When you cultivate strong relationships with customers and foster strong brand loyalty, all while providing top-notch service and products, your customers get exactly what they need and your business thrives. A significant contributing factor to those relationships and that loyalty is how you communicate.
With texting as your primary communication method, you streamline your outreach as well as simplify how others reach you. As as result, you gain more customers and retain them for longer.
Use texting in these ways and watch as you increase customer lifetime value with a few simple messages.
Nurture Your Leads
If you properly nurture a lead, they’ll better understand the value of your business and will therefore stay a customer longer. And what better way to do that nurturing than through texting? When you optimize your lead nurturing, you shorten the sales cycle and close more deals.
Texting allows you to get in touch quickly — faster than any other method of communication — and then stay in touch to move people through each stage of the lead nurturing process.
Quick outreach and continued follow-up directly benefit your leads as well. When they know they can reach out to you simply and quickly whenever they may need and always count on a prompt response, they’ll want to stay involved with your business.
Read more about nurturing leads through texting:
- 7 types of lead nurturing messages that you need to send
- 3 stats that point to the importance of texting when nurturing leads
Follow Up Easier
A huge part of lead nurturing is follow-up, and follow-up certainly drives customer engagement and retention. And for good reason. You can’t spend quality time nurturing a lead to suddenly cut off all contact once they become a customer. No one will stick around long if that’s the case.
Whether it’s checking in after an appointment or requesting feedback, follow-up doesn’t get much quicker than texting. It’s even faster when you schedule and automate that outreach. Even one-on-one messages that you don’t schedule go out quickly and show that you consider a customer to be more than a number.
When you nurture a lead through texting and continue following up through texting after the lead converts, you keep everything in a single conversation thread. This allows you to refer back to previous messages easily, and then you can personalize future messages and deliver content relevant to each person. The fortune is in the personalized follow-up.
Send reminders quickly
People miss emails all the time. No one wants to answer their phones. But texts get through: 90% of them are actually read in under 3 minutes. Sending confirmations and reminders through text basically guarantees your message will be seen. When you confirm with someone to show up and then continue reminding them to show up — surprise! — it’s much more likely that they will actually show up.
Or if you’re planning an event and use texting to send invites and reminders, that helps ensure more people attend. For the customers who RSVP, your reminders are just one more touchpoint. For those who aren’t already customers, those reminders potentially mark the start of the lead nurturing process. (Just make sure you follow up with them after the event.)
More than that, a large number of people at a well-planned event means people will have a better impression of your business. You reinforce to your customers that they made the right choice doing business with you, and they’re more likely to recommend you to other. Those those who aren’t customers are more likely to choose you in the future because they’ll remember the good experience they had at your event.
Reward Your Customers
When is the last time you showed a little customer appreciation? Whether you plan a whole customer appreciation campaign with scheduled messages or send a one-off text, sending coupons or special offers to your most loyal customers helps you keep them choosing you.
The simplest show of customer appreciation via text? The birthday message. Some businesses take that concept further by sending anniversary texts. The longer someone has been a customer, the sweeter the anniversary reward they receive.
Building and executing a customer appreciation program through text, even a simple program, gives you incredible opportunities for personalization and customization. Really show your customers what your business is all about and how much you care about their continued patronage. Many of them will return the favor and stay customers longer, thus you increase customer lifetime value.
Read more about customer appreciation and personalization:
- 3 ways to use texting to show customer appreciation
- Automate your customer love and still keep it personal
- Take note and personalize every text
Texting proves over and over again to be effective for businesses and convenient for their customers. After all, it’s how people want to be communicated with! Carefully plan out your business texting strategy and authentically engage with people and to increase customer lifetime value.
