Reach Out And Text Someone - Greg Zakowicz

While SMS has been growing as an outreach option used by businesses for the last half decade, the 2020 Covid Pandemic forced companies to find new ways to interact with their clientelle, be it for sales or to just keep them engaged with the brand during turbulent times. 

As a cost effective, personal and immediate way to communicate with customers in a safe and socially distanced manner, SMS messaging has become a must-have tool for any surviving store, e-commerce based or traditional brick and mortar. And while that particular iron is still hot, now is the time to strike and get in with SMS messaging for your brand, says Greg Zakowicz of Omnisend, especially if you want to have all the kinks worked out and your designed campaigns prepped and tested by Holiday Season 2021. 

With SMS traffic exploding over the previous year, Omnisend themselves seeing over 400% growth in activity, text engagement has gone over the tipping point and is now a must-have service, and with that must-have need comes a rush to provide services, come some common mistakes and basics to keep aware of and a keen eye on for the first time SMS user.

• Collect early, collect often. Even if you’re not currently using SMS to communicate with your customers, collect what numbers you can. This will at the very least give you an idea of how many would be interested in using such a service, when if offers nothing special in return. These customers will be your baseline, and if they’re too small or disinterested in responding to SMS offers over email offers, then don’t force them to switch over, wait until the feedback they give you shows that the time is to use SMS.
• Work in the present, sell in the future. That’s to the immediacy of text messages, arriving faster than even emails, and with a higher and faster rate of opening by receiving consumers, you can tie your SMS campaigns to more in-the-now opportunities, like unplanned flash sales, offering unexpected and limited deals that carry a sense of urgency due to the naturally short timeline SMS itself gives you due to its speed. With more customers responding to buy faster, an entirely organic deadline for purchases is created, the rate of the count down dictated by the customers themselves, generating a sense of excitment to buy your product that may not be there if the offer came through email, or was part of a planned and expected seasonal sale.
• Take advantage of data driven interactivity. When you send an SMS, you’re not just sending the same message out to everyone who ever gave you their number, systems like Omnisend let you monitor the activities of those numbers on your site, what they’re looking at, what their shopping habits are, and feed that data back into the messages you send. With these details, Omnisend can tailor every individual automated email for the specific customer, including their personal details, interests and products they have been looking at, driving a more indepth interaction, which at the very least will generate more data and a better understanding of your customers and their shopping behaviour. Listen to the data they drive, and adapt appropriately.
• Blow out the cohorts. Don’t approach SMS outreach through a lens of generational expectations, that it assuming Millenials and Gen-Zers are the only tech savvy customers, and anything for Gen Xers or older has to be scaled back, down, or overall de-complicated to the point of losing features. It’s estimated that over 80% of all Americans, regardless of age, send and received text messages, and are perfectly capable of using the technology with confidence. Do not let presumptions about the remaining 20% dictate how you interact with the larger and more active majority.
• Don’t put the cost of your SMS campaign on your customers. Having a flashy new SMS messaging system for contacting and staying in touch with your consumers is a great thing, so long as your consumers are within the same market as you. Customers from entirely different countries however will face different costs for operating their end of the SMS transaction, including possible delivery and sending costs. Be aware of where your SMS activity is, and how that may effect customers, and be sure to not make them pay twice over just for engaging with your brand. A feature stops being a feature when it takes more from the user than they get out of it, so make sure any system you implement is more helpful than it is hurtful to your bottom line.

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