Automated text message campaigns are a popular way to respond to leads anytime, schedule appointments with busy clients and provide important information to customers.

Here are examples of how you can use automated text messaging campaigns across a variety of industries.

1. Automated Text Messaging Means Responding to Leads Anytime

With automation you have the ability to respond to leads right away, no matter what time of day it is. Clients and prospects are no longer left waiting, and you don’t have to always be checking to see if there is a new message. You’ll be able to communicate and interact with even your busiest clients. You can set this type of automation up to be as easy as:

• Confirm consent & stay compliant.
• Offer information about new programs.
• Continue to nurture prospects with relevant information.

2. Automating Enrollment to Save Time and Resources

Universities spend insane amounts of time dealing with enrollment processes that can be incredibly tedious. It also takes valuable resources to ensure all of these processes are completed, and most higher education institutions don’t have unlimited budgets. That’s why universities love automating enrollment with text messaging. This allows them to notify applicants of key information still pending, remind students of enrollment dates, and even switch between automated messages and interactive individual questions and requests.

3. Scheduling Interviews and Appointments

Scheduling interviews and appointments always takes longer than any of us thinks it will. Between finding a time that works for both you and a client, people cancelling appointments, or things getting shuffled around, it’s always a dance. Can you imagine the time you would get back if you didn’t have to do this all manually? Automated text messaging  campaigns take care of scheduling so you get back valuable time with your clients and prospects.

4. Surveys

Surveys are a great way to get a pulse on how customer interactions are going or how a customer is liking a product or service. But, building and sending individual surveys can be time consuming. With automation, you can trigger a survey and get a quick response, helping you ultimately create better customer experiences. In the example above a contact center automated an NPS Survey once a case was closed and then automatically stored the customer rating in Salesforce. Such an easy way to continually improve your business.

5. Share Tips and Updates

Engaging with customers and prospects on a personal level is more important than ever. And with everyone obsessively checking their phones, text messaging is a great channel to reach your audience. Automating tips and updates can be an easy way to connect with customers and leads. And you can provide an option for them to ask a question or reply back, starting a conversation that may not have happened otherwise.

The Bottom Line

Automated text messaging campaigns can put you ahead of your competitors and help you gain loyal customers. Texting provides the ability to easily engage and interact with your audience, and your customers will appreciate the convenience and personal touch they receive with this type of communication. It’ll give you the competitive advantage you’ve been looking for. 

Want to see how SMS-Magic Converse helps clients achieve all of this with text messaging? Reach out and we’d be happy to give you a personal tour and share examples from our clients!

As we described in our last post, When to Use Text Messaging vs. Email in Marketing, there are many use cases for blending email and text messaging. So how do you decide?

Here’s a basic rule of thumb:

• Whenever you want simple attraction or engagement (meaning you want to get their attention,) use text messaging.
• Whenever you want to deliver long form content, or when you’re communicating with a lead or customer who prefers, use email.

Let’s go through a common business scenario to share some thoughts on the best ways to use text messaging and email.

How to Use SMS Messages with Email

Every business needs new leads to thrive. Whether a sales prospect, job candidate, student, patient or client¹, our prospects are what drive new business growth.

Just as you need new leads, so does your competition. That’s why our markets are so noisy, and our prospects overwhelmed with promotional communications. Your competition is doing many of the same things that you are to attract and engage those new opportunities.

Not when you blend text messaging with email! Here’s an example of how to innovate your communication strategy to increase your pipeline volume.

• First, SMS messages get 6X the responses of emails. Our customers actually report 75% response rates. Use text messaging to attract your new leads. Create an opt-in to your text messaging campaigns with an offer that’s compelling to your markets.
  • You’ll receive the responses you want. Just be sure that you manage the text messaging consent in a legally compliant manner.
  • Once the opt-in is confirmed, immediately fulfill the offer using your automated text messaging campaign.
• You can continue your automated campaign, using simple text messages to start a personal conversation. Wait, how can automation be personal? It’s simple, thanks to keywords.
  • Ask questions to learn about their needs. What problem are they trying to solve? What new thing do they want to know about? What’s their goal?
  • Offer keywords that represent what you know are the top 3-4 areas of interest for your new leads. For example, you might start with your types of customers (SMB, ENTERPRISE, CUSTOM), or your solutions (LAPTOPS, MONITORS, DISCS.) Once they respond, you can automatically trigger a text messaging campaign that relates to that specific topic, offering them information that’s relevant to their specific interest area.
  • At any point in time, they can ask a question, send a keyword like TALK and you can quickly send the lead to sales to respond with a 1:1 interactive conversation.
• Let’s say your new lead has read a couple of your texts and they reply with a request to receive another piece of information, let’s say a white paper focused on best practices for their specific industry.
  • Using a text message, ask them if they prefer email or text delivery, for that piece of information. After they respond, ask if they’d like to set that channel for all content delivery, then record that personal preference and use it.
  • Send the content in the way they requested.
• As part of your text messaging lead nurture campaign, offer them a regular communication from you. Perhaps it’s a weekly blog, a monthly newsletter, updates on your market, or customer use cases that you publish that reflect their interest area.
  • Use keywords to offer different types of educational, informative content, for example: TECH, NEWS, MARKET.
  • Send whatever regular, long form content they request through email, unless they’ve requested text messaging for all communications.

