5 keys to increasing customer loyalty with mobile messaging

Mobile messaging is one of many powerful channels that can be employed to nurture your customer relationships. It isn’t for every interaction or use case, but by understanding the best ways to use mobile messaging, you can drastically improve customer loyalty, save time and money, and work more efficiently. Not bad, right? Here are five tips to get started.

When communicating through SMS text messages, MMS messages, or messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp Business, think about how your customers prefer to use these channels. For the most part, people reserve these platforms for short, personal conversations, so avoid using marketing language or an impersonal tone.

Keep things conversational and write as if you were actually speaking to or texting a friend. Anything that comes through in mobile messaging channels that doesn’t hit that mark may be seen as an invasion into someone’s space — the equivalent of a spam call, which is the opposite of what you want.

Depending upon where you are in the world, for ongoing communications, you likely need an opt-in. And if your customers opt-in to receive mobile communications, you don’t want them questioning that decision (or opting out). There are many ways to use mobile messaging throughout the customer lifecycle, and by being strategic in choosing the right ones, you can really enhance the experience.

This could mean sending updates on orders and deliveries for retail consumers. It could mean sending exclusive offers for new products or sales to existing customers, based on previous purchases or activity. It could mean offering tips and insights for using a service or making the most of a new account. It could even mean just messaging to tell people to check out what’s new.

Whatever you land on, be clear this is a two-way channel. Customers should be able to reply and keep the conversation going — and if they do reply, make sure they get a quick response. You can accomplish this by ensuring that someone from your team is always on hand to answer any messages coming back in, or you can use other tools to keep things even more seamless.

By integrating chatbots that use advanced conversational AI, replies can be instantaneous (and the majority of customer questions and concerns are often resolved this way). This will also save you time and money by letting you allocate staff resources to other tasks. Plus, these chatbots can hand customers off to an agent when things go beyond their scope, so no customer gets lost in the system. Another option is to work with Rich Communication Services (RCS), a complement to SMS that lets you go beyond 160 characters and incorporate multimedia components, buttons, and other elements that let users engage more robustly within the messaging channel.

With more personal channels and more personal language, you should also personalize your messages as much as possible. Anything you can do to make people feel like the messages were crafted specifically for them — and not just cut and pasted or blasted out — will go a long way. This can be as simple as using your customers’ names in your messages, or it can go much deeper, incorporating their purchase behavior, preferences, or any other information they’ve chosen to share.

Your communications are a chance to show your customers that you care, so the more you can make them feel like an individual as opposed to a number, the better you’ll do. Make sure that the messages people receive are as tailored as possible, including sending them at the right time. Think about the classic “Who,” “What,” “When,” and “How” questions here: Who, on an individual level, are you trying to reach? What benefit are you offering them? When is the ideal time for them to receive this information? And how do you want them to respond?

This may sound like a lot, but the good news is that there are extremely easy ways to start integrating all this and more into your team’s workflow with very little heavy lifting or much of a learning curve. Sinch gives you everything you need to get set up in the optimal way for your organization. All of the coding, engineering, and AI technology is delivered with flexible APIs that enable you to simply plug and play to get things running.

Of course, there’s still plenty more to learn about everything mobile messaging can do for you and your team — and fortunately, we’ve developed a free guide for that. Interested in going further? Download the full Actionable Guide to Increasing Customer Loyalty now to continue your journey into a higher level of customer satisfaction.