The success of your business mostly depends on how much you sell, yet this is where it gets more complicated. Nowadays, having a nice product or simply offering your services is no longer enough since the competition is fierce, and customers have just too many options to choose from. So how to lean them towards your direction?

Customer experience. Two words that you should always keep in mind if you want to stand out from the crowd. It’s an overall impression a client has about your brand, and there are many ways to influence it. One of them, also a pretty effective one, is text messaging for business that is hardly imaginable without some Sms Marketing App. In this article, we're going to highlight the benefits of using it to craft your SMS campaigns and what impact does it have on customer experience.

What is an SMS marketing app and how can you benefit from it?

SMS Marketing App is a software that allows you to send text messages from a web application, supports integrations with e-commerce platforms, lets you organize your Sms Marketing campaigns and avoid a lot of manual work.

Usually, it comes with such features as:

• Automations, that you have to set up once and enjoy the benefits that they bring for as long as you want. For instance, you can send premade messages automatically when some specific trigger occurs, like someone leaves your store without finishing their purchase, and you'd like to invite them back
• Bulk messages, to save time and improve work efficiency by sending a large number of SMS messages to a broad audience, all at once
• Link shorteners, to help you save those precious symbols in your text messages and drive more traffic to other channels
• SMS scheduling, so you could just prepare everything in advance and focus on other important tasks
• And more (depends on a specific app)

Using an SMS marketing app not only helps you to manage all of the most important SMS marketing functions in a convenient, time-efficient way but might noticeably improve your client experience, thus helping your business grow. Let‘s look into some real-life examples and learn how you can actually use the app to your advantage.

How to improve the customer experience with SMS?

1. Send SMS notifications

Texting is an activity that became wildly popular over the last decade, and it‘s actually one of the most preferred digital communication channels between different age groups. The whole process got pretty fast and dynamic, and that‘s probably why users engage with this channel so much.

Although SMS as a channel itself is pretty simple, it comes with many possibilities for business. It can be a truly beneficial tool during all stages of the customer experience journey, not to mention time and cost-efficiency.

To improve customer experience, businesses can choose between many different approaches, using SMS as a way to give a customer some specific benefit, whether it’s some news, alerts, reminders, company updates, promo codes, or discounts. Upcoming holidays? Send an SMS and surprise your customers with a discount before they start the preparation. Dentist appointment? As much as your customers would like to forget that, it's not that easy with SMS notifications.

2. Make personalization a part of your CX strategy

No matter the industry, learning about the habits of your customers and using this to your advantage is crucial. No one really wants to be provided with excessive information that isn't relevant to them in any way, as well as your business wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to earn money from the messages sent to the customers.

For the best customer experience, personalization is one of the keys. It doesn’t mean that you have to start calling your customers by their names or even remember their birthdays (which is actually recommended if you have the resources to do that). The important thing here is to have an understanding of their behavior and create a strategy that would allow you to improve how they feel about your brand. How? You can start by using such information as location, previous purchases, and other preferences to craft a customized offer that specific customers would enjoy. Keep it simple yet relevant – and benefit from it.

3. Get in touch at the right time and rethink the frequency

Another very important factor for everyone using SMS marketing is timing. And by timing we mean two things – first, when it’s time-sensitive information, and second – scheduling.

SMS is highly effective for all kinds of deals that require to react fast since it has high open rates and usually doesn’t take long until people get to read it. It means that if your store has decided to organize a flash sale, SMS is the best way to inform your audience about that.

However, talking about scheduling and frequency of your SMS messages, you always have to consider some other things, such as rest hours, dinners, etc. Don’t be intrusive, it won’t do your customer experience strategy any favors – spam has never been helpful, and promoting your stuff at the wrong time might only bring you the opposite result from the one you seek.  

4. Mix the content you send

Do you know the feeling of being bored? Very likely. So why would you let your customers experience that with your SMS marketing campaigns?

The right answer here is you shouldn't! SMS is a simple means of communication, yet there are way too many possibilities not to use them. Mix your ideas together and make the messages you send memorable, different, yet beneficial. Sending only your company updates all the time won’t be that well-received probably, as well as promoting the same product over and over again. Be creative and put some thought into the process – it will eventually pay off.

5. Provide customer support as a part of an omnichannel strategy

Although it's not that common yet, some businesses use SMS as part of their omnichannel marketing strategies and allow their customers to reach them by simply sending a text message. However, in this case it's crucial to make it suitable for customer service.

Customers might choose SMS over a call or email in order not to bug you on those channels. Also, SMS can help eliminate the barrier of hesitance, or come in handy in case they need to learn some time-sensitive information that would take too long if asked via email.

So obviously, if you use SMS messages this way, your support agents must be able to react fast and look at SMS messages more or less as a chat to really get the most out of this whole process.

6. Increase business transparency

One of the ways to use SMS marketing app for better customer experience is updating your customers on delivery processes, such as order status change, providing tracking numbers, or delivery time updates. If you've ever tried online shopping (and there are high chances that you have), you probably know how exciting every purchase is. SMS can bring it to the next level, spicing it up with suspense.

Every SMS notification comes with a dice of joy, besides, by giving your clients access to the process from the beginning to delivery, it makes your business seem more transparent, gain credibility, and encourages your customers to come back to you the next time they need anything else.

7. Monitor and collect customer insights

Finally, due to its high response rates, direct and personal nature, SMS is a great tool to collect feedback and reviews that will speak for your brand later on their own. Not to mention that you can use that information in the future to improve your business.

Use SMS to learn what might be going wrong and enable yourself to start looking for ways to fix it. Besides, customers might appreciate the fact that their opinion matters, and it would most likely improve their experience with your brand.

Conclusion: should you really go for an SMS marketing app?

Everything that was mentioned above can be easily done by simply using SMS, yet doing it manually can be incredibly time-consuming. If you want to be able to launch, manage, and really benefit from your SMS marketing campaigns, SMS marketing app is a must. It‘ll help you organize your outgoing messages and efficiently follow the results to achieve your goals. So take advantage of the wide possibilities of text messages, and don‘t underestimate its role in your customer engagement strategy.