In the digital landscape of today, businesses strive to stay ahead of the competition by embracing innovative marketing strategies. While email campaigns and social media advertising have long dominated the digital marketing platforms, SMS marketing has been overlooked as a marketing campaign . SMS marketing presents a unique opportunity for businesses to connect with their target audience directly through text messages. These text messages can be used to drive traffic to a business’s website. Businesses can include a link to their website in their text  messages. This will allow customers to easily visit the website, learn more about the business, and play a pivotal role in driving organic traffic, improving website visibility, and ultimately boosting your online presence.

Why text marketing?

According to the following statistics, for every 100 text messages sent:

• The average open rate for SMS marketing is 98%. customers are more likely to see your text messages than they are to see emails or other forms of marketing.
• The average click-through rate for SMS marketing is 19%. Customers are more likely to click on the links in text messages as it’s easy and convenient.
• The average conversion rate for SMS marketing is 12%. conversion rates are higher as the promotional offers are sent directly to the mobile device and are personal.
• 96% of consumers say they are satisfied with SMS marketing for businesses, and can do it at their own convenience.

These  statistics are much higher than any other marketing campaigns as SMS marketing is personal, timely ,quick and optional.

Here are the best practices to follow for an effective SMS marketing campaign:

Collect and analyze customer history: to send targeted text messages, retailers  need to know what the customer has purchased in the past  or which store they have visited. This history tells you about the customer preferences to leverage and increase conversion rate.

Opt-in and opt-out options: Give customers the option to opt-in or opt out of receiving SMS messages from your retail business. This empowers them to control their communication preferences and ensures that you’re targeting individuals who genuinely want to hear from you. Make the opt-in process seamless and straightforward, and respect customers’ choices to foster trust and loyalty.

Keep your messages precise and include a CTA(call to action): text messages with CTA should short, precise to encourage customer engagement an example of CTA will be “ Limited time offer- shop today and get 10% off on your purchase”

Use a variety of messages: SMS marketing is not  just about promotional offers but these messages can be reminders to use up loyalty points, birthday wishes or just a hello message to remind customers about your business.

Track your results: It is important to track the results of your SMS marketing campaigns so that you can see what is working and what is not. This will help you improve your campaigns over time to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Why Using Customer History to Do Targeted Messaging is More Effective

Customer history can be used to create more targeted and personalized SMS marketing campaigns. By understanding what the customers’ preferences are. Retailers can  send them more relevant suggestions and timely messages that are more likely to be opened, clicked on, and converted. 

For example, if a customer has previously purchased a dress from your store, you could send them a text message with a special offer on a new dress or matching shoes  that you just received in stock. Or, if a customer has recently viewed a product on your website, you could send them a text message with a reminder to complete their purchase. Here are some statistics on why you should use customer history for your text  marketing:

• 80% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with a business that remembers their purchase history.
• 70% of consumers say they are more likely to open a text from a business that remembers their purchase history.
• 65% of consumers say they are more likely to click on a link in a text from a business that remembers their purchase history
• 55% of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase from a business that remembers their purchase history.

The most effective and sustainable way to collect customer history is by using a cutting-edge Point of Sales solution, retailcloud POS solution offers a SMS marketing platform that can help you create and send effective SMS marketing campaigns. Retailcloud’s SMS marketing platform includes features such as:

• Segmentation: You can segment your customer base so that you can send targeted messages to specific groups of customers.
• Personalization: You can personalize your messages with customer data, such as name, purchase history, and preferences.
• Reporting: You can track the performance of your SMS marketing campaigns so that you can see what is working and what is not.

With  retailcloud solutions you can even personalize text messages further by offering customer loyalty points for their birthday and also have the ability to see customer responses and respond to them to strengthen customer relationships.With Retailcloud, you can create and send effective SMS  marketing campaigns that will help you reach your target audience, increase sales, and boost customer engagement.

Conclusion:

SMS marketing is a powerful tool that can be used to reach a wide audience, increase sales, and boost customer engagement. By leveraging customer preferences and integrating them into your SMS campaigns, you can create highly targeted and personalized messages that are more likely to be successful.

Additionally, SMS marketing campaigns can generate user engagement and social signals. When customers receive a compelling SMS offer, they may share it with friends or on social media platforms, thereby increasing brand visibility and potentially attracting new customers. These social signals can positively influence your SEO rankings, as search engines consider them as indicators of brand authority and popularity.

