3 Benefits of Using SMS Marketing to Reward Loyal Customers

If you don’t have loyal customers, you won’t have a business for very long.

That’s the simplest explanation we can give for why you need to have repeat customers.

If you are going to continue to have such customers, you need to offer them something of value beyond a high-quality product. They need to feel like they have a stake in your business, like they know you on some personal level, like they are able in some sense to play a part in your business’s success.

And that is why you need to care about rewarding your loyal customers.

In this post, we want to talk about the particular benefits of using SMS marketing to reward your most loyal customers.

They actually see your message.

If you’re going to offer rewards to loyal customers in order to build greater loyalty and generate more sales, you obviously need the customer to know about the reward offer, right?

The problem is most communication mediums actually aren’t very good at guaranteeing that the message you’re sending gets to the recipient. Email open rates hover between 18 and 23% for most industries. Direct mail is expensive and cannot be easily tracked—but much of it seems to end up going straight into the recycling bin. Facebook posts reach between 1 and 3% of a page’s followers. By this standard, a communication channel that actually reached 30% of the intended audience would be a smashing success.

Well, texting reaches as much as 98% of the intended audience.

By the simplest standard imaginable—does my recipient actually see my message?—texting is a clear and obvious winner.

You develop a more direct line to your customers.

Unsurprisingly, communication channels that are more effective in general are also going to be better on a person-to-person basis. Texting will help you reach the vast majority of your list. But it will also make it easier for you to develop a better understanding of individual customers. Unlike other marketing channels, such as direct male or social media posting or advertising, which rely on broadcasting a message to a somewhat unknown audience, you know exactly who you’re reaching with every text message.

What this means is that you can get highly customizable in how you approach text-based marketing. You can even use texting as a way to have conversations with your prospects.

Here are a few basic examples of how you can do that.

First, if you have an order that has arrived for a specific customer, you can use texting to let them know that the order has arrived.

Second, if you carry a certain item that a specific customer regularly comes in to buy, you could use texting to let them know when that item arrives in the store.

Third, one specific way to build loyalty is to help the customer feel as if they have a stake in your business. So one possible opportunity to do that would be asking their input when you’re considering a new idea—whether that’s an in-store event, a new product, or any other major change to your business. You’ll want to be careful doing this because you don’t want a customer to feel disrespected or ignored if you don’t follow their advice. But if you position it the right way, you can easily solicit feedback from customers on a more personal basis via texting and build a strong relationship with them in the process.

You can easily offer special deals.

Finally, if you have your loyal customers in an SMS list instead of an email list (or no list at all…), it becomes that much easier to alert them to special deals that you are offering in your store.

For example, if you run a small grocery store, bodega, or something similar, you might send out an alert to customers ahead of a Memorial Day weekend sale. This has all the inherent marketing benefits of an email letting people know about such a sale (or direct mail) but in this case you can be far more confident of people actually seeing the alert and it will be easier to track how relatively effective the sale was.

Conclusion

If you want to get started using text messages to reach your most loyal customers, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial of our SMS marketing software today. It takes about 30 seconds and there is no credit card required at sign up. Thanks for reading!