How to Integrate Messaging into Your Customer Retention Strategy
Today’s customers have an abundance of choice.
What sets you apart though is effective customer communication.
Text messaging is a quick and convenient way to have informal one-to-one dialogue with your customers. It’s cost-effective, to-the-point, and time-sensitive. These traits make it the perfect channel when implementing customer retention strategies.
Statflo’s Customer Success Manager Sam Wagar highlights the steps to developing an effective text messaging campaign and talks about how you can drive maximum ROI from your outreach efforts.
Short on time? Take a look at these fundamental steps she highlighted
Identify communication touchpoints along the customer journey
Reverse-engineering how your customers’ shop is the first step to understanding the value of each interaction. Depending on the nature of your business, you will have a varying number of touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Interacting with the customers at these crucial decision-making moments can influence their decision.
When customer outreach campaigns are not anchored in solid data like purchase history, there is a noticeable gap between what the customers expect from business communication and what brands deliver. Analyzing customer data and identifying patterns is a great starting point for devising your customer retention messaging campaign and personalizing your interactions.
Select suitable conversation starters
First impressions do matter. One wrong message from you at the beginning of the conversation is enough to make the customer wary of engaging with your brand. An ideal conversation starter should be friendly, casual, informative, and personalized. It should not bombard the customer with heavy promotions. The goal here is to check-in and just start a conversation with your customer.
Enable your team with the right tools
Choosing a flexible and easy-to-use tool that integrates with your existing workflows and customer experience stack is critical for your customer retention text messaging campaign. The right tool ensures that the messaging can be catered to the campaigns you are running and the customer lists that your team is working on. This ensures that the message changes based on who you are reaching out to.
The ideal messaging software should be able to provide your frontline team with insightful customer data that is relevant to their outreach. Additionally, the tool must also give you and your team complete visibility into the outreach activity so that you get a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.
Lastly, make sure that the text messaging tool ticks all the boxes when it comes to compliance regulations to avoid privacy and security breaches as well as any brand violations like tone of voice or approved language.
Coach your frontline team
Your customer-facing employees need to go beyond transactional interactions when conversing with your customers. They need to be coached on the art of making genuine conversations, so they know how to make the customer feel comfortable and respected. At Statflo, we recommend including the following steps in your frontline training programs while coaching them on customer conversations-
Introduce yourself: Be informal but state your name and where you work
Build rapport: Remind them who you are and how you got their contact info
Check-in: Ask how they’re doing
Inform: Clearly communicate the reason for contact
Invite to retail location: Try to make the customer come visit your team
Handle objections: Equip your customer-facing teams with common objection handlers
Log activity: Use your system of record for any outreach activity
Audit your text message outreach campaigns
When you are employing text messaging outreach for customer retention, it is imperative to hold your staff accountable to performance KPIs. To do that, a regular auditing and reporting exercise is crucial.
At Statflo, we look at messaging performance metrics based on –
Attempt rate: Are you reaching out to everyone who is on your list?
Response rate: Are your customers getting back to you? If yes, what’s going right, and if no, what’s going wrong?
Conversion rate: How many sales have happened within a specific period of time
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