5 Simple Text Message Strategies to Build Customer Loyalty

TLDR: Utilizing text message campaings in your marketing gives you control of personalized ads at a low cost. By making sure you have propely seperated ad groups and an organized way of sending out your messages the campaign can build loyalty within your clientele with a high ROI.

The Importance of Customer Loyalty

In the best-case scenario, companies can build loyalty in their customers with simple and consistent strategies. How great would it be if everyone you marketed to saw your goods, bought your goods, and used your goods with minimal effort over and over?  While that isn’t something you can count on happening often, it does happen when your customer base is loyal. 

Even as little as a 5% increase in retention results in an average of 25% increase in revenue.

 Pro tip: Maintaining customer loyalty is crucial because it takes fewer resources than marketing to new customers.

So the question becomes how do you build loyalty through marketing on a consistent basis, and the answer is with short message service or SMS.

Why Text Message Marketing Works

Simply put it’s because people prefer marketing through SMS. Roughly 82% of people open every message they get with a whopping 90% of that figure actually reading the message within the first minute of receiving it. 

Text message campaigns also have the added benefit of sending smaller and easier-to-digest ads while still driving a point of sale for your brand or product. Personalization is key and text message marketing is a perfect platform for targeted ads that will efficiently build customer loyalty. 

How To Get The Most Loyalty From SMS Marketing

1. Seek customer buy-in.

This might seem like a no-brainer but how you approach your market is important. Before sending out mass texts it is imperative that you get permission to do so. Whether the customer is familiar with or new to your brand, receiving unsolicited messages will deter them from being loyal to your company.

Pro tip: Transparency is always welcomed and rewarded.

2. Organize your customers into targeted groups.

People of varying ages will likely have different priorities, lifestyles, and budgets. Same with someone who lives on the east coast versus the west coast. Identifying niches within your own market and structuring your SMS campaign’s content to match those groups will create better results. 

Pro tip: Using specific buzz phrases and slang as well as tying the ads to location-based activities and lifestyles will serve as a better buy-in to your target group.

3. Be thoughtful in your approach.

Using different platforms depending on the target you are marketing to won’t cost any extra money but it does require some research and thoughtfulness. Messages should be short, convey empathy to that particular customer’s situation and lifestyle and welcome them into your brand. Creating invasive or presumptuous ads will only hold a good text message marketing strategy back. 

Pro tip: As an example, marketing to people in the southwest United States during the summer should include acknowledgment of the heat they deal with on a daily basis and how your service or product can help relieve or simplify those day-to-day struggles. If your product can’t help with something like that, look for other lifestyle factors that it can help with and move on from there. 

4. Personalize as much as possible.

Customers want to be acknowledged and addressed in a personable manner and your text messaging strategy should reflect that. Referring to them by their first name and referencing past behavior or purchase history is a great way to accomplish this.

Example: “Hey Carol! Happy Holidays! We hope that you and your loved ones are enjoying the season and staying warm. Is the furnace we installed a few months ago working the way you need it to? We’d like to offer a free inspection with our new service upgrade plan”.

Pay attention to your customer’s behavior and engage them on a personal level. 

5. Organize the work before sending text messages out.

The entire ability to successfully market with text messages rests on the technical application. So make sure you have everything ready before you start! Consider the following:

How will you be sending the messages? CHIIRP offers an amazing platform for managing text message campaigns.

Which responses will trigger your texts and what happens next? Proper automation is key to making a campaign feel personable and making the process simple for customers. 

How are you going to measure the campaign’s success? Think about how these ads lead to a conversion and track them properly, or else you won’t know how to make adjustments for better results. 

Key Takeaways

While text message campaigns are not so different from other strategies when it comes to preparation they can be much cheaper and more likely to be seen by the targeted market. Additionally, building loyalty with SMS marketing relies heavily on getting customer buy-in, organizing the targeted groups and personalizing the ads with thoughtful approaches that relate to the customer. If you focus on these facets for building loyalty with text message marketing you can expect consistent results and a successful marketing campaign.