One key point to note. Be sure that when you create your Opt-in offers, you segment the content related to your offer in a specific theme or area, and tie it to a specific outbound text messaging phone number (whether it’s a long or short code.) That way when they do opt-in, they’ll be opting in to a specific content thread. Which means that if they decide to opt-out, you haven’t lost all of your ability to communicate with them.

If you’d like to see exactly how you could benefit from implementing SMS messages in your business, try out a Free Trial to see how text messaging can help you attract more leads.

Sales

Auto-Responses to Inquiries
The company who responds to an inquiry has 50% higher chance of getting the deal. Your sales reps can’t be online 24/7, but interested customers can be online at any time and they expect a response right away. Auto-responses allow you to send product info, company FAQS, data sheets, and any other type of information instantly when it’s requested. This way you can beat your competition to the response and keep your prospects interested.

Alerts and Routing
When a new sales lead or prospect comes in through the marketing pipeline, it’s important that the right sales rep gets alerted immediately so they can take action and start the sales process. With automated sales alerts and routing, sales teams know they aren’t letting new business slip through the cracks.

Scheduling
Did you know that 91% of customers would rather schedule meetings or appointments via text messaging instead of by phone? Don’t bother your sales team, admins or your prospects with the hassle of scheduling demos or sales calls via email or phone. Automated text message-based scheduling provides the option to see availability and schedule meetings or calls at any time of the day. With 97% contact rate with scheduling text messages, automated confirmation, reminders, and rescheduling messages reduce no-shows and make the process easier for everyone involved.

Application and Document Gathering
Going through any application or document gathering process is time consuming and messy when using email. Automating these processes with text messaging is easier and faster. Confirmation of receipt and reminders for docs or signatures needed help streamline the process.

Track Performance with Automated Reports & Dashboards
Visual reports give you real-time insights to manage individual reps and teams and analyze conversation trends and approaches that drive fast conversions. You can also track and tune outbound campaign results, plus manage budgets to optimize text messaging ROI by applying messaging to your best opportunities.

When you automate your text messaging processes to respond to inquiries first, get the right reps involved, schedule meetings, and streamline document gathering, you can easily increase your sales conversions by 40% or more and shorten your sales cycles by 25%.

Service

Case Creation and Updates
Even when all your service agents are busy helping other clients, it’s important to acknowledge a customer when they reach out for help. With automated case creation messages and case updates, your customers always know what’s going on and they don’t have to sit around wondering.

Routing
It’s super frustrating for customers to be passed around to different service agents on the phone and it’s a total waste of time when you could instead automate case routing with Converse. Based on any criteria, you can decide how you want cases routed and make sure that the right people are solving your customers’ issues.

Customer Experience Surveys
When a case closes, immediately send an NPS survey question and capture the response in the record. If you receive a low score, you can automatically trigger a follow-up profiling survey to learn more about the issue, collect key insights for analysis and offer an interactive conversation with a manager or service leader to resolve the issue quickly.

Track Service Performance with Converse Dashboards
Track important performance metrics for your reps. Measure SLAs and response times, cases handled, NPS scoring at rep and Team level, rep workload, etc.

Converse empowers service teams to respond quickly, resolve issues faster and communicate more effectively. Our customers’ service reps handle 6X more cases at 30% of the cost and resolve them more quickly to drive customer satisfaction and increase NPS scores.

