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!

The right omnichannel sales messaging solution will give your agents insights to immediately respond and engage with a powerful customer experience, while handling 10x more conversations. Consequently, sales teams using messaging have experienced a 40% or more increase in sales conversions.

Omnichannel messaging for sales isn’t just about the interactive nature of sales conversations. The power of automated sales messaging contributes significantly to both the personal nature of the buyer’s experience and to the profitable increase in volume handling and conversions.

If you want to fully leverage messaging in your sales efforts, you need to understand the power of automation as part of your messaging strategy.

Here are our top 7 tips for increasing sales results with automated sales messaging:

1. Ensure compliant messaging

Choose a messaging platform that handles compliance for all of your sales messaging, ensuring you avoid lawsuits and fines. To learn more, check out our Compliance Kit for Global Messaging.

2. Automate immediate responses

Research shows that the first response to a lead gets the deal 70% of the time. Make sure your reps are the first to respond to every lead by implementing automated, personal responses. Automated responses immediately acknowledge the buyer’s query, introduce a rep and establish a personal touch by leading into a series of profiling questions striving to “serve the buyer better.”

3. Automate profiling

Gather more insights about your individual buyers with simple questions and keyword responses.. Based on their responses, marketing and sales can quickly understand what’s important to that unique individual, creating a compelling experience for the buyer.

4. Automate sales nurtures and information sharing

By automating key information and update flows, you’ll enhance your buyer’s experience by  sharing relevant information quickly and then sharing pertinent tips, information and trends over time. Without reps having to be manually involved.

5. Automate scheduling and reminders

Scheduling appointments can take way longer than it should. With automation, you simplify meeting coordination and reduce no shows so your reps can focus on selling, not scheduling.

6. Automate contracts and follow-up

Paperwork and follow-up are time consuming for reps. Automate contract processes such as tracking, reminders, and confirmations so reps focus on prospects, not pushing paper.

7. Automate surveys

Feedback on your buyer’s experience is more critical than ever. Yet the majority of buyers will not fill out surveys or forms. Automated messaging surveys get responses, allowing you to gather insights to improve rep skills and respond to any negative buyer experiences..

The Bottom Line

With omnichannel automated sales messaging, you’ll  deliver the personal experience your buyers crave.

• You’ll be the first to respond, with a relevant message that makes a positive first impression.
• You’ll immediately show you care by asking relevant questions that show your buyer you understand their needs and care about their unique situation.
• When a rep enters the conversation interactively, they’ll  immediately begin a conversation with a high personal touch thanks to all the insights gathered by automation.
• Reps can easily share insights and information, schedule meetings, manage contracts, capture feedback and assure buyers are continuously updated using automation. This frees up hours of time spent on these tedious manual tasks, so reps can focus on buyer conversations and conversions.

Your buyers will want to buy from you,thanks to personal conversations and efficiency of communication, updates, scheduling and more.  You’ll close more business while creating a sustainable competitive advantage that keeps buyers coming back for more.

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!

“[A] rep is 100x less likely to make contact if the first call is made 30 minutes after submission. The odds of making contact drop by 3000x if the first call is made 5 hours after lead submission.”

Quickly cultivating personal and relevant conversations has become the key to success. Whether you are focused on closing deals, placing candidates, serving clients or recruiting students, the more conversations your reps have, the more your business can grow.

Did you know that the company that responds first to a lead gets the business over 40% of the time? It’s also shown that the longer you take to respond to a lead, the less likely you are to ever get a conversation. Yet research from Harvard has shown that the average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours. That’s not exactly prompt, is it?

Our SMS sales messaging customers handle 10x the volume of sales leads, quickly and effectively. Reps are the first to respond, and are always available to chat.

Think of how many opportunities you’ll win by having the right conversations at the right time!

How Messaging Can Handle 10X More Sales Leads

Messaging has been proven to drive more leads into your pipeline. It’s also proven that without the right messaging platform, you can lose track of all those conversations.

If your marketing team uses messaging to attract more prospects, but they have the wrong messaging platform, you’ll actually increase abandonment rates, your response times will lag, reps will flounder and everyone will be frustrated.

