When you use SMS messages with email, you will attract more leads. You’ll also engage more of your pipeline to actually read and digest your content, moving them more quickly through your pipeline and into sales.
As we described in our last post, When to Use Text Messaging vs. Email in Marketing, there are many use cases for blending email and text messaging. So how do you decide?
Here’s a basic rule of thumb:
- Whenever you want simple attraction or engagement (meaning you want to get their attention,) use text messaging.
- Whenever you want to deliver long form content, or when you’re communicating with a lead or customer who prefers, use email.
Let’s go through a common business scenario to share some thoughts on the best ways to use text messaging and email.
How to Use SMS Messages with Email
Every business needs new leads to thrive. Whether a sales prospect, job candidate, student, patient or client1, our prospects are what drive new business growth.
Just as you need new leads, so does your competition. That’s why our markets are so noisy, and our prospects overwhelmed with promotional communications. Your competition is doing many of the same things that you are to attract and engage those new opportunities.
Not when you blend text messaging with email! Here’s an example of how to innovate your communication strategy to increase your pipeline volume.
- First, SMS messages get 6X the responses of emails. Our customers actually report 75% response rates. Use text messaging to attract your new leads. Create an opt-in to your text messaging campaigns with an offer that’s compelling to your markets.
- You’ll receive the responses you want. Just be sure that you manage the text messaging consent in a legally compliant manner.
- Once the opt-in is confirmed, immediately fulfill the offer using your automated text messaging campaign.
- You can continue your automated campaign, using simple text messages to start a personal conversation. Wait, how can automation be personal? It’s simple, thanks to keywords.
- Ask questions to learn about their needs. What problem are they trying to solve? What new thing do they want to know about? What’s their goal?
- Offer keywords that represent what you know are the top 3-4 areas of interest for your new leads. For example, you might start with your types of customers (SMB, ENTERPRISE, CUSTOM), or your solutions (LAPTOPS, MONITORS, DISCS.) Once they respond, you can automatically trigger a text messaging campaign that relates to that specific topic, offering them information that’s relevant to their specific interest area.
- At any point in time, they can ask a question, send a keyword like TALK and you can quickly send the lead to sales to respond with a 1:1 interactive conversation.
- Let’s say your new lead has read a couple of your texts and they reply with a request to receive another piece of information, let’s say a white paper focused on best practices for their specific industry.
- Using a text message, ask them if they prefer email or text delivery, for that piece of information. After they respond, ask if they’d like to set that channel for all content delivery, then record that personal preference and use it.
- Send the content in the way they requested.
- As part of your text messaging lead nurture campaign, offer them a regular communication from you. Perhaps it’s a weekly blog, a monthly newsletter, updates on your market, or customer use cases that you publish that reflect their interest area.
- Use keywords to offer different types of educational, informative content, for example: TECH, NEWS, MARKET.
- Send whatever regular, long form content they request through email, unless they’ve requested text messaging for all communications.
One key point to note. Be sure that when you create your Opt-in offers, you segment the content related to your offer in a specific theme or area, and tie it to a specific outbound text messaging phone number (whether it’s a long or short code.) That way when they do opt-in, they’ll be opting in to a specific content thread. Which means that if they decide to opt-out, you haven’t lost all of your ability to communicate with them.
If you’d like to see exactly how you could benefit from implementing SMS messages in your business, try out a Free Trial to see how text messaging can help you attract more leads.