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Medium-sized businesses have their hands full. They're competing head-to-head with large businesses but often have a fraction of the resources. But, equipped with the right tools, middle market companies can see great success. SMS is one of those powerful tools. It can save your business time, money, and effort. Use texting to build a sales pipeline, promote the latest deals, improve recruiting, and enhance customer support. SMS is effective because it's a communication channel customers prefer. Plus, it has high open and response rates. Read on to learn other key benefits.
Most Americans own mobile phones and spend an average of 4 hours and 23 minutes on them per day. This makes texting a great way to reach customers. Plus, customers want to text with businesses. In fact, 85 percent of consumers reported wanting to have text conversations with businesses.
<div class="mb32">Use SMS to thank customers for their business, share personalized offers, send appointment reminders, relay order notifications, and more. All in all, SMS can help you reach more customers and create positive experiences.</div>
Reduce the time it takes to resolve customer issues with SMS. Customers can send and receive texts at any location and at the most convenient times. This improves the support experience since customers don’t have to stay behind a computer or on the phone waiting for a resolution.
Plus, your customers want this support option. In fact, 52 percent of customers prefer to text with a customer support agent over other communication options.
Texting platforms can also support Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which allows customers to send attachments like photos, videos, or website links. When it comes to back-and-forth support interactions with customers, a picture can speed up otherwise lengthy conversations. This makes MMS messages a great tool for customer support.
<div class="mb32">Overall, SMS and MMS messaging allow you to respond instantly to customers, serve more customers at a time, and shorten resolution time.</div>
One major benefit of texting is its speed and immediacy. The average response time for a text is 90 seconds, while the average email response time is 3.5 hours.
That’s why texting is a great way for your sales team to reach leads quickly. Use SMS to contact your leads after they fill out a contact form on your website. This will help you close more deals, as the sale often goes to the company that reaches the potential customer first. You can also use SMS to schedule calls, demos, or appointments.
<div class="mb32">Plus, there are statistics that back up texting’s effectiveness in the sales process. In fact, one study found a 100 percent increase in conversions when a sales representative texted a qualified lead. And 90 percent of business leads prefer to receive a text over a phone call.</div>
SMS is also an excellent tool for marketing teams. On average, SMS marketing campaigns perform seven times better than email marketing campaigns. And 96 percent of marketers said adding text marketing boosted revenue.
<div class="mb32">Use SMS marketing to send abandoned cart reminders, personalized mobile coupons, flash sale alerts, and more. Text message marketing campaigns are effective because texts have a 98 percent open rate and reach customers in real-time.</div>
Adding SMS can help your middle market organization save valuable resources: time, effort, and money.
Use automation to streamline your SMS communication. Send automatic reminders to reduce appointment no-shows, set up automated responses to reduce your SLA, or craft a series of templated messages to answer common customer questions. These features of an SMS platform will allow you to save those valuable resources.
<div class="mb32">Plus, texting is cost-effective compared to phone calls.</div>
Another use for business SMS is recruiting. Use texting to make your midmarket businesses’ recruiting and hiring process easier. Text messaging is used by recruiters to schedule and confirm interviews, screen candidates, follow up with referrals, and more.
Plus, candidates who received texts from recruiters rated their experience 50 percent higher than those who didn’t receive texts.
<div class="mb32">Text recruiting makes it easier for your midmarket business to connect with candidates and hire the right talent.</div>
Business SMS can also improve logistics and internal communication. Easily communicate with staff via text or within the application by leaving internal notes on conversations. Textline also helps you connect quickly with outside vendors. You can do this without playing phone tag or needing to wait for email responses.
<div class="mb32">Business SMS is especially helpful for teams with field workers that may not be behind computers during the workday or those with remote workers. Use SMS to send important notifications, schedule changes, and more.</div>
Textline’s SMS platform is equipped with the right features for middle-market firms. Below you'll see a breakdown of just some of our powerful features.
With Textline’s unified inbox, you can manage all incoming and outgoing messages in one place. It allows you to assign conversations, reply to customers, view metrics, find contacts, and more. The intuitive interface is easy to use and accessible to multiple users at the same time.
Plus, you can link your other communication channels like Instagram Business, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Pipedrive. Messages you get from the other platforms will be viewable in the Textline SMS dashboard. Think of the dashboard as a one-stop shop for your mobile business communication.
