A Guide to Conversational SMS Marketing

In today’s marketing landscape, consumers are more familiar with text messages than ever. As texting is now a significant part of a consumer’s communication, conversational texts from businesses have become more prevalent, and for good reason.

Conversational SMS is a real-time, two-way texting communication channel that can help drive more customer engagement, improve customer satisfaction, and scale to meet the demands of any business.

What is Conversational SMS Marketing?

Traditional SMS, or Short Message Service, is the standard form of sending text-only messages up to 160 characters to cell phones. You may use traditional SMS to reach your audience, but it has traditionally been a one-way communication channel for businesses. However, conversational SMS is changing this dynamic. Conversational SMS allows for two-way messaging, allowing your customers to send reply messages and your company to answer them. 

Conversational SMS takes traditional two-way communication a step further, too. It allows for automation and CRM integration, plus your automated responses can be more in-depth and rely less on keywords and more on conversational language. Conversational SMS does this by using a natural language processor to carry on digital conversations. Some of these two-way conversations even use conversational AI to produce marketing messages.

Benefits of Conversational SMS Marketing

Implementing conversational SMS marketing as part of your company’s customer communication strategy has many benefits. Here are some of the most significant advantages of conversational SMS:

Enhanced Engagement

Compared to traditional SMS marketing, conversational SMS is more engaging for audiences. Conversational messaging can feel more personalized and build better relationships with your current and potential customers. Also, conversational messaging has higher open rates and response rates than traditional SMS. Not only can you gain valuable customer insights by learning more about each of your customers, but you’ll also make sure they feel heard.

Operational Efficiency

Manually typing personalized texts to each customer can be incredibly time-consuming. But with conversational SMS, AI-assisted automation can help you create customized messages for many different subscriber groups quickly and easily. 

Complementary Channel

A holistic marketing strategy considers multiple messaging channels to reach and engage your customers. Adding conversational SMS can help integrate your company’s messaging across every touchpoint – from email and social media to SMS and more.

Post-Purchase Engagement

Many people wrongly believe the customer journey ends after the purchase, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, communicating with customers post-purchase represents multiple opportunities to instill brand loyalty while providing a personalized experience. There are many forms of post-purchase engagement, including conversational SMS for shipping updates, customer retention, order tracking, and collecting feedback from customers.

Setting Up Your Conversational SMS Messaging Strategy

Once you’ve decided to implement a conversational SMS messaging strategy, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind to set up your company for success.

• Choose the Right Platform: The right platform can take your SMS to the next level. Look for an SMS marketing platform that allows you to integrate with your current CRM platforms, has tools to help ensure opt-in and opt-out procedures for compliance with Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations, and can give you the ability to scale with your business. Sakari is a leading provider of SMS marketing for businesses of all sizes.

• Define Goals & KPIs: Determining how your business will monitor success for these marketing campaigns is crucial, and having the ability to view metrics can provide incredible insight into consumers’ behaviors. In SMS, some of the biggest metrics to keep an eye on are response rates and conversion rates.

• Hybrid Approach: A software that allows you to automate SMS messages but also gives you the ability to send messages with a human touch can help ensure you strike the right balance between efficiency and non-human interactions. Look for software with automation functionality to help you spend less time manually managing your SMS. 

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Best Practices for Conversational SMS Success

Leveraging conversational SMS successfully relies on understanding and implementing texting best practices. Here’s what your company should consider as you’re working with conversational SMS:

• Clarity is crucial: No matter your messaging type, having a clear message is paramount to engagement and response rates. Stick with one key headline per message and be as concise as you can.
• Personalize messaging: Because texting is such a personal communication type, users expect personalization. Even if you send mass text messages, artificial intelligence tools can help you craft more personalized messages that get responses.
• Ensure compliance: Follow all relevant regulations in your jurisdiction such as TCPA or GDPR when sending marketing text messages. Working with a partner like Sakari can help simplify your subscribers' opt-in and opt-out process.
• Optimize timing and frequency: Sending the right message at the right time is important to have the best chance of success. Test a few different cadences, then utilize the analytics dashboard to compare the success of each and find what works best for your company and customers.
• Leverage analytics: As you develop your campaigns, be sure to utilize Sakari’s analytics dashboard to gain insights on what types of messages perform the best. 

Now that you have a better grasp of the best practices for conversational SMS, let’s check out a few examples to give you a better understanding of the types of messages you can send with conversational SMS.

Real-Life Examples of Conversational SMS

Looking for some ways to incorporate conversational SMS into your SMS marketing flow? Here are a few conversational SMS templates you can use for a variety of use cases:

Promotional Campaigns

• “Hey [INSERT NAME], our flash sale is LIVE! Get 40% off until 9 PM tonight! [INSERT LINK].”

• “Hi [INSERT NAME], our [INSERT PRODUCT] is BOGO FREE until 10 PM tomorrow. Get yours here [INSERT LINK].”

Appointment Reminders

• “Hey [INSERT NAME], please reply YES to confirm your appointment tomorrow at [INSERT TIME]. If you need to reschedule, please rebook here: [INSERT LINK].”

• Hey [INSERT NAME], we’re excited to see you tomorrow at [INSERT COMPANY] at [INSERT TIME]. Need to reschedule? Click here: [INSERT LINK].”

Transactional Updates

• “Hi [INSERT NAME], your order is on the way from [INSER COMPANY]. Track its progress here: [INSERT LINK].”

• “Hey [INSERT NAME], great news! Your order #589384 from [INSERT COMPANY] is out for delivery. Check out the full tracking at [INSERT LINK].”

Event Invitations

• “Hi [INSERT NAME], join us at [INSERT COMPANY] at [INSERT TIME] for our holiday sale! Space is limited, so RSVP here: [INSERT LINK].

• “Hey [INSERT NAME], we’re throwing a birthday bash for [INSERT COMPANY]. Join the fun by RSVPing here: [INSERT LINK].

These examples can be a productive start to any marketing text campaign workflow. When you’re ready to make your SMS work even harder for your business, look to partner with a trusted provider like Sakari.

Overcoming Challenges in SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can pose challenges to businesses of any size. Here are some of the most significant challenges businesses face when ramping up their SMS marketing:

• Scaling Conversations: As you build your subscriber base and your business, you’ll need to strike the right balance between being personal and optimizing the time it takes to have text conversations with customers. What is the best way to scale these text message conversations? Utilizing an SMS marketing tool.

• Including Personalization:  Personalization helps you build a relationship with your customers, which may be difficult as your business grows. SMS marketing tools like Sakari can help you get the best of both worlds: Automating conversations while giving you the ability to personalize text messages on a large scale. 

• Maintaining Compliance: In the United States and in the United Kingdom, compliance regulations help to protect customers from unwanted phone calls and text messages. In the United States, it’s known as TCPA, whereas a similar law is called the General Data Protection Regulation in the UK. Ensuring your text messages are compliant and consumers can opt-in and opt-out accordingly can be a difficult task to manage manually.

How Sakari Simplifies Conversational SMS Marketing

As a leader in SMS marketing, Sakari’s leading the way in helping customers find their stride. With built-in templates and automation tools, we make it easy for you to build campaigns and ensure you’re reaching audiences with the right level of personalization. Our powerful API gives you the ability to natively integrate with CRMs like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. Plus, track your campaign’s success with our robust analytics dashboard, allowing you to quickly see whitespace for optimizing current and future campaigns.

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