Creating Brand Advocates through Text Message Marketing

Did you know that it costs five to ten times more to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one? Creating life-time brand advocates is essential to your company if you want to stay relevant and remain profitable. 

At a recent session titled “Creating Brand Advocates through Contextual Customer Experience” at ITEXPO 2014, Jeff Cordell, SVP Technology, West Corporation, discussed strategies for creating contextual communications through automation and analytics of mobile and social behavior, including how to entice your customers to agree to provide you access to the data to run these analyses.

During the panel session, Cordell discussed how peer-to-peer texting has transformed into business-to-consumer texting, in which businesses communicate with their customers via text messaging. With 91 percent of American adults owning a cell phone and 98 percent of text messages being opened, businesses can’t afford not to cast an eye toward text messaging marketing.

In fact, several big name companies are already adopting this strategy –for example, CVS and Walgreen’s text consumers when their medicine is available or when it’s time for a refill. Not only does this free up phone lines and resources, but it also increases customer satisfaction and improves the customer experience. 

However before a company can jump on the text message marketing bandwagon, there are several things to keep in mind including, confirming the subscribers’ opt-in and initial messaging. The last thing you want to do is spam consumers. Moreover, it’s important that you don’t ignore your other marketing channels, such as IVR and web chat, as text messaging is simply just one of the communication channels a business can employ.

As for the future, Cordell believes that M2M and video are the new channels that will redefine the customer experience particularly in the healthcare sector where doctors can communicate with patients post-survey and pre-survey via videoconferencing to improve the patient’s experience and increase the amount of patients seen during the day.