Two-way text messaging is the hottest trend of 2021. Due to remote working culture, text marketing continues to grow as a popular and effective digital marketing trend. Nine out of ten consumers prefer to text with businesses, and text messages are more likely to be read than emails.
Stay-at-home orders following the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on digital text marketing. Studies show that more than 50% (56 percent) of smart phone owners have increased their usage during the pandemic.
As more firms adopt text marketing in 2021, you’ll need to keep your strategy fresh by capitalizing on the newest text marketing trends.
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Text Marketing Trends
Marketing teams are effectively using text messaging platforms to boost their digital marketing efforts. If you are yet to plan your text messaging strategy, consider these trends for 2021.
1. SMS is a Seamless Customer Service Channel
A large number of companies are willing to invest in the B2B SMS applications to amp up their Text messaging outreach. AI-based Bulk SMS is the future of the B2B Text messaging. AI-enabled text messaging helps in improving the customer communication channels. In the COVID-19 era, we all know how prompt customer service plays a supporting role to Marketing and post-sales customer care departments by delivering on your brand promise, especially if you are an e-commerce retailer.
Consumers expect fast and correct responses to their inquiries, and they’re not afraid of sharing their negative experiences on social media platforms.
Studies show that over 50% of customers prefer texting client support reps over phone calls, which is becoming more mainstream.
SMS can facilitate several customer service functions, such as:
- Sending order confirmations
- Â Providing delivery tracking data
- Sending appointment reminders and rescheduling appointments
- Responding to commonly asked questions
- Asking for product and service feedback
Texting with customer support permits anyone with a mobile device to resolve problems quickly — without enduring long hold times and transfers. Shorter resolution times with SMS channels can also encourage consumer trust and help boost the bottom line.
2. SMS Relationship Building is Strong
Social media chatting and messaging plays a key role in adoption of text messaging tools. Despite the prolific rise of Social media messaging, backed up by WhatsApp’s growth in recent years, we are still seeing text messaging with SMS as a fairly productive engagement. Why?
SMS open-rates range between 45% and 98%, compared to a miserable 6%-20% open rate for email.
Gartner had reported way back in 2016 that SMS texts help consumers cut through the email noise, which has only exploded in the last 5 years.
Relationship building is a long game. Sending SMS messages to contacts during the important events such as birthdays, anniversaries or even on big sales days can help brands stand out from the competition. These definitely deliver ROI in increased sales and customer engagement.
3. Cross-Selling Through Transactional SMS Updates
More than two-thirds of customers find brands that send text messages as more engaging as they leave a positive influence on recipients.
With progressively cluttered email inboxes, more customers are opting into SMS to receive order updates. Text messages let companies offer instant value through transaction updates like order confirmation and shipping/delivery notifications.
Sending status updates text messages also offers companies a way to cross-sell or give discounts for future orders while customers are already engaged.
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4. Mainstream Availability of AI-Enhanced Chatbots
SMS chatbots are a large text marketing trend that started taking off this year. Chatbots save time and effort by automating elements of the customer expertise, providing instant answers to common customer inquiries.
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have created the technology more pervasive in mainstream software products. These advances will advance into the SMS-centric software platforms
You’ll see additional AI-powered chatbots stepping in to answer customer queries, complete tasks, and facilitate orders with no human intervention.
AI also permits for greater personalization, which will enable companies to customize messaging and build meaningful customer interactions at scale.
5. Rise of SMS Marketing Among B2B Companies
Are you still doing cold calls and sending bulk emails? These practices reveal gap in your customer experience delivery. Text messaging can solve these problems.
B2B marketers are slower to adopt SMS trends in their marketing campaigns compared to B2C firms. But the popularity of SMS also applies to people working in the B2B sector.
B2B firms rely heavily on relationship building and targeted marketing campaigns to attract and convert the correct customers.
During the pandemic, B2B marketers have found new, creative ways to use SMS, including:
- Sending real-time order tracking and delivery updates
- Registering online complaints sent through toll-free calls, texts, or chatbot messages
- Generating business leads
- Gathering client feedback
Many companies are offering text messaging integration software that could add fuel to your digital marketing efforts. From enhancing your brand proposition to building robust communication channels, from forging trustworthy relationships with your customers to tracking your consumers’ behavior, text messaging can add relevant context, value and synergy to your customer acquisition and retention goals.
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