How To Leverage SMS Across The Customer Lifecycle

With 98% read rates and 5x the response rates (vs email), SMS serves as an effective customer engagement channel for small and large businesses across different industries. While many businesses use SMS in one of the customer lifecycle stages (e.g. either to generate leads or to seek feedback), only a few manage to optimize SMS communications throughout the lifecycle. With the experience of helping 225,000+ businesses setup SMS communications for a wide variety of use cases, we are big believers in using SMS comprehensively across different customer touchpoints.

Textlocal features are designed to maximize returns at every stage, right from reaching out to a wider audience and acquiring new customers to interacting with existing customers and seeking feedback from them.

In this month’s newsletter, we’ll be discussing different stages of the customer lifecycle and how you can grow your business by leveraging powerful Textlocal SMS features at each stage.

Acquire new customers

By going beyond 160 characters and conveying more information (via SMS attachments) in a personalized SMS (via merge fields and regional language options), our customers achieve significantly better returns on their lead generation spends. You can even customize your campaign send times by sending instantly, scheduling for later, or staggering large sends over a time period.

What’s more, you can also measure campaign effectiveness using Textlocal clickthrough data, SMS responses, or missed call hits. These metrics can then be used to compose the right SMS message and optimize for the right send times.

Absolute Barbeque, Eazy Diner, Happily Unmarried, Ruosh, Tailorman and many other businesses send personalized campaigns and offers via Textlocal SMS. They often provide details about the offer along with a fulfilment path by attaching files and by adding shortlinks in the message.

Engage and interact with customers

Once the customer purchases, Textlocal can help you run 2-way customer interactions via SMS (e.g. account balance enquiry) and keep your customers updated with timely reminders/alerts. With Textlocal, you can easily:

• Open up a 2-way communication channel – Provide instant, on-demand information to your customers by receiving inbound SMS enquiries and setting up automated SMS responses.
• Boost customer retention and renewals – Send timely service expiry reminders, renewal alerts, regular payment and service reminders and other notifications directly to your customer’s mobile phones. Automate these alerts and reminders by integrating your application with Textlocal SMS API gateway
• Easily capture data – Accelerate your data collection efforts by sending data collection forms via SMS.

Exide uses Textlocal Missed Call Numbers to capture feedback about their service. Immediate response to service increases customers’ trust and helps build a long-term relationship. Furlenco, Save the Children, Yashoda Hospitals and many others also send purchase confirmations and other updates to customers, donors, and patients.

Build loyalty and get referrals

Textlocal helps you easily capture customer feedback by sending mobile-optimized surveys via SMS. You can also easily design and send loyalty coupons and tickets right from the Textlocal UI.

Businesses can simplify their customer referral process – just ask your customers to text in the referral information into your keyword or long codes. Alternatively, you can also use Textlocal data collection forms to capture referral interest and send them the referral offer/code as an autoreply.

Edenred, BookMyShow use Textlocal to send their loyalty coupons. Customers get coupons based on their eligibility and they then give a missed call to claim it.

ICICI bank gets referrals from their Gold loan customers by asking them to SMS the details of the referral to a 10-digit Textlocal Long Code. This helps them expand their customer-base with minimal effort.