Today’s restaurants and retailers face several challenges when it comes to engaging customers and driving traffic, particularly in the context of an increasingly digital and competitive business landscape. As a result, automated text marketing has become one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools to help restaurants, retailers, and other businesses reach their customers in a personal, timely, and efficient way. One of the most significant benefits of an automated text marketing strategy is setting up a campaign and then moving on to other tasks. Once you have a powerful automated campaign in place, you can set it and forget it.
As an industry-leading customer loyalty and text marketing software, textLIVING offers an easy way for merchants to implement automated text marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ll highlight the opportunity that automated text marketing offers to businesses in many industries. We’ll also highlight a few campaign ideas your merchants can implement through the textLIVING platform.
The Untapped Potential of Automated Text Marketing
When it comes to direct marketing, there isn’t a channel more connected to the customer than text marketing. According to recent studies:
- 91% of consumers are interested in receiving texts from businesses. (Source)
- Almost 60% of consumers think texting is the best way for brands to communicate with them. (Source)
- 90% of customers have gained value from SMS loyalty programs. (Source)
- SMS marketing lists have 10x value over email marketing lists. (Source)
- Fewer than 5% of SMS subscribers ever unsubscribe, while 20% of email subscribers leave each year. (Source)
Despite its proven effectiveness, automated text marketing is still an under-utilized tool for many businesses. Most businesses use text marketing for loyalty program updates or in-store specials. However, they often miss the opportunity to engage their customers in personal and relevant ways based on their engagement, visit history, and activity. This is evident when you consider facts like:
- 54% of consumers would like to receive promotions via SMS, but only 11% of businesses send them this way. (Source)
- 59% of consumers prefer receiving direct communications from companies rather than downloading a separate app on their phones. (Source)
5 Effective Automated Text Marketing Campaign Ideas
Here are some of the most effective automated text marketing campaigns based on different customer engagement scenarios:
- Welcome / Onboarding Campaign – When a customer signs up for your text marketing program or makes their first purchase, merchants can send a warm welcome message and thank them for choosing your business. This campaign sets a positive tone from the beginning and encourages customers to return. It’s also a great opportunity to drive customers to your social media channels to increase engagement on those platforms.
- Anniversary Offers — Celebrating the anniversary of a customer signing up or making their first purchase is an excellent way for merchants to build relationships. Businesses can send a personalized text with an exclusive anniversary discount or reward, which makes their customers feel valued and may rekindle their interest.
- Birthday Surprises — People love being celebrated. Automated texts with birthday wishes and exclusive birthday offers make recipients feel special and motivated to celebrate at the merchant’s store.
- Inactivity Offers — It is essential for merchants to engage customers who haven’t visited their business in a while. Sending automated texts after a specified period of inactivity (e.g., 20 days) can entice customers to return, especially if it is paired with a special offer.
- Online Review Requests — Your online reviews on Google are Yelp are a big difference maker. Why not leverage the power of automated text to increase your number of positive reviews? For example, after a customer visits your business twice, they likely return because they had a positive experience. After their second visit, you can set up an automated text campaign to ask them for an online review.
Help Businesses Unleash the Potential of Text Marketing as a White-Label Partner
At textLIVING, we’ve designed an intuitive customer loyalty and text marketing software that has helped more than 10,000 merchants increase engagement and generate meaningful revenue through text marketing. In 2021, we created a white-label version of our software so that entrepreneurs and sales professionals could sell our proven platform as their own to support the restaurants, retailers, and other small businesses in their area.
These valuable insights and resources are just a few of the assets we share with our white-label partners to help them sell their custom-branded text marketing software to merchants.
You can explore our customer loyalty and text marketing platform or learn more about our white-label partnership opportunities to discover how you build a business by helping other companies to unleash the potential of automated text marketing.