(Ad Feature) Text messaging, much like email and social media, is an effective way to engage with customers on a personal level. All sorts of businesses are now utilizing text messaging to reach out to customers, announce promotions, make sales, handle customer service, and so much more. With a Samsung Galaxy S8 on a carrier like T-Mobile with unlimited 4G data, text message campaigns are more affordable and easier to implement. Here are four ways that businesses can connect with customer via text messaging.

Actionable, Immediate, and Relevant

Image via Flickr by NEC Corporation of America

What are the best reasons for engaging with customers via text? The fact that text messages are actionable, immediate, and relevant make them useful in many situations. It is important to realize that not every smartphone owner has push notification set up for emails. This means that the phone only dings or vibrates when it gets a call or text message. Basically, a text message is bound to get read first.

The immediacy of a text allows you to send actionable messages that are relevant. On the other hand, the same message sent via email might be irrelevant by the time the customer reads it. Having a flash sale for an online product? By the time the customer sees the email, it might have expired. But with text messaging, the customer will have seen that promotion immediately, clicked on the link, and made the purchase before the deal expired.

Respecting Your Customers

You need to set realistic and respectful parameters before implementing a text messaging campaign. First of all, you don’t want to set goals for text messaging campaigns that you won’t have the time to fully implement. For instance, you don’t want to promise your customers that they will be receiving a free credit or discount code every week if they are subscribed to the text campaign. Just make sure the logistics are worked out before you make any rash promises.

Also, you don’t want to send your customers daily text message or they will get annoyed and unsubscribe. Your sales will suffer if the customers don’t trust your brand simply because they are annoyed by incessant text messaging. Texts once a month or every two weeks are more realistic. This also gives you the flexibility to throw in some special, randomly scheduled texts to announce promotions (as in the previously mentioned flash sale scenario).

Do It All From Your Phone

Your text messaging campaigns will also be more successful if you coordinate them from your phone. You can use basic apps that schedule the text messages: when they are sent out, who they are sent to, and who responds. When you send text messages from smartphone to smartphone, you engage in a more intimate conversation. You can also get a better idea of how the text messages will actually appear on the customer’s phone.

If your text messaging campaigns are managed and implemented by a desktop computer-based program, you could run into problems. Most significantly, you might have issues responding, retracting, and troubleshooting if something with the campaigns goes awry. When you are running your campaign with an app on your smartphone, you can instantly respond and make changes to any situation.

Spellcheck . . . and Double Check Your Spellcheck

Nothing will frustrate customers more than a text message that is poorly written, riddled with grammatical errors, and/or confusingly formatted. A text message needs to be ultra-concise, easy to understand, and straight to the point. This is why it is so important to test your campaign before sending it out to your customers’ phones. You want to be sure that everything is spelled right, and it looks good. But, most importantly, you need to be certain that if you provide a link, it works! Specifically, it must work on a smartphone. Once again, this is why it is a good idea to run your campaigns from your own smartphone.

If you are strategic with your campaigns and respectful to your potential customers, you can implement successful campaigns. Test out a text messaging campaign and see if it boosts sales. If it doesn’t and you seem to lose followers, abandon it, and try a new approach.