How Messaging Can Keep Your Not-Quite-Ready Customers Engaged

Do you track customers who are almost ready to buy from you? You might have a customer who is 90 percent qualified for a loan or purchase a service, but doesn’t quite meet all the standards you’ve set. With a little time and work, however, these customers could be ready to buy from you or use your services.

One of our clients in the financial service industry sends out thousands of messages each month, and is delighted with the number of quick responses they get from potential customers. They are able to qualify an increasing number of candidates for their services. Some potential customers, however, don’t have the income or the credit score to qualify quickly. They may, however, qualify in six months because income and credit scores often change quite rapidly. Our client asked us how they could keep these not-quite-ready customers engaged until they qualified.

We knew the SMS-Magic platform could help our customer. Globally, we send more than five billion texts a day – not counting other types of messages – and we open 98 percent of them. Conversely, we only open emails 22 percent of the time, according to Gigaom. Research from Asurion shows that we look at our phones 96 times a day or once every 10 minutes.

Messaging was a great way to reach customers initially, but we also knew it could help us reach customers farther along in the process.

Drip Messaging Campaigns

Our suggestion was to set up an automatic series of messages (a drip campaign) that offered the customer a chance to re-apply in six months. In this instance, SMS-Magic was configured to work with Salesforce, so the set up was pretty straight forward.

We recommended dividing customers into several groups, depending on how far their customers were from qualifying. Then we suggested a series of messages for each group.

Here’s a summary of the message content for the best, non-qualifying customers:

Message #1 – This message launched when the customer didn’t qualify on the first try. It gave the reasons for the denial, explained what was needed to qualify and listed the process for re-applying.

Message #2 – Two months after. This message was a check-in with the customer, offered a quick peek at the company’s personal finance blog, and provided a sign-up form for the blog.

Message #3 – Four months after. This message was a check-in with the customer and offered a link to personal finance information on the company’s website. SMS-Magic allows customers to use a shortened link in messages for web pages.

Message #4 – Six months after. This message was a reminder that financial situations often changed, and the company would consider a new application.

Message #5 – Immediately after the second application or a month after no response. This message either approves the customer or gently denies the application. If the company does not receive a response, the message acknowledges the lack of response and reminds the customer to contact them again if the situation changes in the future.

How Messaging Can Help You Maintain Contact With Your Customers

The type of campaign we’ve outlined above is only one example. Your customers already have a preference for messaging – most of us do. Messaging is immediate and catches customers at their moment of decision. Your customer can contact you exactly when they need you, and it allows you to provide information with forms, photos, or websites.

You can no longer assume that your customers speak English as their first language. Messaging apps like WhatsApp can help with on-the-fly translations within the app, making your message accessible to more people.

Your customer’s choice of messaging system also doesn’t matter to SMS-Magic. SMS-Magic works with all of the current messaging platforms like native text applications, WhatsApp, and Messenger. SMS-Magic not only receives these messages, it logs them so that anyone in the system can see the discussion.

If this capability sounds exciting to you, please contact us here. We’d love to start a conversation about how we can help you stay in touch with customers who are not-quite-ready.