5 Reasons You Want to Use SMS Messaging in Your Business

Are you looking to grow your business? Get more customers? Have larger profits? Of course you are. Isn’t every business looking to improve, grow and generate more sales?

More and more businesses are realising how SMS messaging can help them do all those things. But it’s nice to have some facts to back up what most people seem to assume is true. So I’ve looked around and gathered 5 facts to demonstrate beyond any doubt how effective text messaging in business can be.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, you have to communicate with your customers. Support call centres, sales calls, cold calls – you might do a lot of business over the phone. A few years ago Forrester did a study to analyse the financial return of adding the option for customers to “Click to chat” or “Click to call” to a business website. The results showed that the chat option cost approximately $5 per session (~£3.24) while a call could cost anywhere from $6 to $26 (~£4-£17) per session. Phone calls cost much more than a chat session. And an SMS chat session could cost much less than the online chat considered in the study. Each message could be as low as 2.1p. At that cost per message,  you’d need to send over 238 messages to equal the cost of one online chat session. See? It can save a ton of money over other forms of sales or customer support.

Do you own a mobile? What do you do every time you hear your text message notification? Probably the same thing most people do – you read it. A study of business professionals reported in eWeek showed more than one-third not only read their messages right away, they respond to texts in less than ten minutes. Actually, the report said they couldn’t go longer than 10 minutes without responding. As a business selling to businesses this is good news because your target market is driven to respond to you. If you’re a consumer oriented business, it’s still good news. It means your employees will feel the need to respond quickly to texts too. Whether you’re using SMS to communicate within your business or with customers, your employees will respond in a timely fashion. Well, at least one-third of them will and probably more.

In that same study from eWeek mentioned above, more than 80% said they were using text messaging for business. And 15% percent of those said that more than 50% of their messages are for business purposes. So even if your employees don’t have a company mobile, they are likely communicating about work to other employees using their personal device. And they might even be communicating with customers. In this blog, I wrote how one car dealership had its sales staff answering texts at all hours even when they were not working. It became a huge problem. So they employed a new system that let them route text messages so their sales staff could sleep and enjoy their days off. And productivity and sales went up. The eWeek study also showed that over 70% prefer traditional SMS messaging over using apps to communicate. That’s another bonus with using text messaging: You probably won’t need to create a custom app to communicate with your employees or business customers.

Sales automation company Velocify produced a study that looked at conversion rates for leads who were sent text messages and those who were not. The overall result was that leads, or prospects, that were contacted via SMS converted 40% more than ones who had not received text messages. But it gets better than that. Read on for fact number five.

The Velocify study said if the SMS messages are timed appropriately with the sales process, you can get conversion gains over 100%. The way they put it was “when used properly”. In this instance, “properly” means only sending SMS messages after you’ve made contact with them some other way (unless they’ve requested it but then technically they have made contact with you in some fashion).  And to drive the point home even more, they found that if you text a prospect before contacting them, the probability you’ll ever contact them decreased by 39%. That isn’t the reduction in the conversion statistic. It means they will never accept contact from you in any form.

Now you have the five reasons you want to get started using SMS in your business. To summarise all this information though, SMS messaging can save you money, increase sales, and your staff is already doing it. So you might as well jump all in.