5 Keys to Increasing Customer Loyalty With Mobile Messaging

Smartphones are undoubtedly becoming the number one digital tool around the world, with almost half of smartphone owners spending 5-6 hours daily on their phones. This makes them an invaluable tool for digital marketers, who are starting to use mobile marketing strategies to connect with customers and earn their loyalty. Mobile messaging is one of those channels.

This quick and simple channel is gaining popularity among marketing specialists for its effectiveness. With a 98% open rate and 45% response rate, SMS stands out as a powerful tool for brands to build relationships with their customers, skipping the crowded feeds and jam-packed feeds. By understanding how you can use it for the benefit of your brand, you can improve customer loyalty and work in more efficient ways. In this article, we take a look at five ways this can be achieved.

Ask For Their Permission

First and foremost, before you start sending out marketing SMS to your existing and potential customers, you need their permission. Sending unauthorized messages will feel intrusive and can even damage your brand. On the other hand, giving your audience a choice to join your contact list makes them more receptive to the information you send them because they agreed to receive it in the first place.

This choice, as well as an option to unsubscribe at any time, builds a trusting relationship between you and the customer. As an additional benefit, it also helps to improve campaign effectiveness, as you’ll be spending your marketing budget only on the people who are interested in your business and want to hear from you.

Targeting and Personalization

We can never stress this enough: personalization and targeting are crucial for the success of any marketing effort, and it's true for SMS as well. If you've run other SMS campaigns before, use the data and analytics at hand to start segmenting your subscriber list and reach out to them with more personalized messages. Do anything you can to make the recipients feel that the message has been crafted specifically for them and follows their best interest. Think of SMS as a chance to let your customers know that they matter to you instead of just being a phone number on your list. This can be simply done by addressing them by name, but you can also dive deeper into their past behavior and iterate your messages based on that.

At first, this may seem time-consuming, and even impossible if you are just starting to use mobile messaging. However, as you start to emphasize targeting and personalization and have more data to consider, it'll get much easier.

Two-way Interactive Communication

Whichever platform you end up choosing for your SMS marketing efforts, make sure that it allows two-way communication. Your recipients should be able to reply to your messages and maintain the connection with you at each point of the interaction with your brand. Make sure you have someone on the team responsible for addressing all the message replies to your campaign. You can also use automation tools such as chatbots for this, to make the process even smoother. The main idea is to let your audience know that they can reach you with their text messages and address any issue that they may have.

You can even go as far as providing customer support services through mobile messaging. This fast and convenient method of keeping in touch with you at any step of interaction with your brand will instill confidence in your customers and build trust towards your brand.

Promote Sales and Loyalty Programs

Sharing with your customers about your latest sales, discount coupons available on your website, as well as how easy it is to join your loyalty programs at any time can go a long way when it comes to earning their trust. Here again, however, personalization plays a similar role. For example, segment your customers by interest towards specific product types, and send them messages about those products specifically. Most important is, however, to make sure that they have access to all the essential information and won't miss any opportunity because of not being informed about it.

Follow Texting Etiquette

This is a crucial step that shouldn't be ignored. Here's the truth: no matter how much your customers love your brand, there is such a thing as too much messaging. When you are conducting an SMS campaign, make sure to send only a reasonable amount of texts, otherwise, you'll overwhelm your audience and come across as spammy.

Another step is to consider the times when you are sending the message. Sending texts too early in the morning or too late in the evening is can distract the recipients from their daily life when they are getting ready to go to work or are unwinding with their loved ones after. Sending texts during business hours is a good rule of thumb.

Lastly, having a personality is great, but make sure that it matches your brand voice and doesn't cross any boundaries. You want to sound friendly but not too invasive. Also, consider the audience you are sending your texts to. For example, while incorporating emojis in your SMS may work with younger audiences, older recipients may not appreciate them.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking to earn the loyalty of your existing and even future customers, reaching them through mobile messaging is a powerful step that you can take. There is of course still a lot that you can learn about using SMS for marketing purposes, but the tips discussed in this article are a good starting point. Use them to turn mobile messaging into a valuable communication channel for your brand and establish meaningful relationships that will benefit both your brand and your customers. Good luck!