Here's How To Use Two-Way SMS For Your Business

Consumers want to engage with their favorite businesses via text. But one-way SMS messaging just doesn’t meet most customers’ needs. Customers could be replying to your marketing texts, and you wouldn’t even know it. Many of those customers might believe that you’re ignoring them on purpose or get the impression that you don’t really care about your customers because you’re not engaging with their responses – when in fact you didn’t even know there were any responses to engage with.

Using two-way SMS marketing for your business is much the same as using one-way SMS marketing – except it opens the door to engage more deeply with your customers by making them feel heard. Two-way texting helps customers feel like they’re engaging with a human being on your end and gives you the opportunity to generate conversions more efficiently, without sending customers away to another sign-up page. Texting is one of the top ways people use their phones – harness the power of this modern communication method with two-way SMS messaging.

Send Delivery & Order Notifications

Customers appreciate receiving order confirmations that let them know your company has received their order and give them the opportunity to engage further with customer service regarding their orders. Two-way text messaging for order and delivery questions will free up your phone lines and give your employees more time to spend on the kinds of tasks that require a human being at the helm. You can use 2-way SMS messaging to send delivery notifications, too, so customers won’t always be calling up asking where their packages are – and so they can have their delivery preferences catered to.

Send Reminders & Receive Confirmations

Two-way text messaging is excellent for reminding customers about upcoming appointments and performing appointment confirmation, cancellation, and rescheduling functions. There’s no need to tie up a real live person’s time with appointment confirmation, cancellation, and rescheduling texts. Two-way text messaging allows customers to reply to a confirmation text to confirm an appointment, cancel it, and even reschedule it without the need to place a voice call or talk to one of your actual employees.

Improve Customer Support

Two-way SMS is a great tool for handling simple customer support inquiries. Of course, a support request that begins with text messaging may end with a call to or from a live agent, depending on the customer’s needs in that instance. But two-way SMS can provide a channel for customers to ask their support questions and resolve their complaints, possibly without speaking to a live person at all – a real win for many Millennials and Zoomers. If support from a live person is needed, two-way SMS can make the transition from texting with an autoresponder to communicating with a live person seamless – customers can feel that they’ve been communicating with a human throughout the interaction, even if they haven’t been.

Boost Sales Engagement

Two-way texting is an efficient means of boosting conversions by keeping customers on the hook throughout the buying process. Customers are more likely to close on a sale if they don’t have to do a lot of running around to find the answers they need and complete the transaction. If you can address their concerns, answer their questions, and close the deal in the same text conversation, you’ll have a much higher conversion rate. Two-way SMS messaging allows for helpful and ongoing customer service support during the purchasing process. 

Communicate with Employees

You aren’t limited to just communicating with your customers via two-way text messaging. It’s also a powerful medium for communicating with employees, too. Imagine you need to send out a company-wide emergency alert, for example. A two-way messaging service allows you to get that message out to all who need to hear it, and it allows for recipients to ask questions or get additional information.

You can use two-way SMS internally to onboard new hires, reach all of your employees with time-sensitive information, and distribute confidential information to employees who need it. You can even use two-way SMS messaging as an effective communication channel between supervisors and their direct reports, to give employees access to HR, and to collect employee feedback.

Two-way SMS messaging is a powerful tool that can help your business grow its customer base and offer better services and support to both customers and employees. Don’t leave your customers and employees hanging when it comes to text communication. Make sure they’re getting the responses they crave – use a two-way SMS solution.