-
How subscription-based businesses can use SMS to improve customer engagement and ensure recurring revenue
This post was contributed by Fusebill. Fusebill is a software platform that simplifies subscription billing management by automating manual accounting, financial processes, and workflows.
If you’re looking for the best way to communicate with your subscription customers, it’s hard to go wrong with SMS, or text messaging.
Around 95 percent of people own mobile phones, with texting being the most used function, so you’re certainly connecting with customers in a way they’re used to. Additionally, 9 out of 10 consumers say they actually prefer communicating with businesses by text, with many labeling it an unobtrusive, fast, and convenient means of communication.
It’s no wonder SMS has become such a popular marketing tool—one frequently used to share special business offers and discounts with customers, promote surveys, and offer customer support.
As it turns out, SMS is also an effective tool for finance teams—especially those working within a B2C subscription …
-
A Picasso, a freight train, and how to make your business’s alerts and notifications stick out from the noise
Art and function. Experience and utility. A Picasso painting and a freight train. Individually, each serves a purpose. One for enjoyment, one for functionality.
In customer engagement, you need both: utility to make your campaign useful to your customer, and a delightful experience to make it enjoyable.
But you can’t just stick a Picasso painting in a freight train and call it a day.
Connecting utility and experience to enhance the customer journey requires thinking differently about how to make these two concepts actually work together.
Alerts and notification messages are one powerful way to marry these two concepts to improve consumer trust, but first you must break through the noise—a growing challenge in today's digital world.
And while it might seem simple, elementary even, to just send a mass message about a change in store hours or push out a generic delivery notification, in doing so, you miss a …
-
Make your text marketing campaign count: How to choose the right service provider for your comms strategy
A record-breaking hurricane, an ongoing international pandemic, and an upcoming presidential election.
What might sound like the beginning of a bad joke is just another day in the life of a consumer in 2020. And as uncertainty continues, building consumer trust is critical for brands to maintain their customer base this year and beyond.
With 62 percent of customers expecting their brand preferences to change permanently before the pandemic subsides, the numbers speak for themselves. Businesses that want their customers to stick around need to connect with them on a more meaningful level than in the past. And for many of those brands, text marketing is the key to establishing two-way conversations and increasing consumer trust long term.
If you’re considering using SMS to engage with your customers, but stuck choosing a service provider, the factors below are a good place to start. Then, use our business value calculator …
-
How to build a contact tracing text messaging strategy for COVID-19
Messaging channels like SMS play a pivotal role in contact tracing as tracers inform potentially affected individuals and monitor the spread of COVID-19.
Tracers often call highly exposed contacts, but symptom tracking and notifications for those with lower exposure can be automated, saving valuable time and resources.
To effectively use messaging channels like SMS for contact tracing, it’s important to understand the task that you’re performing, compliance regulations in your region, and your options for the actual number sending the text message itself.
Let’s take a look at how you can build a framework to deliver critical messages to citizens at scale.
Common contact tracing tasks
Typically, there are two types of people tracers need to contact: patients who’ve tested positive for COVID-19, and exposed contacts identified by patients.
To communicate effectively, it’s important to consider how to deliver messages that prove legitimacy and build trust. Unfortunately, bad actors are …
-
SMS & HIPAA: How to handle texting at a medical practice
If you are a physician or manage a medical practice, sending SMS messages to patients carries a lot of upside. These forms of communication can minimize no-show appointments, improve interactions between provider and patients, and even provide more effective care/dosage instructions—all while saving your practice resources.
But healthcare SMS and text messaging is far from a turnkey process. Because the information contained in these messages could be considered protected health information (PHI), sending SMS messages needs to comply with the strict requirements outlined in HIPAA. In the event of a breach, PHI could be exposed, and your practice could face penalties and fines. Breaches can also damage patient trust in the practice or physician.
Let’s examine the potential benefits of adding SMS to your medical practice communications, how to do so in a manner that supports HIPAA compliance, and key considerations when choosing a HIPAA-eligible SMS provider.
