Improving your company’s client journey with SMS marketing
Understanding your clients’ journey is critical to ensuring you provide the greatest possible experience. By outlining prospective pathways. You may better identify where consumer touchpoints are failing you and where you can improve. Enabling you to design a holistic plan for success.
Mobile devices have had a huge influence on the customer journey. With many customers using their smartphone to browse your website. Compare prices, or read customer reviews before making a purchase. Add to that all the other mobile applications. Such as scheduling an appointment with your company on their calendar or Instagramming a picture of their new purchase and sharing their experience on social media. And it’s clear how important mobile communications have become.
Customer journeys will always be unique to individual companies and customers. But to give you an idea of how simple it can be to incorporate mobile into your customer experience. I’ve drawn out an example of a local company with 7 phases for you.
The Customer’s Journey
Step 1: Be aware
Your potential consumer sees an advertisement for your product or service, such as on a billboard, in a newspaper, or on a brochure. They’re curious enough to want to know more. They may:
Enter your website URL into their phone, hoping they have a mobile internet signal and time to read the information.
Save your phone number in the hopes that they will remember to contact you later, when they are less busy.
SMS Text a keyword to a short code (for example, HELLO to 60777), and you will get an automated response with a polite welcome message and a link to your website. They may go through this at their leisure. Doesn’t it seem obvious?
Booker
Step 3: Conduct preliminary research
When the consumer goes to use their phone, they notice your Bulk SMS, which reminds them to search you up. They follow the link in the message and browse your mobile-friendly website. They’ve never heard of you before, so they’re not quite ready to buy, but they click the link to follow you on Facebook so they can learn more about you.
Step 4: Continue your education.
They’ve liked you on Facebook, but only around 2.6 percent of your followers view each of your updates, so they haven’t seen anything yet and are losing interest. Fortunately, you prepared ahead and sent them another text message a few days after the first, so they remembered you and returned to your website. You don’t want to spam them, so you’ve included an unsubscribe link in your message so they can easily unsubscribe from your messages.
Step 5: Make a purchase
Whether in-store or online, your ‘potential consumer’ has taken the first step toward becoming a paying client. Success!
Step 6: After-purchase
The purchase is complete, but the customer’s trip is not. Now is an excellent moment to ask your new client what they thought of your service in order to assist you produce the best experience possible. Sending a link to a brief feedback survey in a text message allows them to respond immediately, without the burden of back-and-forth communications or finding time to complete an email survey later.
Step 7: Maintaining Loyalty
It’s a well-known truth that selling to a current client is less expensive than attempting to acquire a new one, so don’t lose contact with them once they’ve bought. Keep your company in their minds by sending them text messages on a regular basis. Include discounts or promotions to improve the probability that they’ll return and to thank them for sticking on your mailing list. Remember to include an opt-out in all promotional communications so that they may choose whether or not to hear from you. Download Textlocal’s free e-guide, Promotions and Discounts with SMS, to learn more about handling promotional messages.
Of course, each firm will have its own own route to buy, and clients will come from a diverse set of sources. The journey described above is just one example; there are several ways to employ mobile to deliver a better experience for your clients at each point of the RACE framework. Analyzing your own customer journeys can provide you with a solid foundation for developing the most successful communications plan for your company.
