, just to name a few of their recent initiatives.

As they prospected for new business, HeyTutor found that their best potential clients were working parents and students who were busy with other commitments most of the day. When HeyTutor reps followed up initial inbound queries, they found it very hard to reach students and parents consistently.

They knew that the average response rate for emails was less than 10 percent and the response rates for phone calls were lower still. Messaging seemed like a great solution to their problem.

Patrick McClure, HeyTutor’s director of operations, said in a recent interview that a staff member can respond immediately to an inbound query with a text. The prospect can then easily multi-task and respond. Their response might read, “I’m not available right now. Call me back after work. I’m free at 6.” The staff member knows exactly when to call.

By this point in their corporate development, HeyTutor had already developed a robust CRM with Salesforce and wanted to integrate the database with a messaging solution. They looked for companies that were experts at Salesforce integrations and chose SMS-Magic. The company is a Salesforce Partner and the #1 rated messaging application on the Salesforce AppExchange.

McClure reported that after the SMS-Magic integration went live, the company saw an increase in lead responses between 35 and 40 percent. The increase in responses has directly benefited the bottom line.

As the relationship between the two companies has developed, SMS-Magic has continued to work on tailoring the product to meet HeyTutor’s needs. “These guys made it effortless and got everything set up right away,” McClure said. “Also, it was very affordable.”

“It’s been a pleasure to work with SMS-Magic,” McClure said. “They have a customer service team to emulate. It’s remarkable.”

In another success story, Craig Garber, CFO of LifeMoves, reported an average response rate to text message surveys of 59 percent. Survey masters are generally happy with response rates of 10 percent. Research shows that CRM-driven messaging regularly produces response rates of 40 percent and above.

Great Customer Support Builds Great Customer Loyalty

Working in the experience economy, your customers expect you to provide meaningful experiences in every interaction. Nowhere is that more obvious than in customer support. Your customers want you to solve their problems without a hassle.

You probably provide several channels for customer contact. We’d like to suggest that you offer conversational text messaging. Customers already prefer text messaging and say they would use it for customer support issues, if it were available. Messaging can be immediate and catches customers at their moment of need.

Using text messaging in customer support allows a customer to contact you exactly when they need you, and the nature of the platform encourages them to use a minimum of language to describe the problem. That brevity saves your reps time, and that saves you money.

If you use a CRM, you can capture all customer interactions, no matter the channel. That means your reps know the background as they deal with issues. Texting also allows you to extend the time spent with each customer. Texting agents are ten times more productive than their phone or email counterparts.

Greg Royse, CEO of Tidy, said, “We respond with 10 support messages to every support email – our customers love it.”

Providing positive, easy customer service responses helps build customer loyalty. Each time a customer is satisfied, your brand benefits. When it’s time to replace a product, customers remember positive responses to their needs.

Plan for a Great 2022

Your 2022 goals probably include bringing in new customers and keeping the customers you already have. Text messaging can help you meet your goals. CRM integration, automation, message templates, and conversational outreach all help create and build customer relationships. Let SMS-Magic help!

We offer a free trial so that you can get a feel for our product. If you’re as pleased as we think you will be, you can choose the level of service that’s best for your company.Contact us to set up a demo or to start your free trial. Let us show you how you can engage your customers in a new way!

How do I know?

You’ve got a really tough job. Your employee turnover is high, so you’re recruiting all the time. You want to solve problems during the customers’ first call, but it’s tough to do. And when the buck stops, you’re the one who has to respond, and that cuts into your family time in destructive ways.

So how can a software package help make life at home better?

SMS-Magic can help you deal with the issues that drive your reps crazy and help customers quickly solve their problems. With happier reps and happier customers, you might get home earlier at night or even have an entire weekend without work issues.

Why Use Messaging in the First Place?

Your customers already prefer to send messages and tell researchers they would use it for customer support if it were available. Globally, we send more than five billion – that’s with a “b” – texts a day, and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

From the customer’s point of view, messaging is immediate. They can reach out the second they experience problems or have questions. Messages also encourage them to be brief and that helps your reps uncover the issue quickly.

