Text Messages for Potential Clients: Top 5 Best Practices
Many talk about how important it is to take an omni-channel approach to potential customers. The most successful companies are obsessed with turning statistical data to their advantage at every stage of the sales process. To do this, when working with potential customers, they use every channel available.
To reach the most important buyers, you have face-to-face meetings, calls, emails, video messages, social media, conferences and more in your arsenal. Truly, the excuse that a customer couldn’t be reached no longer applies.
However, one important and effective channel for reaching potential customers is often left out, and that’s text messaging. Texting is an important part of the omni-channel approach to marketing, allowing you to reach your potential customers at the most opportune moment. So today we’re going to talk about just such messages and the 5 best practices for working with them.
A Chain of Messages
Practice shows that it’s best to build a chain of messages, not just one message, to engage the customer. Text messages convert better if they are linked to other ways of reaching the customer, such as phone calls, videos or voice messages.
Recent studies show that individual text messages have a conversion rate of less than 10%, but when messages are part of a chain, their conversion rate increases many times over.
Correspondence After Business Events
Business events can be as local as local chamber of commerce meetings or as large as annual forums or trade shows for companies in your industry. Every entrepreneur needs networking to succeed. But often you meet new people, collect a stack of business cards, promise everyone you’ll be sure to contact them, and then enter all the new information into your CRM and forget about them. Even if you eventually decide to contact these people, a lot of time will have passed and the moment will have been missed.
So write text messages right after business events. This strategy has worked wonders for salespeople around the world.
Industry Events
If you have a list of potential clients with whom you have already formed relationships, you can take the opportunity to text them when an event happens in your industry: demand has changed, a new online betting sport has taken over the industry, your potential client has a dramatic increase or decrease in sales, etc.
Writing messages in such cases is useful, because events require an immediate reaction to them, and text messages also create an effect of urgency. Practice shows that such messages work best when you rely on articles or relevant content about the event and then reinforce the message with a phone call.
Unobtrusive Persistence
Text messages are a great way to remind a potential customer about yourself without being annoying.
Of course, it’s important to know the limits. You’ve probably encountered companies that overwhelm you with their messages: Don’t become one of those companies.
When working with potential clients, focus on your lead qualification criteria: most of the deals you’re aiming for, you’ll close not today, but somewhat later. Even a qualified lead with the right budget, purchase history, and need for your product needs to be approached at the right time, and until that time comes, focus on nurturing.
Text messages work best as part of the chain in an omni-channel approach (phone, email, social media, and so on). It’s advisable to send the most important information in text messages so as not to diminish the value of that channel. As, for example, lending platforms do by texting notifications of new leads so that customers can process them “hot.”
Engagement
Even if nothing noteworthy happened in your industry this week and you don’t have an interesting article to share, you still get LinkedIn notifications about birthdays, promotions and raises and so on, for example. That’s an excuse to send a text message, too, and it will be more effective than a likes or automated message. Be creative and write a text message that your potential customers will remember.