Your customers expect choices. Choices in how you sell to them, how they buy and how you interact and communicate with them. This is creating challenges for sales and marketing teams everywhere, big and small. Even more challenging is that many are stuck with few options.
Being able to offer your customers multiple forms of communication is a requirement if you want to attract more customers and grow your business. Review the options you are currently offering your customers – email, phone, face-to-face, and direct mail. Each of these is helpful on it’s own but your customers have changed. They are not at their desk all day, they are working from remote or home offices, and many are working in a mobile environment.
If you are limiting your communication to any of those options alone, you are missing significant opportunities to connect and communicate. Your competition has already realized this and is taking action to expand their connections to communicate and connect.
Choices
Here are two recent advancements that I encourage you to consider:
Browser/Push Notifications
This technology has emerged over the last six months and is having a significant impact on results of some of the biggest companies like CNN, NBA, Twitter, Facebook and many more. When you are working on your laptop or desktop, you have probably seen a small popup box appear in the corner of your screen with a message from a company you have a relationship with. Facebook has been doing this for some time with spectacular results. They are short, to the point messages with a call-to-action included. You receive almost 100% views, and your customers choose to receive these messages and are able to discontinue them at any time, providing them full control. This tech is now affordable and available for anyone and can be implemented with three simple steps:
SMS/Text Messages
Text messaging has been around for some time and most are already using this for communication so the experience is easy to use. The challenge in using this as a business tool has been how to manage the process in a way that meets governmental guidelines and keeps the recipient in full control of the experience. The ability to request or sign-up for text messages at scale is now available, and the back-side management, segmentation and delivery options are equal in ease to your email service you are already using. By connecting SMS services like Twilio, CallFire and others with cloud-based management services, you are now able to offer Text Message communication to your customers efficiently and productively. In addition, you can enjoy integration with your email service, analytics, keyword campaigns as well as an easy “subscribe” process for your customers.
You can have access to the features we expect in Email Autoresponders BUT for SMS:
[+] Unlimited Subscribers: Create unlimited contact lists & add as many subscribers as you like.
[+] List Management: Easily segment your subscribers into different targeted lists.
[+] Automated Subscribe/Unsubscribe: Be 100% compliant without having to do any of the work yourself, automatically adding STOP and HELP messages where required.
[+] Keyword Shortcodes: Allow people to text a specific message to a shortcode number in order to subscribe and receive a coupon code, hyperlink, or message.
[+] Timezone Detection: Text Deliver will automatically detect the subscribers location and avoid texting between the hours of 9pm and 8am so your messages get through for maximum benefit.
[+] One-Click Broadcasts: Send out one-off SMS blasts to one or multiple lists.
[+] Message Sequences: Send out automated SMS sequence, just like a regular autoresponder so that your subscribers receive timed messages.
[+] Inbox Management: Manage your text message conversations with subscribers similar to an email inbox, sending to their phone and receiving messages in the easy to use admin area.
By adding both Browser/Push Notifications and SMS/Text options for your customers to choose from, you will be providing them the ability to connect with you in the ways that are preferred and productive and at the same time achieve dramatically higher open rates and actions.
I am in the final stages of integrating both of these choices into Fill the Funnel. Today you can request my weekly email Web Tools Update. You will notice a popup box at the top of the site which gives you the option to receive Browser/Push Notifications. By the end of the week you will also be given the choice to receive SMS/Text messages from me.
Here is how I intend to implement them for visitors to this site.
I will share tools with you beginning tomorrow that you can use to begin offering expanded choices to connect and communicate with your customers. Look for a post and if you are a subscriber of either the newsletter or Browser Notification you will receive more information tomorrow. I am very positive about these changes and am here to step you through the implementation for you and your business. Come along for the ride.