From your point of view, texting is less expensive than calls. Phone calls, according to a Forrester Research study, cost the sponsoring company about $16 each. A text thread, however, averages out to between $1 and $5. Reps can handle several message threads at a time, but only one phone call, increasing their productivity.

But, you say, my reps are still handling the same issue over and over.

Stop the Boredom!

Let’s consider how mind-numbing it is to answer the same question day after day. I’m sure you have a list of questions your reps hear all the time. They might be giving instructions for returning a product or helping a customer navigate online. Whatever it is, wouldn’t you like to take those questions out of the mix and allow your reps to handle more complicated issues?

They would. It makes their jobs more interesting.

SMS-Magic can help you develop a system to respond to common questions automatically. Your customer would have to opt into messaging – giving you permission to send message to them – but after that, you can reply to requests for simple information without involving a rep. Your messages can reflect your company’s personality, even though they are automatically generated. Save your reps for issues that require a personal touch.

Track All Customer Interactions

One of the main customer complaints about service is having to call multiple times to resolve an issue and being bounced from one person to another. It’s frustrating, it’s time consuming, and it costs you money.

SMS-Magic can record all customer interactions regardless of the source. Your reps will know when the customer called, messaged, or emailed, who helped them, and what was promised. The customer won’t have to spend hours explaining to rep after rep why they’re calling. Your reps will appreciate the insight. Your customers will appreciate being heard and having the issue resolved.

Logging all your interactions in one place can also help you to research what issues are the most critical. Fixing the problem at the source can reduce customer calls dramatically.

Scale Easily

Is your need for more reps growing because business is booming or the holidays are coming?

Legacy systems sometimes make it difficult to onboard new reps. SMS-Magic makes adding additional seats easy so that you can begin training right away. Increased call volume shouldn’t keep you from serving your customers quickly, and SMS-Magic can handle as many reps as you need.

Get Started Today!

Does SMS-Magic sound like the answer you’ve been looking for? We hope so! We’d love to talk with you about your needs. No pressure. We think our product will speak for itself. Make our phone ring to discuss how we can help you improve your customer service and, maybe, save your marriage!

The answer is, it depends.

Your choice should revolve around the specific goals of your program, the audiences you want to engage with and the type of content you’ll deliver.

The strengths of text messaging vs email

Both channels have their strengths, so it isn’t a clear either/or choice. The choice for your company may also be different than for another, once again, depending on the variables.

Text messaging

Texting is a much more natural form of communication in today’s digital world. Generations of the digital age prefer it over any other channel. It’s immediate, interactive and until now, hasn’t been spoiled by over-zealous marketers.

• Text messaging is a better channel for attracting new prospects and engaging them in early conversations, given the 90%+ read rate and 6X response rates vs email.
• It offers a powerful, non-invasive way to ask questions that help you understand interest areas and intent, and begin to create personalized conversations that will compel leads to move forward.
• Text messaging lends itself to delivering shorter or digital content, although many digital natives are happy to read a 20-page document on their mobile devices.
• Is obviously the highly preferred channel for younger audiences, since they are the true digital natives.

Email

Email has been so heavily over-used by some marketers that it’s not a good channel for capturing the attention of many prospects. It’s low open and read rates make it a poor channel for any sort of attraction in today’s world.

• It is a better channel for engaging and retaining traditional customers who are accustomed to communicating via email. Many customers already expect your emails and updates, and prefer this form of communication.
• Email is usually a better option when you’re delivering long-form content like whitepapers, longer articles, contracts and other lengthy documentation. Many people don’t want to read such documents on a mobile device.
• For programs that deliver regularly scheduled content, for example newsletters or customer support updates, email may be a better choice.

Blended campaigns

We believe the best option for many marketers isn’t a text messaging vs email choice. It’s the blending of both to create an optimal communication flow that balances attraction and engagement with ease of content delivery. Here are some basic parameters for blending text messaging and email.