At retailcloud we love lists; our support team keeps a list of all features that are requested by users, our partner team keeps a list of what is important to our partners and our product team keeps yet another one on what are key industry drivers.  

Recently our AI and analytics team was playing with some models to mash up all the data and see what features should be developed based on these three lists as well as what could have the greatest impact on our customer’s bottom line.

If you have been following our blogs you will see that we, and our industry, have been talking a lot about the impact of customer retention and building brand loyalty and experiences,  and so while a feedback and  rating system was not on our product roadmap we were not altogether surprised that our AI modeling told us that an application where customers could provide instant feedback to merchants, AND where merchants had tools and insights to make customers into fans made sense.

And so feedbk (pronounced feedback) was born; feedbk is a real time rating application that allows merchants to easily obtain feedback from their customers at the Point of Sale. It keeps track of 3 metrics for a retailer;

• • NPS (Net Promoter Score) that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships and is claimed to be correlated with revenue growth. This is done at the POS and a single question is posed to a customer who gives it a rating.

• • CXS (Customer Experience Score) that is used to gauge customer satisfaction using email receipts and other online interactions to allow customer to provide feedback on a set of questions based on their initial ratings. These are customized questions and are used to give an average customer satisfaction score.

• CEP (Customer Engagement Priority) that can be used to provide an operator with strategies on how to interact with various customer segments – this can be done instantly using ngauge or at a later date using social media, text  or email.

This feedback is automatically combined with segmentation which is critical in allowing operators to immediately identify problem areas and rectify them; it  is also able to provide retailers with the ability to gauge opportunity costs that are related to such issues. feedbk operates entirely on the retailcloud platform so it can provide operators with actionable analytics on how to increase units per transaction, identify ideal product mixes, and in general, identify their most valuable customers.

It’s just version 1.0, but we are excited about feedbk and the machine learning opportunities that come from it. We believe that it is the first of many pragmatic analytic solutions from our AI team that will allow small and mid size retailers to quickly access where their staff can best focus their efforts.

To understand your customers, customer feedback is important. Companies that listen to their customers have the tools to succeed – You’ve heard this many times and you have probably even given it consideration for your business. But what’s missing is a solid explanation. You’ve heard that customer feedback is crucial to your business grow, but the how’s and why’s are what I’ll try to help clarify for you.

Here are seven reasons why a customer feedback rating is important to the success of your business

1) Allows you to identify products that need improvement

You know your product, every variation, size, color, style, feature and you have educated your team hundreds of times. Unfortunately, your passion may not allow you to see the imperfections. It is important to know what appeals to your customers, as well as what was subpar and why. Listen to your customers and provide the products that they desire.

2) Engage with your Customers

Listening to your customer feedback makes your customers feel involved and valued. When customers feel listened to, they positively connect with your brand and direct their good experience back to you, which makes them a part of your business family and ensures return visits.

3) Positive Feedback generates Recommendations

Word of mouth advertising is very successful, and referrals are the most effective, free way of advertising. These most often come from friends and family and are often the most convincing recommendations.  Always remember to strive for positive feedback, if you want to gain customers through recommendations.

4) Convincing Customers to come back for more

You can always sell something once, but the true test is getting the customer to return over and over. Feedback is helpful in providing some of the finer details that encourage the recurring business. Is maybe free shipping, same day alterations, polite/educated support team, user friendly website which is the key to solidifying the customer relationship.

5) Embrace the Negative Feedback

Especially nowadays, with competition down the street and on line, its essential to tackle a problem or misunderstanding immediately. With the bandwidth of social media, a bad comment can do far reaching harm to your business.

Seek out a rating system can has the capability to alert you to negative feedback immediately – before your customer has left the store. Allowing the customer to share the unhappy experience and providing you with the opportunity to rectify the issue immediately.

6) Feedback helps you acquire new customers

As a consumer, one of the first things you do when looking up a business or product is to read online reviews. Make sure that you have reviews available to draw in the new business, and further more, make sure that the reviews are positive. Asking your customers for their feedback in store will allow you to react before it appears online.

7) Listening to customer feedback helps build loyalty for the brand

Actively soliciting feedback from your customers and reacting to their opinions creates a relationship that makes the buying process more personal. The customer perceives the business as being run by friendly people that care about their experience, instead of just a company that sells product.

As you see, eliciting feedback from your customers is important and can be very beneficial to your business, as it helps you get to know your customers better, increases their engagement and loyalty and brings in new customers. As it turns out, customer feedback is quite important!