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Beginner’s Guide to Mass SMS from Your Landline
More and more consumers are growing comfortable with the idea of texting businesses to make their voices heard.
The savviest of businesses understand the importance of this trend and is choosing to engage numerous customers using bulk SMS.
Bulk SMS is changing the way businesses communicate and nurture relationships with consumers by empowering businesses to send messages at scale, without sacrificing the personal touch of their messages.
For those interested in dabbling with bulk SMS, did you know you can take your current phone landline and convert it into a platform that enables 2-way bulk text messaging?
You don't even need to change your landline phone number.
All it takes is a quick call to your service provider.
It’s so quick and easy In fact, you could easily text-enable your landline within the day. WIth flexible pricing plans depending on your needs all without disrupting your current business workflow.
Soon you’ll be able to send tens of thousands of messages efficiently and effortlessly.
How Bulk SMS Makes Your Life Easier
The message workload that every successful business must respond to is unruly enough as it is. Through a text-enabled land-line with an SMS platform, lighten that load and get back to what matters.
Scale & Increase Work Capacity
A single member of your team can manage several conversations at once.
An SMS interface allows by having multiple open chat windows. Answer each message based on priority either individually or in groups.
A single person can even send scheduled mass text message. As many as tens of thousands of messages at a time.
It gets even easier with repeatable messages such as appointment reminders and order confirmations. Messages of this nature can easily be automated through the use of auto responders, which send canned responses, freeing up time and energy for a team member to focus on other chats and tasks.
Centralized and Safeguard Data and Messages
Multiple team members can have access to a single text-enabled landline, as long as they are authorized.
This keeps all the inbound and outbound messages in one place, eliminating information silos and enhancing collaboration among team members.
This secures your users' data and more effectively than if agents were to use multiple different phone lines and with their own individual cell phones.
Faster Engagement
Emails usually take days for the receiver to open. On average, texts are opened within minutes of receiving them.
That increased speed happens on both ends. You reply to messages faster, and so do your recipients.
3 day response time for emails vs 3 minute response time for text messages.
Imagine how much more you can get done with the extra time and energy.
How to Enable Landline texting
Getting Set-Up
First, speak to your provider. For example, AT&T has a landing page to get you started on text enabling your landline.
While text-enabling your land-line is free, you’ll still invest some money to get a practical and viable text-enabled landline platform for your business needs.
Depending on the terms your provider offers, you’ll find different packages that offer functions such as mass scheduled texting.
Once you’ve set up your platform, it's easy to import your list of contacts. Most land-line enabled texting platforms allow the importing of contacts from spreadsheets.
Getting Your Audience’s Permission
Once you have the platform to start texting, be aware that according to TCPA and CTIA guidelines, you are only allowed to send texts to people who have opted in.
While you can’t start spamming your customers with promotions right off the bat, what you can do is text your pre-existing consumers and subscribers and ask them if they’d be interested in hearing more. When they choose to opt-in, that’s the green light to send the content they crave.
Whether you’re sending a newsletter, a special sales promotion, a customer care case. Remember who the message is for and what you value you hope to offer.
Targeting the right audience with the right offer, at the right time is a sure fire way to pique their interest and get them excited and opt-in.
Be sure to set expectations such as how often they will be receiving content.
Not only is it polite, but setting expectations is an important part of developing trust and loyalty.
Types of Bulk SMS Campaigns to Send
Now that you have a working land-line enabled SMS, where do you go from there?
Here are some examples to get you started:
Market Research Surveys
Use SMS to better know your market.
Through SMS, you can quickly send a quick message to your customers to participate in a survey to get some valuable insight.
Gauge your market’s interest through polls, or get feedback regarding your service.
Survey Monkey gives some great insights about SMS surveys.
Sales Promos and Special Offers
Campaign special blowout sales, and loyalty programs.
Get your consumer to opt-in via keyword campaign. Offer a discount or referral program to those who opt in.
Event Management
RSVP attendees and send email reminders and newsletters about upcoming events and seminars.
Not only will you keep it organized, you’ll also be able to track data such as the number of attendees and examine it for future event planning.
Newsletters
Don’t keep your customers in the dark. Let them know what new and exciting attractions and features you that they can look forward to.
Not only are newsletters useful for retaining the interest of your current customers and subscriber base, but it also boosts traffic to your website as well as drive sales.
Looking Forward to New Conversations
Texting is quickly becoming the way that customers feel most comfortable talking to not only their friends and family but those they do business as well.
Just as email was a game changer for marketing, so too is SMS.
