SMS Marketing
How to Engage Lost Leads with Two-Way Texting
Technology has blown the doors open to more leads than most companies can count.
Learn why more businesses are implementing SMS marketing and sales strategies to generate more leads, and close deals faster.
Remember the days of someone knocking at your door with a suit and tie, hoping to deliver you a killer pitch on the latest “as-seen-on-TV” product? Oh, how times have changed…
We’ve seen the advancement of sales and marketing processes from the door-to-door salesman, to telemarketing, email marketing, and now, SMS marketing. SMS marketing campaigns not only help marketers deliver results, but allow businesses to drive more sales opportunities, lead generation, customer engagement, and revenue growth.
There’s no doubt that digital marketing has continued to evolve. CRM systems and email marketing platforms make it easy to market powerful and creative content to your target audiences via email messaging.
But here’s the catch 22. With email communication, you’re constantly playing a waiting game to see if your message was opened. Who’s to say that your message isn’t hiding out in a Spam folder or buried under a bulk of other marketing emails?
One thing you can count on is that, in today’s digital era, people depend on their cell phones for almost everything — which means mobile messaging is always at the consumer’s fingertips, while email may not be.
According to Deloitte’s 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, Americans view their smartphones about 52 times a day- increasing the chance of higher open rates and success in getting your SMS marketing message read.
Simplify the Sales Cycle with SMS Integration
With Sakari’s text messaging integration options, sales and marketing teams are strengthening communication and building relationships with leads, prospects, and customers throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
We’ve outlined 5 benefits of utilizing an SMS marketing and sales strategy to optimize overall business efficiency:
1. Automation, automation, automation
Save time for your team and eliminate one-off manual workarounds by creating automated workflows and SMS drip campaigns. With Sakari SMS, you can automatically send a custom, personalized text message to a contact after they’ve completed a specified goal or action. Common examples of automated SMS campaigns include:
- Sending a welcome text message after someone becomes a new customer/member
- Confirming an appointment after a contact has booked one on your website
- Scheduling a date and time for a product demo, tour, consultation, etc. via SMS
- Providing a promotional discount text to someone that just submitted a form
2. Two-way messaging in real-time
We know you’re tired of waiting hours – maybe even weeks – for someone to reply to your third follow-up email kindly asking when you can schedule that demo. With SMS marketing, it’s an immediate communication channel. Using Sakari SMS, you can keep two-way text messaging conversations between your sales team and contacts flowing smoothly in real-time. Just make sure that the contacts you are messaging are opted-in to receive text messages from your business.
3. The entire sales team is on the same page
With email communication, your Salesperson A might not be aware that Salesperson B already booked a demo or received a response from a prospect that’s been stuck in the pipeline for a few months now.
With SMS messaging for HubSpot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, and more, the entire sales team can have full visibility into lead communication and status updates of the sales cycle. Sakari allows one-on-one text messaging conversations to be seen in the contact’s profile timeline, along with any other text messages directly from automated workflows.
This ensures a smoother sales hand-off and gets both marketing and sales aligned on the current status of any given contact, whether a lead or customer.
4. Deal workflows and deal messaging
How many times does the question “Who’s the decision-maker for this deal?” pop up during the sales cycle? With Sakari’s HubSpot deal-record text messaging and deal workflow messaging, your team has the ability to view all the contacts that are associated with a deal and choose the appropriate contact(s) to send a message to.
5. Maximized customer retention and loyalty
Someone who was once a warm lead has converted and been your customer for a year. Do you have the right strategy in place to drive customer advocacy, loyalty, and maintain retention so they stay a long-time customer?
Sakari SMS allows you to continue to build relationships with your customers by encouraging engagement and showing appreciation. You can send customers text messages for:
- Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, etc.
- Customer events or conferences
- Special deals for existing clients
- Requests for reviews and testimonials
If you’re sending a message to someone in the US or Canada, you also have the ability to send MMS, or multimedia messages.
With an abundance of SMS integrations for sales and marketing teams, companies are creating a new text messaging ecosystem that allows them to get right in front of their prospective customers, closing the gap on email response times and speeding up the overall sales process.
Now, this doesn’t mean you need to permanently brush off email marketing from your digital strategy, but it might be worth giving SMS marketing a try to see how it builds up contact communication and in turn, converts leads to paying customers.
Try Sakari's SMS Marketing Platform for FREE
Ready to transform the way you communicate with your customers? Start your 14-day free trial with Sakari today and experience the power of seamless SMS messaging at your fingertips.
No credit card required, just immediate access to all the tools you need to enhance engagement and drive results.
