Customers can disengage from your brand for a variety of reasons, from having a bad experience to losing interest in your offerings. Is it possible to win these customers back?
The short answer? Yes! Short message service (SMS) texting is an excellent solution for reengaging inactive and former customers. This guide will explain the basics of customer retention using business SMS solutions.
Why Is Customer Retention Important?
While customer acquisition involves winning leads through careful marketing and experiences, customer retention involves building loyalty with your existing customer base to minimize churn and maximize their lifetime value.
And while it may not seem as important as acquisition, customer retention is a vital part of your business’s lasting success.
Keeping existing customers engaged with your business is actually more cost-effective than constantly acquiring new customers since they have a higher lifetime value. The marketing and outreach efforts involved in acquiring a new customer cost five to seven times more than reengaging an existing one.
Are SMS Campaigns for Lost Customers Effective?
SMS is fast, accessible and incredibly user-friendly. Some of its biggest advantages for customer retention include:
- Convenience: Nearly everyone carries a cellphone, making texts one of the easiest types of marketing messages to send and receive.
- High open rate: On average, recipients open 98% of SMS texts—and personalizing them with information gained through customer feedback can help you improve that rate.
- Efficiency: You can automate your SMS solution to send messages at predetermined times or in response to specific customer behaviors, which allows your team to send more messages than you would if you were to draft each one individually.
- Direct delivery: Emails are often automatically redirected to a customer’s spam folder. Customers are more likely to see text messages because they’re sent directly to their phones.
- Interactivity: Two-way texting solutions empower your customers to send messages to you, which helps boost engagement and improves customer service.
If you want to build trust with your audience and boost direct engagement, SMS is the way to go.
Designing a Successful Win-Back SMS Campaign
While investing in an SMS solution is the first step, you need a strong plan to win people over. Here are some tips and tricks you can use to create an SMS campaign that will bring back your lost customers.
1. Personalize Your Messaging
The human connection is critical for customer retention and acquisition, and it’s not hard to see why. People want to feel valued. Speaking directly to them through personalized messaging engages them on an individual level, which can help them regain interest in your brand.
Your company already collects plenty of customer data through marketing and selling touchpoints. You can use this data to create messages that appeal to specific audience segments. For example, you can personalize messages with the recipient’s name or send them a message on their birthday.
2. Keep It Short and Sweet
While you can pack all the little details into an SMS message, it’s best to limit message length for maximum engagement.
As a general rule of thumb, try to keep each message under 160 characters. Any longer, and your message might get split into multiple texts. You can always include a link to your website or customer service line if you want recipients to reach out for more information.
3. Time Your Messages
No one likes being interrupted, even when they receive an offer for a major discount at a favorite store. That’s why it’s important to avoid sending customer retention messages during peak hours when customers are already swamped with work and personal messages.
Instead, schedule messages in advance to go out during the quieter parts of the day. For example, you could send one batch in the afternoon when working customers are most likely taking a lunch break. Or, you could send your message in the early evening when people are on their way home from work.
Either way, you need to choose a time when your customers most likely have the freedom to fully engage with your brand.
4. Use Behavioral Triggers
Timing and personalization are everything in customer retention, but manually writing individual texts is time-consuming and costly.
Setting behavioral conditions for automated messaging eliminates the need to draft your own messages, saving valuable time for customer service reps and reducing overhead costs.
Plus, it ensures messages go out at the right time to catch the customer’s attention without coming off as desperate or pushy. Some common triggers include:
- Behavior: Schedule messages to automatically send when customers take specific actions, like a thank you message when a customer makes a purchase or a gentle reminder when a customer abandons their cart.
- Dates: Automatically send messages containing exclusive deals on important dates, such as national holidays, customer birthdays or company anniversaries.
- Promos: Automatically send updates whenever your company releases new products or services to keep previous customers in the loop.
5. Ask for Feedback
If you really want customers to come back to your brand, you need to know why they’re disengaging. Asking for feedback shows you care about your customer base and uncovers areas for improvement within your organization.
Create a short, streamlined customer feedback survey and send the link in a text blast inviting recipients to answer. This gives customers an opportunity to explain where your business is falling short of expectations, which can make them feel heard and help your organization make the necessary changes to meet those expectations. To take things up a notch, you can incentivize recipients to fill out the survey by saying they’ll get entered into a giveaway.
6. Integrate With Other Channels
A seamless flow of information across your organization is essential for maximizing your marketing and customer retention efforts.
Your SMS solution is most effective when combined with the rest of your tech stack, including:
- Social media platforms.
- Customer relationship management solutions.
- Shipment tracking software.
These integrations create a single source of truth for all your sales and customer data, which improves data quality and targeting accuracy.
7. Monitor and Optimize Your SMS Campaign
Tracking performance metrics during your SMS campaign can help you adapt to better reach your audience and boost your engagement rates.
Some key metrics to monitor include:
- Open rate: How many of your messages do recipients open?
- Click-through rate: How often do customers click on links included in your messages? This metric can help you determine whether you should reexamine the attachments you send to your audience.
- Conversion rate: How often do customers take action? For example, how many customers responded to a sale announcement by opening the store link and making a purchase?
- Net promoter score (NPS): How likely are your customers to recommend your business to others? The best way to measure NPS is through customer surveys, which you can distribute via SMS links.
Learn More About Business SMS Solutions From Red Oxygen
If you’re considering investing in text-based customer retention efforts, finding the right SMS provider is key.
Red Oxygen is here to streamline customer retention with user-friendly SMS messaging solutions. From bulk messaging APIs to seamless Gmail integrations, we have a solution that will match your company’s needs.
Ready to see how SMS messaging can boost your customer retention strategy? Contact us to start your free Red Oxygen demo today.