How …
-
What conversational messaging means for business
Today, the four largest messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, have more active users than the four largest social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn –– 4.1 billion versus 3.4 billion.
It’s a sign of the times. A decade ago, the rise of social media pushed communications into the public sphere, incentivizing businesses to broadcast content to their followers. Now, consumers prefer secure, 1-to-1 communication, or group channels.
Overwhelmed by as many as 63.5 notifications per day, they’re muting notifications from non-essential mobile apps providing a singular function or one-off transaction. Only 12 percent of consumers prefer a company’s mobile app for receiving communications from a business. These shifts in technology and preferences are driving consumers to seek out more secure, authentic communications.
A powerful opportunity to engage
For companies, this shift represents an opportunity to transform how they connect with customers through personalized, context-rich conversations. …
-
Powering customer engagement with trusted communications: 90-second insights from Lyft
Ridesharing giant Lyft didn’t get to where it is today, worth $15 billion and operating in hundreds of cities, by luck. The industry leader has, from the start, placed a huge emphasis on customer experience and engagement to garner trust from its riders and drivers alike.
But how, exactly, did they do that? Here are some key takeaways from Jaime Gilliam-Swartz, Lyft’s VP of Customer Experience and Trust Operations.
1. Use the right channel, with the right message, at the right time.
Sending a message that is timely or even urgent via email isn’t the best strategy. Nor is making riders reach out via some convoluted reporting system when they have an emergency, like leaving an important item in their driver’s vehicle. Ensure the messages you send are appropriate for the channel they’re being sent on and are reaching readers at the right time.
“We have used email primarily for …
-
How leading financial services companies like ING differentiate through communication
From managing an online checking account to communicating with a mortgage advisor, today’s mobile customers are used to receiving texts and other messages from the financial services companies with whom they do business.
Payment-due reminders, low balance alerts, and suspicious activity warning notifications are all essential bits of information that shouldn’t end up in an email inbox. Customers need — and want — to receive these messages in real-time and via SMS, in-app chats, push notifications, and popular services like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other over-the-top (OTT) messaging applications.
Outside of regulatory compliance, customer retention is the biggest challenge facing financial services firms. According to a CustomerThink study, retail banking customer acquisition costs hover around $200.
With the average customer generating about $150 in revenue each year, a financial business would need to retain that customer for more than a year and a half just to recoup those costs.
That’s …
-
Enterprises share their use case and best practices for elastic SIP trunking
For organizations hoping to save some money on their phone bill, SIP trunking is a natural place to look. Not only does it provide companies with a clear and consistent bill, but it also costs less than traditional phone services and provides a whole host of additional benefits, including:
- Reliability: Traditional phone services can be stymied by bad weather, downed lines, or human error, but SIP trunking is steadfast. Vendors offer mobile-failover for redundancy, meaning you can still make calls when one outlet is down.
- Scalability: SIP supports rapid growth across multiple geographic locations, and its fast scalability lets companies scale with flexibility as they explore new locations or bring on additional remote workers.
- Customization: With SIP, your employees can connect their mobile devices via flexible VoIP apps you can install safely and securely, letting them remain connected to your phone system no matter where they are, …
-
Email and text reign supreme: Research uncovers consumers’ frustrations when communicating with brands and reveals channel, frequency and customization preferences
Email and text: that’s how customers want brands and businesses to communicate with them, despite the massive explosion of new channels and social media platforms in recent years, according to a new Twilio study.
The study surveyed 2,500 consumers across a variety of backgrounds, all over the world, to better understand how, when, and where consumers want to be reached, and how the content and urgency of those messages influence their preferred medium.
Download the full report here.
Survey respondents vastly preferred email as the main mode of communication between them and a business—83% said so, in fact—but texts are more than twice as popular as email when receiving urgent communications from businesses.
As for homegrown corporate apps specific to your business? Only 12% of consumers prefer a company’s mobile app for receiving communications from that business. While 7 out of 10 consumers curate their home screens, less than …