How to Reduce Churn Rate with SMS

The major aim of a business is to continue providing value for its customers, you see them alway innovating in order to remain ahead of the curve. Why? To KEEP their customers and if possible, for as long as the business exists. Without this, you cannot sustain yourself as a business. There are numerous competitions these days and on the other hand, the attention span of current and potential customers is reduced daily, from 12 Seconds in 2000, to 8.25 in 2015 (according to Wyzoul). This is expressed in the bottleneck of increasing churn rate experienced by businesses.

Guess what, smart businesses are leveraging SMS to be more direct to customers, that is the only proven hack to the decreasing attention span of your customers. But how do you actually reduce churn rate using this channel?

Before we go to the HOW, it would be great to quickly touch on the WHAT:

WHAT IS CUSTOMER CHURN:

According to Hubspot, Customer churn is the percentage of customers that stopped using your company’s product or service during a certain time frame.

The heart of churn management lies in being able to identify the early warning signals from potential attritors. If I know early enough that a specific customer is likely to leave my business, I can take proactive steps to prevent it from happening.

Shamli Prakash

So, to the point. Here are very helpful ways you can reduce churn rate with SMS:

1. Do not stop Halfway: Remember the point about your customer’s attention span? That is one reason why you need to keep your communication with customers going. When you stop, they move on without you. Many SMS marketing campaigns fail to achieve its KPI due to the lack of consistency. Engaging with your customers is based on a relationship, and SMS is the channel that keeps this relationship going. So, ensure to keep a good consistency with communication with your customers through SMS, you need to have them keep you in mind.
2. Ensure Opt-in: Of course, it is a good idea to keep consistency with communicating with your customers, but nobody wants to be spammed with a lot of messages, especially via SMS, that cannot be overemphasized enough. Your relationship becomes annoying, literally. So, the first thing is to ensure that your customer wants to be communicated to via SMS, and let them actually take an action that shows their interest. This is something called opt-in, and if they do not opt-in you become a turnoff on their mobile phones. On the other hand, your customer opting-in does not mean they cannot decide to opt-out. So make sure to keep your consistency natural and not spam.
3. Be ‘unwordy’: SMS is not a veritable channel to have a lot of words going on. You just have to go straight to the point or you will have customers who just don’t care what you sent them. If you are not ‘unwordy’ in your brand communication, you will be unworthy of their attention. Remember this, your SMS should always quickly lead to a call to action, otherwise, it will be a waste of marketing cost
4. Personalization: Customer intimacy is a major trend in businesses nowadays, and smart businesses know well to create and maintain that intimacy, you can do that too through SMS. It is very simple. Customers want to feel like they are speaking to an actual person, they do not want to receive an SMS that sounds general and from a bot. They want to feel special and the only way to achieve that is to make your messaging personalized and empathetic, not linear and general. 
5. Target Before Shoot: Sure this is not the first time you are hearing/reading this, but it has never been less important. Do not just cast nets carelessly into the sea, do not just send SMS blindly for whatever reason. You need to streamline your SMS to the right customer profile, it could be based on your actual customer profile or whatever demographics. Why? Because you want the right customers receiving your SMS, you want those who actually need your solution and will continue to need it receiving your SMS and you want to have your SMS bringing back good returns.

SMS can help your business reduce the spike in Customer Churn rate when you deploy the right strategies. It may take some time, but I assure you it will provide you with big wins for your business.