Businesses that don’t start developing a system of SMS to communicate with their market are asking to be left behind.
It doesn’t take much. Take your old business landline, text-enable it and start communicating with customers in a new, effective, and exciting way.
Want to learn how your team can collaborate on customer messages faster? Chatfully can help! Click here to learn more.
Texting with prospects and customers is a new marketing channel for most businesses, but the benefits are staggering.
As you’re learning more about conversational commerce, you may start to feel defensive about your current email communication strategy. It seems to be working for you and you're comfortable with the system in place. Why put time, energy, and resources into implementing a new process, like using SMS texting and instant messaging, that may not work for your needs? It’s a natural way to react to any type of change—probably more so in business where you’re not just risking your personal reputation and money, but your business’ as well. It’s the responsible reaction to question anything that claims to be “better for you.” So to all of you cautious decision makers—we say bravo and applaud your thoughtful judgment. We are not here to convince you that you need to completely change your communication plan. Rather, we are here to provide insights into how you may augment your arsenal to enhance what you’ve got and make it even better. We’ve got nothing against email. On the contrary, we’ll show you how to improve your email strategy while adding SMS texting and instant messaging capabilities as options for your audience. Before we do that, we will first address some common concerns about using SMS and/or IM for business purposes. Then, we’ll outline when to use instant communication with your audience and when to use email. Common Concerns about SMS and IM Concern #1: They’re intrusive. Some people may find getting a text or chat message from a business on their personal phone as an invasion of a sacred space that should only be designated for trading emojis and gifs with your nearest and dearest. That’s a fair point if the customer did not opt in to receive SMS or IM from the company. However, standard practice for most organizations is to request permission before contacting a consumer. By doing this, businesses know whether the consumer wants to hear from them or not. In addition, companies usually offer a way to opt out if consumers change their mind or were contacted by mistake. So, ultimately this choice of communication style is left with the consumer. Those people who find it intrusive can opt out—they would be among the minority anyway. When Facebook surveyed daily messaging app users, 61% of those surveyed in the US told them “they had messaged a business in the past three months.” The same statistic from other countries was either the same or higher. It’s clear most people around the world don’t find SMS or IM from companies intrusive at all. Concern #2: No access or limited access. There may be a cost barrier that limits or prevents people from receiving text or instant chat messages. Those consumers have the same choice as above—they can opt out of receiving these types of instant communication altogether or choose the chat platform that’s most accessible to them whether that be SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or the like. Businesses can access all of these mediums through a unified platform, like Chatfully, that will keep the conversations organized and open for teams to view and collaborate on the best solutions. If the targeted recipients do opt out of any instant communication, hopefully, they have the option to be reached by email, phone, or postal mail instead should they have questions about your product or service or want to be alerted about sales promotions. Concern #3: No records. For everyday personal use, it may not be possible to keep a history of your texts or DMs, and if one did, it would take up precious space on your device. For businesses, however, there are services, like Chatfully, that can help you maintain records of all your conversations (no matter the platform) for however long you want to keep them. So if you’re looking for that complaint sent over Twitter or that billing question sent via WhatsApp, you can easily find it through a unified platform like Chatfully’s. But which tool is best? Now that we have addressed the common concerns about using SMS texting or web-based instant messaging, for the rest of this article, we will refer to both of these mediums as “instant chat” and compare “instant chat” to email. The other pros and cons in certain situations for both SMS and IM are the same so both will be grouped as “instant chat.” This guide will help you choose the best tool for each of the following areas: Scheduling Customer success Sales Marketing Use Cases for Instant Chat
Picture this—you’re thinking about conversational commerce and what it can do for your organization. You’re sitting through a demo to learn how easy it is to add texting to your current phone line when it hits you … AHA! This is a lot easier than I thought!! So what do I do next? First, you’ll want to get buy-in from your team. If your employees don’t believe in this new strategy, it will be more difficult to get your customers to trust it. To tackle this, consider this two-pronged approach: Explain how adding SMS texting and instant messaging will help your team. Explain how it will help your business. How Texting and Instant Messaging Will Help Your Team The first approach to get your team behind your new SMS and IM plan is to show them how it will make their work simpler and more efficient. Are your employees being stood up too often by no-show customers not making their appointments? Are their processes held up by waiting for important customer information? Through the use of automated appointment reminders and faster responses via text or chat, your workers’ pain points with customers can be reduced considerably. An instant message platform can also make collaboration within the team and the organization effortless by allowing other workers to see the status of a conversation and, if needed, jump into it to bridge a knowledge gap and seamlessly facilitate service to the customer.
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