That’s right, we see ourselves as a shiny ship with great big sails and every time we get a new customer, it is like a new shipmate has come on board and decided to sail the Text Marketer ship. We know, very sad, but look how amazing our ship is.
However, every so often one of our customers stops using us, they have decided to walk the proverbial plank. Every time this happens we shed a little tear, not just because we lose a customer, but because we know thousands of their customers will no longer be receiving a great mobile experience from them.
We have trawled through the data and have identified the 4 main reasons why businesses stop using us, and we have decided that the best way to showcase these, is with ship analogies.
1. Your ship never leaves the dock anymore
2. Your ship doesn’t have a map or compass
3. There was another ship that didn’t cost as much to run
4. A shinier ship came along, and you decided to board it
For those who don’t understand our amazing ship analogies, we have, in plain non-ship language, explained them all in more detail below. Which isn’t as fun.
1. Just stopped sending SMS
Amazingly we do see customers just stop using our service, and what is worse they have hundreds and sometime thousands of credits on their account. This can be a real head scratcher.
We tend to see that the main reason behind the random drop off is that sending customers a text message was taking up too much time. This completely baffles us as we know it takes less than 10 minutes to set up and send a text message to tens of thousands of customers.
Out of our 4 reasons, this is the hardest to tackle, but we wanted to reiterate how amazing SMS is and why all businesses should continue to use SMS to communicate with their customers.
87% of people always have their smartphone at their side, day and night (Source: Google)
Sales prospects who are sent a text message convert at a rate 40% higher than those who are not sent any text messages (OneReach)
90% of users who enrol in an SMS loyalty program feel they gained value from it (Source: Hipcricket)
58% of companies now have a dedicated mobile marketing team (Source: Salesforce)
If you are struggling for time, why not take a simple approach and only send an SMS to customers for major events. Set a plan where you pick 3-4 big occasions, like a sale, a new product or service release, or just wishing them a happy holiday, and only send a bulk SMS campaign at these times. This means you can plan your time easily without it effecting your day to day schedule.
2. Haven’t been tracking ROI
A cardinal sin this one, before you send any marketing or sales message, make sure you have a goal. Whether that is total clicks of a URL, calls, replies, sales, enquiries. You NEED to track it, so you know exactly how well it went.
Now we know a lot of people are put off at this point, as tracking a goal seems like a long and daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Below are a few ways you can easily track different goals quick and easily.
Sales – The most important information you need to track is when sending a sale or promotional message through SMS. To track this, you can use something called UTM parameters. This is a small bit of extra information at the end of your URL. For more information about how to use UTM parameters read this article by Google.
URL clicks – We have a free feature that you can use to track the clicks on your URL within your text message. Simply include a URL within the text message and click ‘URL Shorten’ icon. This will then shorten your URL where within the ‘Analytics’ section you can see exactly who has clicked your link and how many times.
Enquiries/replies -If you want people to fill in a form once you have sent them an SMS message, use a dedicated SMS form on your website that can only be accessed when you send them the link via a text message.
Another way to track enquiries or replies, is by using a keyword. For example, ask recipients to reply to your message by texting your keyword to our short code. You could use different keywords for different text messages and track exactly who and how many people reply.
“If you are interested in coming to our next event, reply EVENT to 88802 and we will send you more information about it”
3. Found a cheaper supplier
We know, a shock, someone is cheaper than Text Marketer! Yes, it is true there are one or two SMS providers out there offering a cheaper service, but before you go jumping ship to the cheaper provider, make sure you do your research.
You may actually be able to get the same price per SMS with us as you can buy larger bundles of SMS for less. Meaning buying more credits at once would save you money. We also regularly run SMS sales, where you can get anywhere from 10% to 20% extra free.
If, however the other provider is cheaper, you need to compare the actual service and product, you can buy a boat for £100 or £100,000 – both technically are boats, just one may sink half way through your journey.
Are they using grey routes – These are routes that are not directly connected with the networks. They use a 3rd party to send your messages, typically the 3rd party will be outside the UK, meaning your data and messages are being pushed outside the UK to these 3rd party’s and then back to the UK, which can dramatically delay them being delivered, if at all. Many times, customers have come back telling us that their delivery rate dramatically dropped with the new provider.
How good is their support – Yes, the support may be fantastic to start with, but this is so they get you on board, this can deteriorate very quickly after a few months. Make sure you check reviews of the SMS provider you are switching to, is the customer service good, or are there lots of bad reviews about it? We are currently sat at 9.6 on Trustpilot and there is no other SMS provider that is higher.
Platform ease of use – We have worked extremely hard to make Message Box as user friendly as possible, and we are yet to see another provider that offers the same user experience. We have seen customers leave us, to only come back a couple of months later because after using their new SMS provider system for a while, they found multiple flaws and problems with it.
4. Sold on extra features by other provider
One of the reasons we can offer such low prices is because we don’t offer absolutely everything, but just because another provider offers a service that we don’t, do you really need all those bells and whistles?
We know some SMS providers who offer services that we know are, to put it frankly, completely and utterly pointless. Take MMS for example, there are providers out there that offer this service and will tell you that it is amazing. But sending picture messages and videos can really irritate your customers as it can cost them money? Could this not be achieved by sending a link to the picture or video in?
For most businesses they don’t need all these extra features and 9 times out of 10 a basic SMS message with a link to your website will suffice.
We know that SMS isn’t for everyone, but before you decide to set sail on another big shinny ship, just make sure you aren’t boarding the Titanic. We all know how that fared . . .