Katherine Morley 
SMS provides a simple opportunity to the brands for communicating with the target audience with a short message. They can use it for a variety of purposes, from marketing to sending reminders. Your audience may miss the emails, but it is hard to ignore a text on the notification window.
Therefore, businesses have tried to use the service in creative manners to get the attention of their audience. However, your efforts may get annoying for the customers if the communication is frequent or meaningless. Nobody wants to check their smartphone when it rings to find some clueless marketing campaign in their inbox.
Here, you will find some creative ways to use SMS in your business without annoying your audience.
- Automated Notifications
Customers keep track of their orders to make sure the delivery is on time. You can assist them with updates regarding the order, such as order confirmation and expected delivery date. These notifications are welcomed as they improve the experience since the customers are updated during every stage of the order processing.
Many customers use it to avoid unauthorised purchase from their account. These systems will require integration with your website and databases. For the investment, you can take easy loans in the UK to improve the customer experience.
- Sales and Promotions
The most common use of SMS in communication with customers is for running sales and promotions. You can send them notifications for an upcoming sale in your store. More importantly, you can time these messages for maximum exposure keeping in mind your audiences.
Many brands provide an option to notify their customers of a price reduction for the items in their shopping cart. You can do the same with approval from the customers. Also, personalised texts will create a better impact on the promotional offers to increase your conversion with the SMS links.
- Sharing Files and Information
During a conference or meeting, you can use the SMS to share the link to your presentation. It will provide the audience with all the prerequisite information for your presentation. Therefore, they will understand the offering from your brand in a more effective manner.
You can integrate your email marketing tool with the text messaging service of your smartphone. It will send a message at the end of your presentation to the audience. The information shared will increase your chances of conversion of leads in the meeting.
- Appointment Reminders
Businesses offering some services to the employees can remind them of the appointment through messaging. It will give customers the required time to prepare for the appointment. Moreover, the customers don’t have to go through the troubles of rescheduling as many clients are lost in this process itself.
Your business will experience less cancellation once the customers are reminded of their appointments. Therefore, there will be fewer idle hours in your workplace even with high demands. You can also use the SMS for payment and other reminders.
- Feedback
Feedback is important to improve your services and grow the business. However, it takes the right strategy and consistent efforts to get reviews from customers. Not everyone will go through the trouble of creating an account on some website.
Therefore, it is important to provide comfort and options to the customers to get reviews and feedbacks. You can ask some simple questions regarding the service through text messaging. Moreover, you can share the link of some feedback form or survey to get the required input from the customers.
- Customer Support
Customer support through calls is a costly arrangement for businesses. They need to hire professionals to make sure the waiting time is minimum for the customers. Moreover, the customers get more frustrated if they are forced to wait hours in the waiting line.
Thus, you can provide customer support over text messaging to save time and resources. One representative will manage multiple clients during chat support. Also, communication is easier to retrieve in case of a misunderstanding or dispute.
- Tips and Advice
Customers can ask for advice based on your business at any time of the day. You can provide them instant help through SMS. They will have an opinion from a known expert instead of some self-acclaimed expert on the internet.
This service is mainly used in the healthcare industry, where patients need information from healthcare workers. The doctors can keep track of their progress and help them with the latest recommendations. Many gym trainers remain active on messaging to clear doubts about diet to their clients.
- Coupon Distribution
Coupon distribution to the customers is simplified with the use of text messages. Emails are prone to land in the spam folder. Customers do not even open around 80% of the promotional emails.
Therefore, you should distribute the coupons through text messages. It will increase their visibility, and customers can find them easily in their inbox. Thus, the overall ROI on the coupon strategy will increase with the use of SMS.
Conclusion
To sum up, SMS are extremely useful for brands to streamline communication with customers. Your messages will enjoy greater visibility than emails. Moreover, it will help improve the customer experience to benefit the organisation with an increased retention rate.