That’s why we designed Converse to easily handle the high volume of sales conversations you’ll enjoy with message marketing. Here are just a few of the ways the right messaging platform will make your reps more productive and effective.

• Immediate responses – Harvard Business Review recently released a study analyzing sales leads and response times within B2C and B2B companies. They found “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead …as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that wait 24 hours or longer.” This is where automation comes in. Within Converse you can set up automations so you quickly respond to every lead, so you never lose out on a sale because of delayed response time.
• Familiar interface – To be successful with messaging programs you need an SMS platform that is familiar and user friendly so your reps can easily navigate through conversations. Having a messaging UX that integrates with your reps “home” environment (CRM, call center, etc) will ensure your reps never lose time trying to find lead history or past conversations. Converse delivers the most advanced native Salesforce SMS messaging capabilities available. It’s both robust and simple to use, which is why we have a 5 star review in AppExchange.
• Rep Guidance to quickly find and respond to messages. With Rep Guidance you get alerts to new messages, blended with guidance features help reps to quickly find and respond, track, and manage conversations. The intuitive rep guidance also creates simple worklists, offers customizable rapid response templates and gives you quick access to conversation history. It arms reps with everything they need to create personal conversations, quickly.
• Full-Context history. Converse’s 360˚ Full-Context History provides personal insights and related conversations for every lead. This helps reps deliver fast, personal responses, creating more loyal customers and shorter conversion times. 
• Rapid response templates. Text message templates arm reps with pre-written proven responses, allowing them to quickly share the best possible information. This allows you to leverage winning conversations across your team.
• Analytics. Track and control your SMS messaging results with easy-to-use analytics dashboards. With the right insights you can better control SMS delivery, compliance status, rep and team productivity. This leads to better conversation flows and success rates while continually helping improve rep results.

The Bottom Line

You need more sales leads with immediate, personal conversations. SMS messaging is proven to deliver more leads and convert those leads with key features. With the right SMS platform, like Converse, you’ll also 10X more immediate, personal conversations to increase your results.

Want to see for yourself how messaging can increase your sales leads? Just reach out and we can give you a personal tour!

Sales still needs to know all of the background information and history when talking with prospects. No one wants to repeat themselves or waste time getting a rep up to speed.

According to a study by Microsoft, the average human being now has an attention span of eight seconds. That means you have eight seconds to prove you care about this customer and get right to the point. No time to repeat conversations that have already happened.

So how do you create compelling sales conversations in such a short amount of time? You do it with the right channel and the right context.

The right channel: SMS Messages

Companies who use SMS messages in their sales process report 40% more conversions. And it has been found that sending three or more purposeful text messages—after contact with a buyer has been made—can increase conversion rates by as much as 328%.

People see and respond to text 10x more and 6x faster than they do email or phone calls. Texts are immediate, and everyone checks their SMS messages constantly throughout the day. 95% of messages are read within 3 minutes. It’s the best way to have fast conversations and move prospects along quickly.

If you’re nervous about whether your reps can manage the volume of texts they’ll get with prospects or current clients, you can set them up with an intuitive rep guidance system. This alerts to new conversations, creates simple worklists, empowers reps to prioritize and sort leads, and offers customizable rapid response templates.

Alerts and templates will guarantee that reps won’t miss a crucial conversation and will ensure the proper context throughout any conversation.

The right context with a 360 ̊ Conversation History

Companies see a 25% faster sales cycle when they create relevant and purposeful sales conversations. To do this, sales reps must be equipped with knowledge of the prospect history, prospect company, and respective competitors.

The right SMS messaging vendor will help you do this by sharing holistic history of the lead’s interactions with marketing, sales and service across your business. Reps can request to see related conversations and review all conversations with a company or user.

Visual reports are also important to give you real-time insights to manage individual reps and teams, and analyze conversation trends and approaches that drive fast conversions.

Check out the Converse Simple Text Messaging Platform, to help your company gain a 360° view of the buyer’s conversational history and have everything they need to create a contextual conversation, quickly.

Are you ready to feel the power of context in your SMS messages? Get started to use text messaging to accelerate your sales revenue results, and captivate and engage your buyers.

If you haven’t yet adopted business text messaging for your team and want to learn more, 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 business results.