Bulk SMS, also called mass texting or mass SMS, can be used to reach many contacts at once. Send personalized messages to all of your contacts or a group of contacts at scale using Textline’s Announcements feature. With the feature, you can send event reminders, appointment confirmations, text surveys, promotional offers, and more.
For best results, personalize your bulk text messages with custom fields like customer name, job title, and more.
Collect actionable feedback from customers or employees with text message surveys. Textline offers our customers pre-built CSAT and NPS surveys. This makes it easy for your business to gauge customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention.
You can also set up custom surveys on Textline. For example, you could set up a market research survey, a brand awareness survey, or get to know your customers more.
Texting is built for rapid two-way messaging. In fact, the average person reads a text within three minutes and replies in 90 seconds. As a result, you can chat with your customers in real-time to solve issues, answer questions, and build stronger customer relationships.
Textline also keeps a record of the prior conversations you’ve had with customers, employees, or leads. This allows you to revisit conversations and better understand the problem.
Textline's Routes feature allows organizations to assign inbound conversations to agents automatically or based on a certain set of rules. Routes are great for organizations or departments that manage high volumes of inbound texts, such as customer support or customer service. This can save your team time and balance workloads.
Using Textline’s Shortcut feature, you can create custom text templates for common customer questions or recurring messages. Craft these templates ahead of time to make it easier for your team to respond. This helps keep your response time low.
For example, you could craft a welcome message for new SMS subscribers or create a template for common questions like what are your business hours?
Textline’s Whisper feature allows your team to leave private internal notes on customer conversations. You can ask your team clarifying questions, let team members know the status of an open ticket, and more.
Easily manage your contact list with Textline. Textline automatically unsubscribes contacts who reply with words like stop or end.
You can also segment your contacts on Textline. Our Tag feature allows you to assign internal labels to different contacts. Once contacts are tagged, you can send mass messages to contacts with a specific tag or search your Addressbook by tag. You can add multiple tags to contacts and edit the tags at any time. This feature allows you to send tailored messages to your target audience.
You can start texting your customers in just a few clicks. Textline made it simple to set up your account, add contacts, and start messaging. Below we break down the steps to set up a Textline account.
With Textline, you can often text-enable your existing business number. This includes your existing landline, VoIP number, or toll-free phone number. Textline also can provide a new texting number that matches your area code.
The next step is to create departments, or channels, on Textline. These departments will vary based on your business needs. You can set up departments for various teams such as one for sales and one for customer support. Or you could separate departments by location, such as one for operations in Idaho and another for your team in California.
The third step is to invite your team to join Textline. You can assign them to the correct department, give them a role, and track their availability.
The fourth step is to add your contacts. You can add to your contact list by uploading a CSV file or adding them manually.
Once you have your texting number, contacts imported, and departments and agents set up, you can start texting!
Try Textline for free for 14 days. No credit card required.
of companies saw a boost in customer communication efficiency after launching a texting initiative. — GSMA
of consumers would switch to a business that offers SMS communication. — Avochato
of texts are opened, compared to 20% of emails. — SMS Comparison
To make business texting more secure, mobile carriers implemented a registration requirement. This means that to text, businesses must first register their SMS phone number. This involves submitting information about your brand and texting use case to verify its legitimacy.
Textline makes this registration process quick and easy for midmarket businesses. Companies just need to fill out our pre-built compliance forms in the app. These forms collect the necessary information. From there, Textline handles the rest. Tap Textline for a hassle-free registration process.
The best part? While you’re waiting, you can use Textline for free. Use this time to familiarize yourself with the platform, test features, and set up automations.
Both small and medium businesses have turned to SMS in recent years to build customer relationships, find top talent, send marketing messages, and more. Try out professional text messaging to meet your business goals and revenue goals today. Book a demo to learn more.
You can also start a free trial today, no credit card required, to see the benefits of a midmarket enterprise SMS strategy for yourself.
Textline's team is responsive & helpful. Texting your customers really positions your team to be ahead of the competition. What customer doesn't want to text these days? Take your business to the next level by offering texting via Textline.
Textline offers the most robust platform for our sales, customer service, and operational needs. Textline has been extremely open to feedback and suggestions and have been wonderful to work with when looking for solutions and have become more critical as I plan long-term.
We used Textline out of the box for a while, and over the years we have hyper-customized it to our needs, and been happy with it all along the way. Their support has been responsive, and their feature set has grown, we are very happy customers.
Textline's integrations help mid-market businesses connect their current CRM, help desk, and customer service tools. This syncs key data for more personalized communication.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial today. No credit card required.
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