Whether you're considering integrating an SMS API into your platform or want to text-enable your sales or customer support team, this article will provide you with some options and ideas to get started.
If you want your message heard, you need to use the preferred communication channels of your audience.
Despite the explosion of new channels, text messaging remains a customer favorite. One study even found that 9 out of 10 consumers want to use messaging to communicate with brands. And for urgent communications, texts are twice as popular as email.
Despite the widespread popularity of SMS, only 7% of businesses use texts to communicate with customers. This is a huge mistake–but also an incredible opportunity for your SaaS business.
Whether you want to add SMS functionality to your application, start SMS marketing, or use SMS for customer service or sales, this article will provide you with some options and ideas to get started. We cover:
Let’s look at two of the core benefits of enabling your team or SaaS platform to send and receive texts.
Cloud-based SMS services are fond of trumpeting the fact that the open rate of texts is 98%. And can you blame us? In 2018, the average open rate for an email was 24.8%.
On top of this, people trust text messages. Spam rates on texts are comparatively low (2.8%), while spam rates on email are high (55%).
It explains why people want to receive texts for urgent communications. So, if you currently send password change notifications, downtime notifications, or conduct two-factor authentication by email, consider using SMS messages instead.
If you have a mobile app, you might be thinking, why don’t I use push notifications instead? However, only 12% of consumers prefer receiving business communications from a company’s mobile app.
What’s more, your user base may not have access to the internet, have opted out of push notifications, or haven’t even installed your app yet.
There are a ton of impressive statistics about the response rates of texts. 80% of people report that they check their text notifications within just five minutes of getting a text. This graphic sums up the differences between SMS and email nicely:
Beyond sky-high response rates, texting is a highly personal medium, which makes it effective at building trust and nurturing relationships.
You can offer your customers the option to text you for support issues or send texts to schedule demo calls, send meeting reminders, and ultimately convert more leads into paying users.
If you take a look at consumers’ preferred customer service channels–messaging is number one in the US by a considerable margin.
While texting is not as widespread in the B2B sales world–sales reps report only 0.7 SMS messages sent per cadence. However, when it comes to building your pipeline, “different” can be valuable.
With SimpleTexting, you can give people the option to text directly with your business’s existing landline, VoIP, or toll-free number. You’ll still be able to receive calls as usual. (You can also get a brand-new toll-free number to send SMS messages.)
SaaS providers see a lot of value from SMS, especially when it comes to transactional notifications.
Our REST text message API lets you easily interact with our SaaS SMS gateway from your application.
For example, you could build a flow where customers receive a personalized SMS when they haven’t paid a monthly bill. You’ll fetch information from your billing system, personalize the text with variables from your CRM, and then pass it through SimpleTexting to send the message.
Here are some examples of functionality you can add to your SaaS product:
If you want to learn more, you can read through our SMS API and REST API documentation here.
This article covers the basics of implementing an SMS ticketing software like SimpleTexting. (The process is the same for text-enabling your sales team.) The TL;DR read of it is as follows:
1. Sign up for a 14-day free trial–no credit card required–and take our SMS SaaS platform for a test ride.
2. Choose whether you want to use the complimentary toll-free number that comes with your SimpleTexting account or text-enable your existing number. You can also add numbers and assign them to different customer service agents, sales reps, or departments,i.e., you can assign separate numbers and logins for billing and tech support.
3. Advertise your new customer service or sales channel (we recommend adding Click-to-Text to your website).
4. Respond from your inbox or the mobile app using SimpleTexting’s user-friendly inbox. This video explains how it works.
If you have a highly structured sales process, you can even add automated SMS to your sales touchpoints using our API.
Customers love the shortness and immediacy of text. By incorporating SMS into your application or text-enabling your customer-facing teams, SMS can improve customer satisfaction–and grow your MRR.
Drew Wilkinson is the Head of Marketing at SimpleTexting. Drew has more than a decade of experience managing successful integrated marketing programs to build brands, raise awareness, and generate demand.
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