Today, many businesses are using SMS as part of their marketing campaign. And, why not? It is a very effective and pocket friendly way to provide exclusive deals directly to your consumers. However, direct marketing is only one way of leveraging the power of text messaging.
Increasingly, businesses are finding more creative uses for SMS. For some, it is just the most easily accessed communication channel for remote employees. For others, it is about consumer relationship management. Most of the businesses are not usingSMS Gateway to provide something valuable to their customers but to get payments from them.
Let’s have a look at a few popular, non-marketing uses of texting:
Appointment reminders
With multiple distractions and tedious schedules, missed appointments are a truth of several businesses. Text message is a great tool for issuing reminders to consumers. Do it within 24 hours of the appointment to let them re-organize without jeopardizing them forgetting for a second time. This approach will help you improve your customer services as well as grow your bottom line by reducing losses that may happen by no-shows.
Surveys and competitions
Your association with consumers does not have to be always about a monetary transaction. Provide them something interesting to pass the time en route and they are already a little closer to buying something. Give a reward and they are even more likely to play along. Make a quiz that is relevant to your business. Send it to your consumers via SMS and get the replies back in same manner. This will help you know a lot about preferences of customers.
Urgent notices
Situations often conspire to prevent business owners going ahead with their plans. Let’s suppose, you are organizing an event and a few days before the event your main speaker drops out. What if that speaker was the key reason why some of the attendees agreed to come? Letting them know about the schedule change by text may disappoint them, but not as much as coming to the event and finding out then and there only. For immediate contact with a very high open rate, text messaging is unbeaten.
News updates
Text messaging is perfect for issuing operation information like store location, opening and closing time of your store, etc. It is a great way to engage consumers and keep them informed of your business without trying to sell your services or products.
So, start using SMS gateway API today not just to market your services or products, but for the number of above mentioned reasons and to make staying in touch with your consumers and keeping them informed or improving their experience working with you better and more convenient.
