What Is a Text Club for Businesses?

Have you ever given your phone number to a business in exchange for discounts or coupons? If so, then you’re part of the 77% of consumers who have opted in to a brand’s text messages to receive coupons or deals.

It would also technically make you a member of a text club. This might come as a surprise to you because perhaps the business you text with has branded their program as something different. But whether it’s called a rewards program, loyalty club, or VIP program, if you’ve consented to receive texts from an organization, you’re a part of what industry experts ultimately brand as a text club.

What Is a Text Club?

As you’ve probably started to gather from the introduction, a text club is a group of contacts that an organization exchanges promotional or transactional messages with. Every member of the text club receives the same messages and promotions from the business thanks to a text marketing practice known as “mass texting.” But as a contact, the messages simply appear in your inbox as an individual.

How Do Text Clubs Work?

Text clubs work a little differently for each business. How it’s structured ultimately depends on your goals: increase sales, build customer loyalty, spread brand awareness, etc. However, the first step for every text club always begins with a text marketing provider (like us 😊).

Also known as providers, organizations like SimpleTexting text-enable your business so you can send and manage mass texts on behalf of your organization. We do this by either text-enabling your existing 10-digit number, providing you with a new local number or toll-free number (and helping you register or verify it, respectively), or helping you provision a short code (like 711711) that’s unique to your business.

Once your organization is text-enabled, you can start up a text club in a few different ways:

• Create a keyword that, when texted in to your phone number, subscribes someone to your club messages. From there you would advertise your keyword anywhere your brand can be found. For example: Text “HyggeCares to 833-807-8110 to receive bi-monthly deals and discounts on all of our merchandise!”
• Set up a web form that you can insert onto your website and pin to the top of social media pages. When users into their information into the form, they agree to join your text club.

💡SimpleTexting Tip: In order to see the most success with advertising your text club, combine one or more of these strategies!

Then comes the fun part. Once you begin collecting contacts you can use your text club as a creative space to engage your customers. Text out offers, coupons, flash sales, Text to Vote Surveys…the sky’s the limit!

Because texting is a two-way communication platform, your text club members can also reply back to all of your messages.

What Are Text Clubs For?

Different organizations decide to start up text clubs for a variety of reasons. Some we’ve already touched on:

• Increase sales
• Build customer loyalty
• Engage with active brand promoters and harness their influence as ambassadors
• Send appointment, scheduling, service, or billing reminders
• Sharing information like helpful tips, hours, specials, etc.

How you decide to use your text club is entirely up to you. What’s important is that whatever you decide, you stick to. For example, if you sign people up for the club with the promise of a monthly coupon, you don’t want to all of a sudden start texting out advice and fun facts.

Additionally, it’s important that you stay true to the promised frequency of messages. Continuing with our previous example, you don’t want to start sending out weekly coupons if your contacts agreed to monthly.

At their core, text clubs are for building stronger customer-enterprise relationships. So remaining contentious of the kinds of things that strengthen (and weaken) that relationship is important for anyone interested in starting an SMS club.

What Are Some Examples of Successful Text Clubs?

There are thousands of organizations across the country that are running prosperous text clubs. We’ve been lucky enough to interview a few of them. If you’re interested, read about their success:

• Delta Sonic Speeds Up Slower Seasons With Their Text Club: With a text marketing club nearly two years old, Delta Sonic communicates with thousands of their customers each week to promote deals and share important updates.
• Barnyard Dollar Store Keeps Customers Coming Back with Exclusive Texts: You probably wouldn’t expect to find locally made soaps and spices at a dollar store. Well, things are a little different at Barnyard Dollar Store and More. Find out why.
• How B-Unlimited Uses Texts to Increase Merchandise Sales: Since 1994, B-Unlimited has been printing high-quality, custom apparel. Find out how text marketing empowered their team to increase sales and deliver a better customer experience.

Benefits of Text Clubs For Businesses

One of the best things about text clubs is how straightforward they are. When it comes to developing marketing solutions, it’s easy to start to get lost in the details. But with text clubs, it’s like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” But instead, think “If You Give a Millennial a Discount.”

The psychology behind them is simple:

Action = give company X my cell phone number

Reward = receive customized benefits

And thankfully, we live in a time where people are willing to share their personal information, especially with a reward on the table. 62% of American consumers believe that sharing data and personal information online is part of the modern economy.

And as for the organizations who are already running text clubs, the ROI speaks for itself: 97% of companies found they communicated with consumers more efficiently after launching texting initiatives. 91% of users who opted in to receive texts from a brand see those messages as “somewhat” or “very useful.”

By instituting a text club for your business, you can benefit from things like:

• Increases in revenue
• New leads
• Stronger customer support
• Boosts in reviews and ratings
• Better rates of return

What Kinds of Businesses Benefit Most From Text Clubs?

At SimpleTexting, we have clients across a wide variety of industries: real estate, education, religion, entertainment, hospitality, fitness, e-commerce, retail, medical, and more. The text clubs vary slightly depending on the industry, but there are some common threads that trend toward a program’s success.

There are a few qualities a business can possess that prime them to succeed with SMS. Businesses with one or more of these qualities tend to benefit the most from text clubs:

1. Goods and services that are commonly re-stocked, sold out and changed (whether it’s the price or the items themselves)
2. Has a targeted geographic demographic of customers (for primarily brick-and-mortar businesses)
3. Businesses that experience “busy seasons” or bursts of activity
4. Receives a lot of FAQs
5. Primarily educates an audience on something they’re knowledgable on
6. Has a sales team that stays in contact with leads throughout the sales journey

If you don’t closely identify with any of the qualities above, that does NOT mean that text clubs aren’t right for you. In fact, it could mean that bringing it into your marketing mix will help you stand out among your competition!

The success of a text club is directly correlated to how much effort a business is willing to put into it. So the more motivated you are to build a relationship with your customer base, the better chance you have of taking off with your text club!