As marketers and business owners, engaging and connecting with your customers is critical for your profitability and growth. A personalized and relevant message could mean turning an interested, prospective consumer into a paying, loyal customer. However, time is scarce, and building out repetitive messages can be time-consuming.
This is where SMS Automations step in! Setting up automated message flows will grow, replenish, and engage your audience as your contacts naturally interact with your brand or drop off over time. SMS Automations put your lead nurturing and customer outreach on autopilot so that you can reach the right people at the right moment, with the right message.
What is SMS Automations?
SMS Automations is a tool to help you create and deliver messages to certain people based on specific actions they take–or don’t take– without doing the work every time!
The welcome message you deliver to a new contact after signing up for your SMS mailing list is a perfect example of automation. You wouldn’t want to have to create a new SMS campaign each time someone joins your list. But, you would also like to ensure every new subscriber receives a timely welcome (text) from your brand. SMS automation does both for you!
Benefits of Using Automations
With SMS automation, you can set predefined events, rules, and timing to trigger the platform to send a text message to contacts who meet your criteria.
In doing so, SMS automations let you:
1. Personalize your customer’s experiences
Consumers want to know someone (brands!), is listening and communicating in an empathetic and relevant way. Over 83% of consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for a personalized experience with your brand and expect that you’ll anticipate their needs.
Your automation can target their specific actions, behaviors, and attributes so that you can deliver a message that’s customized just for them. The more you personalize your message and refine your timing, the more effective your marketing will be.
2. Strengthen your customer engagement and retention
How do you build great relationships with prospective customers? You figure out what they want and fill that need! In exchange, they’ll give you their attention, championship, and revenue.
Also, automations aren’t solely for prospective customers! It’s easier–and more cost-effective–to sell to an existing customer rather than finding and converting a new one. Customers feel valued when you can proactively assist them in their moment of need, and if you can deliver a related and timely text that addresses that need, it shows that you get them and that you hear them.
With the right timing and the right prompt, not only strengthen your customer engagement, but you can even bring back a customer.
3. Scales your marketing efforts
Without automations, managing SMS marketing efforts manually can only go as far as the size of your staff. Let’s say you want to send a reminder to customers who abandoned their cart. What happens when your mobile list suddenly doubles or triples in size after a sweepstake or marketing promotion? Could your team stay on top of all of the customer requests?
One of the advantages of predefined automation is that your platform will automatically send a message to SMS subscribers who meet the conditions in your automation flow once it's turned on. You can tend to other meaningful priorities knowing that your customers aren’t neglected and won’t go without hearing from you.
As you begin to automate these recurring messages, you free up your time to focus on other valuable tasks, such as honing your customer service, evolving your business strategy, and creating new products and services to meet your customer’s needs.
What’s next?
- Learn how to create an SMS Automation