Multichannel Messaging has a vast appeal for many small and medium-sized businesses. SMS brings about a lot of engagement, which is what makes it relevant in multi-channel marketing.
The only question is how messaging can be used in multi-channel marketing. In this piece, we intend to let you know everything to help you with your marketing needs.
Used alongside other communication channels by marketers, here is how SMS fits into multi-channel marketing.
1. Enhancing Digital Customer Experience
Across the retail industry, consumer expectations are changing faster than ever. Today, at least 65% of consumers worldwide expect to get more connected experiences.
More than 84% of customers globally believe that they value experiences provided by companies like they do their products.
The challenge is that this figure keeps going up with time.
Today’s customers are tech-savvy, and they need companies to put up with their pace. With web SMS, you can enable two-way communication when customers need to receive feedback as well as other inquiries.
2. Recovering Lost Sales
As a merchant or marketer, you ought to build a strong relationship with your buyers or clients. Without doing this, you will be unknowingly sacrificing sales, thereby hurting your business.
Some studies suggest that at least 79.17% of customers abandon their carts when shopping online. Without a proper abandoned checkout and abandoned cart recovery strategy, you will lose a lot of potential sales.
There are great features that can help you recover abandoned carts and checkouts, and your competitors are already using them. With a good messaging system in place, your agents will text the shopper and engage them in a manner that increases sales.
3. SMS Enhances Customer Engagement
Some brands still believe that SMS is quite invasive. But, when looked at from a different perspective, it is an ideal tool that lets you build one-on-one relationships and trust with customers.
You can use it to remind buyers of upcoming sales, and let them know about newer offers. By sending these relevant notifications, you are creating an enabling environment for clients to get back to you with questions or concerns.
Many shoppers tend to appreciate notifications that let them feel special and recognised by brands. It gets even better when the SMSs have been personalised.
To use this feature, try to see that your multichannel messaging is utilised by humans. Buyers want to receive very accurate responses to each question they ask about companies they buy from.
4. Texts can be Saved and Referenced
Notifications about offers and coupons should be shared with clients early enough, and you want to ensure that they are handy for specific customers. However, as a company, you don’t want your marketing efforts to end up in drawers without paying back sooner or later.
Therefore, it is important to use a channel that your customers can easily refer to whenever they need to. This is something that you can achieve with printed materials or emails since messages are easy to save and refer to.
You also need to keep track of your multi-channel marketing efforts. Many marketers do this to help them analyse what is working and what is not, and you need to do the same to stay competitive.
5. Not All Your Customers have Smart Phones
Though most individuals do have smartphones, still, a good percentage of them don’t. In the US, for instance, 77% of the population uses smartphones, while the rest rely on older types of phones.
There are still millions of Americans with flip phones, and that does not account for customers in different parts of the globe. Now, you can see that you still have room to achieve a lot with SMS as a multi-channel marketing tool.
If you only rely on online marketing tools such as email marketing, you will not reach billions of potential clients in different parts of the globe. But, you can easily do that by engaging them with short, catchy, and highly engaging SMS.
6. Can Be Used Alongside Other Channels
If all channels can work in tandem, then you can achieve a lot. Luckily, you will not have to struggle to use SMS with other marketing techniques such as email and social media.
For instance, you can use a polite SMS to remind a customer to check out a certain email you shared with them. A good example of a follow-up SMS should read like this, “have you checked out our email?” In this way, you will enhance email-open rates.
Conclusion
Multi-channel marketing can be difficult, but it gets easier if you have the right information and tools to get you started. We hope that this article gave you some important insights. Kindly let us know in the comments if you have any questions or concern.