Automate your Sales and Service Messaging and See Your ROI Take Off

Whether you already utilize texting in your sales or service communications and want to learn how to boost ROI with automation or are completely new to texting for business and want to get started, we are always here to help you reach those goals. To see how Converse Reference Campaigns and Automations can work for your specific use cases, feel free to schedule a demo. Book a demo here or text “CONVERSE” to 36343 to experience automated text messaging on your phone.

Compliant Opt-ins

We all know how important it is to stay compliant with regulations when communicating with our audiences. With our automated compliance app, you will always have peace of mind that you have consent to text your customers.

Converse compliance captures consent, tracks conversations and opt-outs in an audit record, then reports status. All data is stored in your Salesforce database to assure full audit trail protection. You focus on attracting more leads and moving them through your pipeline to sales, not potential legal issues.

Progressive Profiling

To send relevant and personal content to your audience, you need to know who they are. Converse progressive profiling allows you to automate the process of sending quick questions over time and progressively gather the data you need to build personas and have great insights into your audience. With the advent of more stringent regulations like GDPR, creating personal profile is more difficult than ever. Profiling solves that challenge for marketing.

Nurture Programs

Nurturing audiences with relevant and personalized content is a great way to stay top-of-mind and keep people engaged with your brand. Marketers know how time-consuming traditional email nurture programs are to build and deploy and also how bad email engagement rates are. Automated text messaging nurture programs are faster to set up and launch and get better engagement rates. That’s a win-win.

Events and Promotions

For time-sensitive marketing programs such as events or limited-time promotions, text messaging makes the most sense. By automating event messaging you can make sure your audience gets the message on time.

Tracking and Measuring your Marketing Campaigns and Automations

Converse dashboards give real-time results for key marketing metrics including compliance opt-ins, campaign results, Lead progression through the pipeline and other metrics to measure ROI.

Whether the goal is to build audiences or engage them, automated SMS messages are one of the best tools to use to ensure your marketing message gets out, gets read, and gets responses. With killer text message engagement performance of 90% read rates and 70% open rates, you can quickly increase your marketing ROI by 50% or more.

Automate your SMS Messages and See Your ROI Take Off

Whether you already utilize texting in your marketing, sales, or service communications and want to learn how to boost ROI with automation or are completely new to texting for business and want to get started, we are always here to help you reach those goals. To see how Converse Reference Campaigns and Automations can work for your specific use cases, feel free to schedule a demo. Book a demo here or text “CONVERSE” to 36343 to experience automated text messaging on your phone.

Automate SMS Messages: The Challenge

The challenge? It’s really complex to create these automations. It takes a team that includes the business users and IT admins to design, custom code, test, update and finally deploy even simple automations. Our customers tell us that it can take weeks to launch a simple automated text campaign, and up to months for something more complex, like a nurture. With all the different triggers, rules and process flows that are involved for every type of automation, things quickly get complicated and unmanageable. Which means companies can’t take full advantage of the power of messaging.

That’s why we designed Converse Reference Campaigns and Automations. To eliminate the frustration and cost associated with automated SMS messages.  We want to be sure our customers can leverage the full power of text messaging, easily and effortlessly.

We created these automated messaging campaigns based on industry best practices for popular marketing, sales, and service use cases. Each industry has access to specific campaigns for their specific needs.

What Are Converse Reference Campaigns and Automations?

Campaigns and automations leverage the same fundamental messaging capabilities. They are simply used for different purposes. Campaigns tend to be focused on automated outbound conversations with your audience, for example a nurture campaign or survey. Automations tend support actions you want triggered, for example, an auto-response to a customer support request that includes creating a case and confirming that case to the customer.

Campaigns, or Reference Apps, offer complete, ready-to-use solutions for popular text messaging campaigns including message blasts, nurtures, surveys, scheduling and more. Each features everything you need to run a successful campaign, including best practices content templates for your industry, workflows and Process Builders to schedule/trigger and manage the messaging campaign, and out-of-the-box dashboards designed to deliver the specific insights you need to measure and manage that campaign.

Reference automations give you a pre-configured workflow for popular messaging automations. Simply tune the automation to your specifications and you’re ready to send SMS messages. For example, our Service routing automation comes pre-configured for service routing and is easily configurable to match your in-place rules. Text-to-lead and text-to-case automations assure immediate responses to sales and service requests.

In our next post in the Textpert Series, we’ll talk about how you can use Reference Campaigns and Automations in your own business to create sustainable competitive advantage by giving every single audience member a very personal touch.  Stay tuned!