5 Ways to Use SMS to Save Money and Improve Your Retail Business
Every good retail business owner knows that the key to success is keeping his or her customers happy. Your level of customer service should be all encompassing to succeed and should consist of more than just being polite to the customer at the till.
Today, customers are expecting more from retail businesses than ever before and want their lives to be as easy as possible, which new technology can assist with. It is detrimental for a business to rest on its laurels and keep its old processes in the internet age, as this will not match up to customer expectations and could lose you business.
With SMS marketing, you can gather customer feedback, confirm delivery times, remind customers of appointments or to pick up items that have been pre-ordered, send purchase confirmations and receipts and let customers know of any suitable products and services for their needs. Below are just five ways you could be making the most of SMS marketing for your retail business:
1. Customer Feedback
It’s important for any retail business to know what their customers think about them and what they are saying through word of mouth to others. This can be difficult to gauge sometimes, especially if your business depends on foot traffic that might never come in again. SMS messaging could solve all your problems in this regard. If you are sending receipts to customers through SMS, you can get their number in this method, or ask customers at the checkout to sign up with their details for customer feedback or offers. A text can be sent to customers on a regular basis asking them to rate your service or leave a few words of feedback. Because customers use their mobile phone so frequently, it is far more likely that they’ll take a moment to send a SMS message than they will to fill out an email or written feedback form. Some feedback ideas include asking your customers to rate your service on a numerical scale, a rating of your products or yes/no questions that you would like further information on.
2. Advertise Products and Services
One of the main and most rewarding uses of SMS marketing is the ability to make customers aware of new products that would be suitable for their needs. If you keep a database of customer contact details and can record what your customers have purchased, it’s easy to create targeted marketing campaigns that have more of an impact, than a general marketing campaign that seeks to meet the needs of everyone.
3. Remind Customers of Appointments
If your business involves dealing with customers on an appointment basis, you’ll know just how much money missed appointments can cost you. With the advent of SMS business messaging, you can send customers reminders of appointments the day before they are due and on the day itself, increasing the amount of appointments customers attend and keeping costs low but profits high for your business.
4. Send Receipts
It’s inconvenient for both you and your customers to hand out paper receipts and purchase confirmations. Businesses also struggle with customers returning items without receipts, as often they can’t prove that the customer bought the product in store, but feel obliged to swap or refund to keep the person as a customer. With SMS marketing, receipts can be issued by text to customers, allowing the customer to have a convenient record of their purchase and to let you do an exchange or refund with the confidence that you are really dealing with your own product and know exactly what date it was bought on. Also, this means you no longer have to worry about faded receipts – with SMS messaging you can see all the details in high quality without having to decipher whether the customer paid £80 or £20. Sending receipts or purchase confirmations by text may seem like a small thing, but implementing something like this shows your customers that you care enough to make their life easier and can make all the difference to the feedback customers give your business.
5. Delivery Confirmation
We all know what it’s like to get frustrated when expecting a delivery. It’s inconvenient for the customer to have to stay in all day waiting for their item when, in reality, a delivery takes just a few minutes; people sometimes sacrifice a whole paid day at work if the item is important and there’s no one else there to take delivery of the package. With SMS messaging, this can all change. A text can be sent to the customer when their item is dispatched to confirm a date, then on the day before and on the day of delivery to confirm the time period the product will arrive in. This also benefits you and your delivery drivers, as there’s less chance your customer gets fed up waiting, goes out and you have to deliver again. By doing this, you can show that you value your customers’ time and increase the chances of them using your service again as they will realise just how convenient it is.
Here at FastSMS we can tailor our service to suit your business needs exactly for less than you may think. Our friendly and well trained staff will be happy to advise you with any questions you might ask. We allow you to send messages from our browser based platform through any internet enabled device, allowing great flexibility in the service we provide to you. Our API also allows you to integrate our SMS messaging service with a wide range of other software programmes you may use, making the installation of this service a breeze. Contact us today for more details and to take your business to the next level.
Related Articles
Do Your SMS Marketing Messages Sound Spammy?
If you aren’t seeing a positive response from your SMS marketing then your list may be thinking of it as spam and just ignoring it like they do much of their email. So take your latest marketing messages and examine them again with these four questions in mind.
How SMS Messaging Can Help Get Buyers Back
E-commerce businesses have a huge problem. Consumers fill up their shopping carts, then rudely abandon them before completing a purchase. Of course, they don't mean to be rude, they have their reasons for leaving a full cart behind. But what if it were possible to get some of those sales back?
3 Best Types of CTA for SMS Marketing
One mistake some marketers make is assuming people will know what to do when they read an SMS message. After all, they’re short and to the point right? How confusing could they be? On the other hand, when writing every other form of marketing they know that calls to action need to be clear. So, just because you don't have much room, it doesn’t mean you get to leave out your call to action! Saving space and being brief is important though, so take a look at three of the best SMS marketing CTAs you can use.
How SMS Can Help Your Local Business Optimise Your Local Campaign
One of the great advantages of SMS: it's completely trackable so you know exactly how your campaigns are engaging your opted in customers and clients. And if you’re a small business, operating in a specific geographical location, then that local knowledge can be invaluable in targeting your campaigns to a local audience.
How to Increase Website Traffic with SMS Messaging
Read some practical advice on how you can use SMS messaging to drive more traffic to your website. Include a shortened url in your SMS marketing message that sends the recipient to a special offers page or a how-to video or even a top-up page for consumables. But make sure the page is mobile friendly.
SMS Marketing For The Equestrian Sector
The British Equestrian Trade Association’s findings from their National Equestrian Survey 2015 put the economic value of the equestrian sector at £4.3 billion of consumer spending across a wide range of goods and services, with the average spend per horse during the same year at £3600. It is an incredibly varied industry encompassing all types of businesses from sole traders making a living in remote areas to multinational companies. Their customer base typically tends to be busy people who lead largely outdoor lifestyles so the obvious and most effective means of communicating with them is by mobile phone, yet very few equestrian businesses appear to be utilising SMS text messaging marketing. So how could businesses in this sector benefit from this method of marketing?
5 Reasons to Receive SMS Online
Beginners’ Guide to SMS Marketing – July 2016 Update
If you've considered SMS marketing to new and existing customers by text message but dismissed it, it really is time to think again. SMS continues to outperform and outreach all the newer models of communication designed to replace it. The latest competitor to run into difficulties against business text messaging is mobile internet advertising.
Do Your Customers Trust You?
I think for much of the last decade, people used the Internet and then mobile devices, without giving too much thought about what they were doing. Or more accurately, what other people were doing with their information. But then came Edward Snowden in 2013 who revealed governments were collecting and using our personal data in ways we hadn’t imagined.
What Your Customers Want From SMS Marketing
Mobile marketing offers an unprecedented access to your customers virtually any time, anywhere. This is particularly true for SMS marketing because it is “always on”. Customers don’t have to be surfing the web, or using an app to receive messages. Instead, they see the marketing messages right alongside ones from their friends and family.