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Investing in a texting service is more of a partnership than buying a consumable item. You’re essentially buying a very cool toolkit – plus plenty of expert assistance.
Unlike some product purchases that conclude with “thanks for buying, you’re on your own now, have fun and good luck,” investing in a text message marketing software can include helpful suggestions and support on how to explore, experiment and make changes to your message and your audience.
Though every business is different and unique in terms of its audience, competition and available resources, modern texting software programs can really help everyone – and go way beyond simply sending out mass texts.
The following are some features that many text message marketing software services offer:
- White papers. Rather than an abstract “you can maybe do this, and this, and this, and this with your texting,” without all that much guidance, your texting provider can offer how-to guides with specific strategies to use your texting effectively. These could include ways to increase your audience, get more opt-ins, improve your marketing, and suggestions on ways to write messages that are memorable and get opened.
- Database management. You’ll have to create and maintain your own database of people who have opted-in to receive your text messages. But your texting service can help you segment and extract different groups to send messages to. This could include customers who fit certain income levels, geographic locations, and specific interests. You’ll also have to create opportunities for people to provide this supplemental info, whether it’s at registration or later.
- Ability to automatically move new subscribers into database. Your team can certainly manually add names and personal info into the database. Or you can configure ways to have this info added, such as when someone clicks on a certain link in a text or site.
- Automated texting services. What’s better than an outlet to send out mass texts? Not having to send out mass texts all of the time. You can easily program your service to send out a certain pre-written text when a customer triggers a certain action. This could be making an order, visiting a location, calling for help, or any other service that could require the efforts of your staff. Or, it could be something related to their profile -- perhaps a birthday card with a special offer a week before their birthday, which you’ll know if they provided it during registration.
- API service. “One size fits all” doesn’t work well anymore, since every business may have their own unique CMS service, database and overall network configuration. A developer for a company may want to make some fixes to the texting service set-up to make it work a little more compatible with a company’s set-up. Working with an API toolkit can make sure everything works smoothly with sending out SMS (texts only), MMS (texts with extra content like pictures or video), or social media posts.
- Short codes. If you want to make it easy for your customers/clients to respond to you, without having to read many texts from them in response, they can contact you with a series of digits, or digits and a keyword, which your service can easily log. This could be used to allow people to give you basic feedback or pledge to contribute to a particular charity. If you’re putting something to a vote, like “what logo do you like best,” you can offer a different short code for each choices, and then receive the results saying “X number of people texted the code for Choice 1, Y for Choice 2 or Z for Choice 3.” You’ll have to choose the type of code to lease based on the duration of the planned campaign, whether it’s a digit you choose, or a random number but with a certain keyword.
- The ability to respond. One of the biggest challenges of one-to-many mass texts is that you don’t necessarily want or need a response from everyone you’ve contacted. Though you and your staff may not mind sending occasional texts to individuals, a mass text service is designed to save time and effort. However, hearing customer feedback is also always valuable, especially if you ask for it specifically for a particular promotion. So your service can offer different strategies to handle feedback, whether it’s short codes or keywords or something similar.
- Texting options. In some cases, people aren’t able to send or receive texts with their phones. But there are alternatives, such as sending texts through an email browser, or calling a toll-free number from a landline.
The ideal text message marketing software should make the process of signing up and getting started as easy as possible, plus plenty of resources for intermediate or advanced users. For more details and strategies in what features are useful, visit www.trumpia.com.
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