Chief Marketing Officer of MessageMedia Tara Salmon shares her top five tips for communicating with clients by SMS. With so much of our client and customer communication happening remotely during this pandemic, reaching clients where they are – mainly, at home on their phone – is crucial to maintaining the client relationship. Why is this so important? It’s more profitable to keep existing customers rather than make new ones.
Tara’s top five tips
Encourage SMS onboarding with a valuable incentive
Thank Tommi, a Melbourne cult beauty brand, offers a 10% discount off a customer’s first purchase if they join their loyalty program or exchange their contact details, including a mobile number. Having customers join the list, with a promise of more exclusive discounts and deals in future, means they are likely to stay a customer and order more in the future.
Use text to remind customers of current progress and future rewards
Joining up is one thing, but how do you keep them coming back? Mecca and Sephora have loyalty programs that update you on your points progress and as you near higher membership levels. Incorporate similar tactics but set SMS reminders as customers near or hit reward targets. This helps to keep the brand top-of-mind but also incentivises the customer to take action.
Support automated SMS customer journeys
Engagement is key for strengthening relationships, but you don’t want to overdo it! Instead, create automated journeys triggered by behaviour, rather than time. For example, leading online wine retailer Vinomofo built HubSpot workflows that send text reminders to enable greater retention. Text reminders are sent 1-2 days after an email offer, but only if the email remains unopened. This helped to re-engage 50% lapsed customers and generated a massive 120x ROI for their business.
Segment for hyper-personalisation
Text messages feel familiar and intimate, especially when you add hyper-personalisation through segmentation. MessageMedia customers can create more complex workflows that use a customer’s onboarding or re-engagement data to personalise deals and offerings. For example, a hairdresser may want to use messaging to communicate a new hair extension service to short-haired clientele, while an e-commerce beauty store can set automatic SMS campaigns to send offers or ‘back in stock’ reminders that are relevant to those who have previously shown interest in certain product categories.
Provide post-purchase care with friendly reminders
Whatever kind of beauty business you are, following up with customers via text messaging can also be a way to nurture long-term relationships as well as encourage future orders and appointments. Customers are seeking quality brands that care and help them manage their lives. Text reminders have proven to be very useful – haven’t we all almost missed a doctor’s appointment without that friendly reminder a day before? A beauty or hair salon, for example, can similarly set automated text reminders to go out the day before an appointment, or 60 days after a client visit to remind them to book in again. For beauty products, use your customer data to find the average time it takes for customers to re-order that product and set SMS reminders that time with a refill, providing a direct link to your shop.
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