Every successful growing business must retain standing customers and engage new ones. You want to engage new customers and send them a great offer, but still don’t know how to do it? This can be easily done by using one of the most famous marketing funnels – Sales funnel. By focusing on the different structural levels of the marketing funnel, you can attract new customers, and therefore subscribers to your text list, as well as lead to new purchases from regular customers.
I bet you’re already curious to know more! Especially for you, we will share secret tips, further in the article.
So What’s a Marketing Funnel System?
A marketing funnel is an analytical tool which allows you to understand how your potential customer comes to a decision to buy your goods or services, what motives they are guided by making this purchase. By understanding all of these buying steps, you can control customer behavior by gently stimulating their interest and encouraging them to buy.
There are some stages of work with the client and each stage indicates the level of familiarity of the client with your brand.
Now you have keen awareness about how marketing funnel works in general, let’s learn in detail about each stage of the funnel.
Milestones of a funnel
As you interact with people at each stage of the funnel, you will pursue the goal of taking the client to the next stage of the funnel. Your main goal is to determine the approach to the client that will convince him in the best way, to acquire and remain your regular client.
Each stage of interaction with a client has different rules of communication: persuasion with phrases, periodicity of professional engagement, questions you ask, tone, and much more. Of course, integrating your SMS Marketing campaigns to the funnel can give better results
1. Onboarding
This is the very first stage at which a client learns about your product or services you provide, gets to know your brand.
In the modern world, especially during a pandemic, the first stage does not take place as before, in a store or in your office, but remotely using digital tools, using a mobile phone or laptop. Therefore, using an SMS marketing campaign for communication with a client is a simple and ingenious solution, because the first thing that a client will see when he picks up a phone to view notifications or news is your message. And if it contains a personalized offer or a secret promotion, then you will win the jackpot.
Be sure to add a link to your product or contacts so that the client can learn more about what you have to offer.
Before the first step, which is to send a text, check the functionality of your pages that the client will see by clicking on the link. It is important that all prices, product availability and other data are up to date, because this builds your brand reputation in the eyes of the customer.
To keep customers up to date with the latest news and data about your brand, publish discounts, sales, promotional codes and updates on your social networks (for example: Instagram, where many stores publish special promotional codes, sales, new items, etc.), update your website and check the functionality so that all buttons and links work properly. Entice your audience so that they don’t forget about you, but also don’t spam, so that they don’t unsubscribe from you, your news should be interesting, given relevant to the targeted audience. You can hire a targetologist or content maker if you are a newbie in it, so professionals will target the audience and prepare content carefully.
As soon as your actual data is updated on social networks and on the official website, you will get ready to start collecting customer contact information in order to carry out your first SMS campaign.
By giving you their phone number, the client shows you a high level of trust. Therefore, it is very important to treat them with respect: do not spam, do not give out his phone to third parties, and much more good practices that we have already discussed in other blog posts.
We collected some secret tips that will help you to create your first effective SMS Message.
- Treatment. Find out the problem the client is facing and show that your product or service will easily solve this problem. For example: the delivery is too expensive for the client – send an SMS to notify that only for him today the delivery is free; for someone goods are too expensive – offer a personal discount by sending a coupon or promo code. Use an individual approach and make each of your clients feel special – after all, we all want to get impressions and emotions, and not just goods or services.
- Content. Use only effective, attention-grabbing texts that will set you apart from the crowd. Use some eye-catching phrases from famous blogs or brands, rephrase and create something unique but good working.
2. Overview
At this stage, the client, being already subscribed to your SMS campaign, will receive lucrative offers and updates from your company.
It is very important to provide the client with the opportunity for feedback in order to collect from your clients as much data as possible, it will assist you during making targeted bulk SMS campaigns.
Using information about the age, gender, occupation or location of the client, you can most effectively notify clients about what they are interested in. It will bring you a return of investments on your SMS marketing campaign and a growth of your client base. Also, a good reputation for your brand will allow you to get customers who have heard about you through word of mouth from friends or family.
We have collected the most effective tricks that will help you to set up an effective SMS campaign:
- Particularities. When you are segmenting your audience, take to consideration not only the customers, but also the product or service that you offer. It is important to highlight the criteria by which you will conduct effective segmentation. Segmentation can be done geographically or demographically. Segmentation by category of product or service that you provide is very effective too. Segmentation of the customer base allows you to define unique approaches to each group of customers so that each of them feels that your proposal is addressed to them personally.
- Automatize. Bulk SMS automation allows you to send messages automatically according to a previously set schedule. All you need is to write the text for the SMS, download the list of recipients and set the sending date in the SMS platfrom scheduler. Automation allows you to save your time and at the same time give enough attention to your subscribers. You can set up an SMS campaign so that messages will be sent at regular intervals, at a specific time, for example: to greet a new subscriber or send a reminder to buy a gift from you before the holiday, etc.
3. Splurge
This is the last stage of the funnel at which the customer makes a purchase decision. Participants in this stage can be both recently purchased customers and those who have bought a long time ago. By sending a short message that feedback about the service or the purchased product is important to you, and also what kind of feedback you will be happy to provide a bonus or gift from the company. This will show that the business respects the client and customer will come back to you and repeat the purchase. Reward the client for everything that will help you become better (feedback on the service, product, feedback on the experience of working with you, etc.).
Some more tricks that will help you to engage effectively with SMS Campaigns:
- Use Pacing Technologies. When we are calling the support departments of any company we are made to wait in line for minutes, which is annoying for everyone and doesn’t make you feel special at all. SMS services come to help! Organize a dedicated support line which will receive SMS complaints and send replies to clients in seconds. Receiving an SMS reply makes everyone feel special, because messaging is more personal.
- Make it easy. Always after a purchase, we have emotions and this can be either gratitude for the excellent service and the joy of the purchased goods, or irritation, by some factor.
To prevent negative reviews from affecting your reputation, find out about the customer’s feedback via SMS message even before he posts it in public sources and correct the negative impression of the buyer. When you see that at some stage of the purchase, the client has encountered a problem that you could not solve earlier, you can improve the service and fix this problem for the future, and this client can be offered a gift or bonus that will increase loyalty to your brand.
Sales funnel and content marketing
Many resources call the stages of the funnel differently, but basically all models follow the same path: attention-> interest->desire->action. All stages are aimed at satisfying the client’s need and leading him to a purchase.
The performance of Sales Funnel
To find out the effectiveness of the sales funnel method, you need to analyze the indicators and see if there is a positive tendency. To do this, you need to analyze the following:
-Convertibility rate of marketing funnel
-Points of entry
-Time in a specific stage
-Engagement rate
-Return of Investment
-Click Rate
It’s never been easier to measure the effectiveness of an SMS marketing campaign!
There are a lot of ways consumers choose to communicate online during the pandemic. When choosing their communication channel of choice, survey respondents ranked receiving messages that are “quick to read, with just the facts” as their top priority, which could lead consumers to navigate away from communication methods that lend themselves to lengthier messages in the future. That’s why it’s smart for brands to diversify their communication channels by incorporating SMS marketing. Also, text messaging allows you to send SMS worldwide without any tech complications.
At Sixfive, we know how important it is to set up an effective SMS marketing campaign and get success from day one. Get started with experienced professionals in the bulk SMS business and watch how your brand’s success starts growing!
