The more your business grows, the harder it is to reach all your customers. But among the many communications channels available to you, one stands out for immediacy, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use.
Everyone wants a growing business. Having more customers means more revenue and a chance to make the world a better place with your products or services.
Keeping customers means keeping in touch with them. Sometimes you want to send them notifications of new products or policies. Sometimes you need to send them alerts about essential services or time-critical events. And sometimes you just want to offer them new information.
The problem is how to stay in touch cost-effectively at scale. Businesses have multiple options, including:
- SMS
- Voice
- Postal mail
- Social media
- Advertising
- Word of mouth
They all have pros and cons when it comes to cost, immediacy, and reach. Email, for example, has low cost but only moderate immediacy. Word of mouth has no cost at all but very limited reach. The best combination of low cost, high immediacy, and almost universal reach is
SMS, a.k.a. text messaging. It offers global reach and immediate delivery at a low unit cost per message.
SMS can reach just about everyone. According to Pew Research, 96% of Americans owned a cell phone in 2019, and the mostly commonly used application for mobile phones is text messaging. That means your customers already have at their fingertips all they need to get your messages.
SMS messaging is the fastest messaging channel available. Most messages are delivered in less than five seconds — just what you want if you’re sending critical alerts and notifications, providing one-time passwords, or offering two-factor authentication. And with an SMS platform like Plivo, using Powerpack, you can automate sending high volumes of messages at one time.
Many people say text messaging is their preferred communication method. Other methods have shortcomings. People often decline to answer phone calls from numbers they’re not familiar with, and spam filters often catch bulk email messages before they reach recipients’ inboxes. By contrast, according to a widely cited figure, SMS open rates run around 98%. Sending your text messages from local phone numbers makes them even more effective.
Bottom line: SMS has the best reach for sending customized notifications and alert messages for cases such as
- Financial transaction statuses
- Order status updates
- Lead alerts for sales teams
- Password resets
- Delivery and shipping notifications
- Appointment reminders
Plivo is architected to leverage SMS potential reach, as Plivo customer Deckers discovered. “Plivo’s queuing system was a huge selling point,” says Jacob Martinez, Project Manager for Deckers’ ecommerce team. “The less we have to manage things like rate limits and batch sizes, the less burden gets put on the developers. If we have 50,000 text messages we have to send, we don’t have to worry about how those will get through. We just send them all and Plivo handles it.”
We’ve written a white paper on how to optimize your SMS communications. It offers information about the different types of SMS (long code, short code, toll-free), international options, and pitfalls to avoid. Read it to see how you can increase your reach by using SMS messaging.
