We will be walking through increasing customer engagement with SMS in your business. SMS communications seem very basic but it is a powerful tool to deploy your customer engagement strategies.
Customers have various touchpoints with businesses as they go through the customer journey. What smart businesses do is to make that journey worthwhile by creating a very positive experience for their customers. Finding ways to better engage with customers is one constant challenge businesses crack daily. The major route is to pay attention to your customers and communicate with them effectively, hook them and keep them coming back.
SMS marketing has constantly been a very useful tool for customer engagement for businesses across the globe. In Nigeria alone, there are over 172 Million mobile phone users. 97% of smartphone users regularly use text messaging, making it undisputedly the most widely-used feature or app. SMS has up to 4-6 times more open rate than email and click-through rates averaging 35%, which is over 10 times the CTR of emails. This makes SMS an absolutely important solution to communicating with both your potential and current customers.
Now let us delve into how you can grow your customer engagement with SMS;
- KEEP THEM UP-TO-DATE: Use SMS messaging to keep your customers up to date with anything about your company that is important to them. When you have and deploy the right strategy, you will have customers hooked with the right information and at the right time.
- KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS: SMS can also serve you an opportunity to know your customers even more in order to continue to improve the value you deliver to them. You can be able to collect data around your customers buying behaviour, needs, product preference, brand or product perception and so on. This could be through SMS polls or surveys. With the right platform, you can be able to efficiently analyze the data collected to know your customers even more.
- RUN LOYALTY: Your customers want to feel important. Increase your customer investment in your business and loyalty by running loyalty campaigns that are based on their buying habits, demographics, preference and so on. Target messages to them on exclusive deals and other messages that make them feel special and rewarded for their loyalty.
- SHARE TIPS AND ADVICE: Customers want to learn new information that would delight them, sending them tips and advice that are thoughtful will create the level of customer intimacy and bond that your company needs.
As you engage your customers using a channel that is direct to them, do not forget some of the important strategies shared in our previous article, HOW TO REDUCE CHURN RATE WITH SMS.