Now more than ever, brands need to rapidly shift, adapt and innovate in order to meet customers' everchanging requirements. However, the painful reality is that most adoptions go wrong. Research shows that 70 percent of transformation activities fail, due to reasons such as lack of service integration complexity and inadequate ROI reinforcement.
To help brands succeed, we are excited to release SMS Campaigns. With this release, we are empowering brands to concentrate on SMS communication activities through single service initiatives, which secures easy execution and removes the need for expensive integrations. With this release, we are also introducing customer Lists, automation Rules, and more.
What are SMS campaigns?
SMS stands for “short message service,” often referred to as “text messaging.” With SMS campaigns, you gain a simple to use yet very effective communication channel.
In more detail, SMS campaigns describe how brands send notifications, news, and updates with SMS. The overall goal is to notify customers of product updates, maintenance, or other special offers that can beneficial for the receiver. With SMS campaigns you are in full control which means that you ultimately decide when your messages are sent and what customer lists receive them.
Benefits of SMS campaigns
The average customer checks their phone 344 times per day "Research on consumer mobile usage") (that's once every 4 minutes!). In addition, customers can leave their emails unopen for several days, even calls are ignored by customers, but text messages are typically shown more attention and read more frequently. As a result, brands are now able to adopt the SMS channel for campaigns as it is more effective, where customers can be reached with personalized and targeted messages.
SMS campaigns provide the means to reach your customers in a way that emails or phone calls can't do. It is one type of activity that must be incorporated into your communication to build a strong relationship bond with your customer base. Essentially with an SMS campaign, you can grow customers to become your ambassadors.
Reasons why you should start with SMS campaigns:
SMS is for powerful notifications: While email marketing works to share content (often discarded by customers due to the received quantity), SMS campaigns contain short notification messages that your customers can quickly and easily get access to.
Possibility to build a near relationship with customers: Your customers spend most of their time with their phones at hand. It's how they reply to business messages, and engage with colleagues, friends, and family. With SMS, you can interact with them and build a close relationship regularly.
SMS outperforms other marketing channels: SMS campaigns have been proven to generate more open rates than other marketing channels. For instance, while the average email newsletter open rate is is
according to data from Hubspot, the average open rate of an SMS message is around
, with 97% of messages being read within
of delivery.
Implementation ease: With Layerise all in one service there are no implementation starting costs (for instance CRM implementation) for running SMS campaigns nor do you have to build and maintain costly email templates.
Targeted communications: SMS campaigns are built around relevant customer data, including product purchase history, demographics, language preferences, etc. With this type of customer information, you can deliver relevant offers written explicitly for each customer.
Tracking simplicity: You can easily manage and track the performance of your SMS campaigns. With insights into each step of the conversion process, starting with the initial point of delivery.
Marketing permissions: Layerise collects all customer marketing permissions to receive SMS campaigns. As a result, you can ensure that your message is delivered to people who would most likely read it.
When to use SMS campaigns
There are many occasions where SMS campaigns are fruitful and if you want a guaranteed positive result, you need to use it correctly and effectively. Here are some of the best SMS campaign use-cases you can incorporate.
Send how-to notification during initial product utilization: Many uncertainties can arise during product onboarding, from assembly to initial customer product experience. During this period it is useful to send the most important how-to guidelines to customers.
Build appointment reminders: With SMS campaigns, you can send appointment reminders to your customer base, so they don't forget to schedule their service appointment.
Notify about special benefits: If you have a special offer that you want to share with a special customer list, SMS campaigns are ideal for this kind of communication.
Increase commercial pipeline: With SMS campaigns, you can send your customers opportunities to buy products, accessories, or services on your own or third-party websites.
Increase awareness of upcoming products: When you are about to launch a new product, it is always good value to share the upcoming product changes with your customers. By sending a short, precise, and targeted notification, you can increase product awareness among your biggest ambassadors.
SMS communication is great, however, you should consider the frequency you use to send text messages. Too many messages in a month, and you have a risk of bugging your customers. Consider this well, and the suitable practice is not to send more than 3 messages a month to the same customers.
Creating SMS campaigns
Due to the Layerise customer focus, where appropriate customer data and marketing consent is acquired, creating an SMS campaign with Layerise is straightforward and safe.
When creating campaigns you will be able to define the following:
Campaign name
SMS message
Recipients (based on Customer lists)
Campaign schedule
Unsubscribe instructions
Due to legal requirements, Layerise automatically adds unsubscribe instructions to your message. As it is required to have clear unsubscribe instructions, we have made it easy for you to add the desired unsubscribe language through the campaign builder.
SMS performance tracking
When you are done with the campaign setup and the campaign is done, it's time to look at the performance indicators. This is essential as you need to look at KPI's as delivery scores etc. Layerise makes this easy and empowers you to gain insights quickly. Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing a few additional report types specifically aimed at SMS performance.
Customer lists
There are no campaigns without customers and customer lists. Luckily Layerise got's you covered with both customers and customer lists. A customer list can either be Static or Active. While both lists contain customers, they are different in several ways:
As evident above the Active lists are created based on a segmentation rule. Based on the conditions of the rule the active list is constantly monitoring your customer base to see which customers fit the conditions. Customers will therefore be added or removed from the list accordingly. You will find the following Active lists in your Layerise account:
New customers (last 14 days)
Active customers (last 30 days)
Active customers (last 90 days)
Inactive customers (last 30 days)
Inactive customers (last 90 days)
In comparison to the Active lists, Static lists do not change automatically. They are created based on your own segmentation needs and only change when you adapt the list of customers.
By using powerful segmentation filters like country, registered product, language preferences, and more, you can create a static list. You can also search for a specific customer by name or by phone number. Finally, your static lists can contain 1 to an unlimited number of customers.
Other updates
Apart from the updates mentioned above, we have also been working on other changes including workflow automation with Rules and introducing general UI updates.
Rules
With Rules, you are now able to manage your workflow automation. Based on Triggers such as New chat conversation or "New warranty request" you can initiate an action flow.
Apart from Triggers, you are also able to create AND/IF conditional operators with customer country of origin or registered product. Finally, your action flow can based on the desired need be used for assigning conversations or warranty reviews to specific team members or groups.
UI Updates
We are constantly tweaking and improving our UI. With this update, we are launching new navigation to improve feature accessibility and increase navigational speed.
Thank you for your support!
All features covered in this release are rolling out over the next few days and are made available in your account. Moreover, cited features are available for marketed plans as declared on our plan overview page.
As always, do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or need a helping hand.
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