Authenticity is crucial when it comes to building trust with your customers. People sense when they’re being sold to. They’re more likely to trust a transparent and genuine business. After all, people like to buy from people, not businesses. Authenticity also helps to build a sense of community and connection between a business and its customers.
Of course, you can’t build trust overnight. It takes time and effort to establish relationships with your customers.
Communicating authentically plays a big part in building trust. If you communicate through text messaging at the right times, you start to build that trust immediately.
So how exactly do you communicate and sell with authenticity, particularly through texting?
1. Get Permission to Communicate
Before sending any messages, ensure you actually have permission to text your customers or leads. Customers must opt in to receive text messages before you send them anything. Don’t give people any reason to think that you send spam.
Sending unsolicited text messages is the number one way to lose your customers’ trust, and it can lead to thousands of dollars in FCC fines.
You also must honor all opt-outs immediately. From time to time, you might include opt-out instructions, such as “Reply STOP to unsubscribe at any time.” Make the opt-out instructions clear, reasonable, and easily accessible. Not only does this keep you compliant with the TCPA, but it also ensures you keep your customers happy.
2. Be Transparent
Transparency is key when it comes to selling with authenticity. It shows your customers that you have nothing to hide and that you’re confident in the value of what you offer.
This means being honest about your products or services and not making false claims or promises just to get a sale. Be clear about any limitations or restrictions.
As The Dalai Lama said, “A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.” Without being transparent, you aren’t able to build strong and lasting relationships that lead to sales or upselling opportunities.
3. Personalize Your Messages
Personalized communication helps to build a connection between you and your customers by creating a more humanized and engaging experience. When customers feel that their needs and preferences are being acknowledged and catered to, they’re more likely to develop a positive emotional connection with your brand.
In fact, studies show that 52% of customers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t personalize communications to them. 72% of consumers claim they will only engage with personalized messaging.
So if you aren’t adding any personalization to your texts, you’re missing out on reaching and building relationships with a significant portion of your buyers. Generic messages only hurt relationships.
A good place to start adding personalization to your texts is to add the recipient’s name, but that is the bare minimum of personalization. Also, consider customer data and analytics such as location, demographics, last purchase, birthday, seasons and holidays, and previous feedback when writing a personalized text.
Personalizing your messages is easiest when you add contacts to different groups/lists that then each receive specific messages and offers. If certain people love one product and don’t care about anything else, receiving promotions about stuff they aren’t interested in feels very contradictory.
4. Make it a Conversation and Be Relatable
The way you interact with your target audience directly relates to your overall business growth. Prioritizing conversations means you interact with customers on a personal and more one-on-one level. Customers and leads know they can communicate with your business at any place and time.
Creating a space for customers to have conversations with you is what will set you apart from your competition. The easiest way to do that? Through conversational texting.
Using conversational messaging in your sales and marketing texts shows your customers that you’re accessible and approachable, which helps foster trust and makes your customers feel more comfortable doing business with you. You want to get a response and keep the interaction going, which helps build a genuine relationship. In contrast, traditional text marketing is just sending out mass messages and hoping for a click or sale.
To help you keep your messaging conversational, be relatable. That primarily means showing your personality in your messages. Showing your personality allows you to connect with the recipient on a deeper and more personal level and avoid coming across as robotic. Humans naturally like to relate to others and being personable helps you gain trust and build a relationship.
The more relatable and natural your communication is, the more customers will trust your business and buy from you. Additionally, this approach generates higher response rates and boosts overall engagement.
5. Respond Promptly
Responding quickly not only shows your customers that you value their time and want to provide them with the best customer service possible, but it also increases your closed deals.
A study by Gong that explored the correlation between seller response time and win rates found that when sellers respond within 5-10 hours, they see the highest success rate for closed deals. To make sure you respond quickly to your customers or leads, use automation.
Automated text message outreach gives you and/or your team the opportunity to respond faster to more people, so ultimately you close more sales. Automating your messages also helps you to maintain ongoing conversations, enabling you to stay connected even when you’re busy. Ideally, you want to keep conversations going. Automating certain messages makes that achievable.
6. Follow Up (Again and Again)
You don’t want to be ghosted by your customers, so don’t ghost them. Follow up consistently with your customers to show them that you care about their satisfaction and commit to providing them with the best buying experience possible.
There are many instances where follow-ups are necessary. For example, follow up after you schedule a call or meeting, after you send them an email, after you don’t receive a response, after sending an invoice, etc. Prove your investment in their success.
There are no excuses for not following up with a customer, especially when many of your follow-up texts can and should be automated.
Although automation helps you do quick follow-ups, it’s important to wait until you read a response before continuing with automated messages. If you send messages without reading the response, you appear robotic. (Or at the very least careless.) Customers won’t believe there’s anyone there to help them. This damages customer trust. Be sure you set up a way to stop automated messages if someone responds to a previous message.
Build Stronger Relationships
Remember, building trust is a two-way street. This means that in addition to communicating authentically, it’s also important to listen to your customers and consider their feedback.
See how Skipio can help you gain your customers’ trust through texting and ultimately sell more.