• Use text messaging to initially attract your new leads and engage with fresh prospects. It’s a much more compelling way to attract new audience members.
• Use text messaging to ask them simple questions about their interest areas, problems, and other information that helps you and your sales teams better personalize each conversation.
• When they respond to a message that offers long-form content, for example, a guide or white paper, ask them whether they prefer delivery via text or email. Also, be sure to ask current leads and customers who opt in to your text messaging communications which channel they prefer. That’s the beauty of blended conversations, each audience member gets their own choice.
• For those who prefer, use email as an option to deliver long-form content, or for all communications if that’s what your audience member prefers.
• When it comes to regularly scheduled long-form content, like newsletters, customer support updates, product updates etc., post the content on a webpage as well as creating a standalone document. Share the document via email with those who prefer, while you can text the url to those who requested text messaging communication.

We believe the next generation of successful marketing programs will be based on the blended approach described above. Next week, we’ll walk through an example of such a campaign with more details. We’ll share how to create the optimum balance to attract more leads, then compel more of your pipeline to actually read and digest your content, then quickly move them through your pipeline and into sales.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging software, and are interested in learning more about what you can do with SMS, feel free to schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your marketing results.

The trend towards texting as a communication channel has many businesses jumping on board and adopting business text messaging software. You may be wondering, well, what about email? A big factor to take into consideration when launching your text messaging marketing programs is how you will best incorporate your message marketing into your existing email marketing.

Blending text messaging with your email marketing is a great way to maximize your reach and engagement with your audience. Start with the basics to create a solid foundation on which you can expand later.

Get started by learning a few basic first steps:

• How to opt your email marketing audience into receiving text messages while staying compliant
• How to use text messaging for nurture or drip programs
• How to determine which channel is most appropriate for the different types of content you send

Opt your email marketing audience into SMS messages

It’s important that you have permission to text your audience, even if they’ve already opted-in to email. Here are a few ways to get the permission you need to start sending texts:

• Add an opt-in check-box to your forms. Make sure to offer text-messaging as an option to receive company updates, promotions, and information on your website forms. This way if they don’t want to receive emails and instead prefer texts, you can reach out to them on the channel they prefer.
• Incorporate a keyword opt-in into your email content. Remind your audience that you also provide text messaging as a communication channel, and that they can opt-in at any time. For example, you can include a simple “Text INFO to 12345 for to learn more” and they will always have that option to opt-in. You can also use offers to compel your audience to opt-in to text messaging.  For example, a discount coupon, free demo or trial, a conversation with a key professor, special priority for new jobs or a free mortgage evaluation.
• Include text messaging as an option in your preference center. If you have an email preference center, add a check-box for your audience to opt-in to different types of text messages that offer relevant content.
• When you send the first text, make sure to confirm the opt-in. This is called a double opt-in, and it’s a great way to make sure your audience wants to receive texts from you while still giving them the option to unsubscribe at any time. You can send a message that says something like “You have subscribed to receive company updates, respond Y to confirm. To unsubscribe at any time, reply STOP”. This extra step is not required for text opt-ins, so you decide whether you want the extra step or not.

Start to build your text message-based nurture or multi-touch programs

You can easily start profiling your audience for message marketing campaigns by sending your opt-in list quick questions with keywords to determine what type of content they would find most valuable.

For example, you can ask them to respond with keywords that relate to the type of product they are interested in, and then only send relevant content based on their response. You can also give your audience the option to opt-in to certain types of texts, such as new product release announcements, tips and tricks, or sales and specials.

Determine whether to use email or SMS messages for the different types of content you send

To get the most out of SMS messages and email marketing, it’s important to make sure you’re using the channel that’s most appropriate for the type of content you are sending. Brief messages that don’t require heavy amounts of content are great for text messages. Some examples include announcements for events or promotions, scheduling confirmations and reminders, links to short-form content such as blog posts or quick videos and help with information about products or services. Email is a great way to deliver long-form content, such as educational documents like white papers or case studies, or other documents that are best viewed on a desktop screen.

Once you get an opt-in list to send texts to and an idea of what kind of content you should send to your audience, you’ve got a great start to incorporating your texting with your email programs. Take time to determine how to use text messaging in addition to email to deliver relevant, personal, and valuable content to your audience.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging software, and are interested in learning more about what you can do with SMS, feel free to schedule a demo and we’d be happy to share our expertise with you, answer questions and show you what text messaging can do for your marketing results.