May 2021

It Might Be Easier Than You Think to Manage Large Call Volumes

Many firms deal with high call volumes on a regular basis. The odd rise in call volume can happen to every organization, from utility providers dealing with winter service problems to retailers dealing with holiday calls and physician’s offices dealing with the turmoil of cold and flu season.

High call volumes are one of the benefits of cyclic enterprises, but they can also be a liability. While a sudden rise in customer interest may be appealing, if your receptionist is overwhelmed, it may irritate clients and harm your brand. Fortunately, managing big call volumes is easier than you might think—at least if you utilize an interactive voice response solution.

Voice Response That Is Interactive

Voice response that is interactive

IVR stands for interactive voice response, and it is an automated call center system that takes incoming calls and routes them to the relevant parties without the use of a live agent. To answer calls and offer customers with the information they need quickly and efficiently, IVR employs phone menus and auto attendants.

Here are some examples of how you can utilize IVR to streamline your calls and effectively manage high call volumes.

Most Commonly Asked Questions

Voice response that is interactive

Simply installing interactive voice response isn’t enough. You must also optimize it in order to boost productivity and make it work for your company. One method to accomplish this is to include commonly asked questions on your phone menu so that callers can quickly and easily find answers to their most pressing questions without clogging up your receptionist or customer care employees. Callers can use simple key presses or voice responses to interact with your menu and get answers to their questions.

Knowing what questions to ask, on the other hand, necessitates familiarity with your consumers and their requirements. To prepare for a busy season, speak with your customer support and/or sales teams to determine the most often asked questions. These should be added to your FAQ phone menus.

Routing of Calls

When customers need answers quickly, the last thing they want is to be shuffled from department to department by someone who can’t help them. During busy periods, interactive voice response can simply redirect calls and keep your callers satisfied, relieving you of the burden. Ask callers a series of specific questions to ensure that they are routed to the correct person the first time.

Another idea is to obtain as much information from callers as possible before transferring them to a representative. This will reduce the amount of time spent on live calls, if they are required, and keep your systems functioning smoothly.

Intelligent Routing

Voice response that is interactive

Even if you’re routing calls and answering FAQs, your call center may be overloaded with callers who require live assistance at times. Use IVR to reroute calls to less busy times or your company’s website if the call wait duration exceeds five minutes.

You can also practice load balancing with interactive voice response by directing incoming calls to the next available customer care person. This ensures that during peak times, all of your agents are available. Furthermore, use skills-based routing to route high-priority calls to specialized agents with better experience managing these types of calls.

These 8 Voice Broadcasting Pitfalls Should Be Avoided

Voice broadcasting is a powerful instrument for mass communication that allows businesses of all sizes to interact and engage with their customers.

While voice broadcasting is highly effective, it is not without flaws, and costly mistakes can be made. To ensure that you get the most out of your campaigns, we’ve detailed the frequent blunders to avoid below so you can get a head start on your new voice broadcast campaign.

1. Improper or absent targeting

Broadcasting audio

Your voice broadcast message will fall flat if it isn’t targeted to the correct audience, no matter how professional or compelling it is. Personalized and targeted communications elicit emotion and connection, increasing conversion rates.

Before you start writing messages, figure out who you’re marketing to. Investigate your target audience’s general demographic features, such as gender, geography, education, and marital status, as well as more specific qualities, such as pain spots, interests, and difficulties. Make sure your message, tone, and campaign are tailored to the specific population you’re seeking to target.

2. It’s been too long

To avoid your recipients hanging up, keep your messages under 30 seconds. A message of 15-20 seconds may be the sweet spot, but experiment with other message durations to see what your clients prefer.

3. Strategic communication

Broadcasting audio

Add the finest content to the first 5-8 seconds of your message to avoid hangups. To avoid the recipient thinking your voice broadcast message is spam, first introduce yourself. Then, if they continue to listen, state the significant benefits they will gain. Also, avoid making a full-fledged sales presentation if you’re sending promotional texts. Declare your promotion, but make it interesting so that your buyers feel connected to your business rather than turned off.

4. It’s too impersonal and uninteresting.

Maintain a professional tone in your mails, but refrain from speaking in a monotonous manner. Long pauses and extraneous details should be avoided. When designing voice broadcast messaging, remember to be friendly and think about your target demographic. If you’re talking to stay-at-home moms, for example, your tone will be different than if you’re talking to male bodybuilders who could be interested in a fitness equipment deal.

5. Excessively fast/excessively slow

Broadcasting audio

It’s simple to speak abruptly in order to keep messages brief, yet speaking too quickly will confuse people. Slow down your speech so that your contacts can fully comprehend what you’re saying. The goal is to keep the speed slow enough that people can hear and understand all of the subtleties, but not so slow that it drags on.

6. A lack of practice

Before you record your message, go over your script again. Before you send your message, listen to it to check the tempo, tone, and personality. Have a couple more folks listen and provide input.

7. Incorrect timing

Broadcasting audio

What time do you send your messages? A great voice broadcast campaign relies heavily on timing. To determine the optimal times to call your contacts, consult your target audience study. For example, a career professional may not be available to take your call during the day, but a 5-7 p.m. call window may be great for this target. Your audience of stay-at-home mothers, on the other hand, would prefer a daily phone call, particularly around their child’s naptime.

8. Not testing before sending

Consider testing your message with a small subset of contacts if you’re new to voice broadcasting or sending a campaign message for the first time. Send the message to your entire targeted list if it performs well. If it doesn’t work, rework the message until you find one that does. Note: Don’t send the same message to the same people over and over again. Exclude your original test group as you send new messages to test, so your messages aren’t misunderstood as spam.

Conversion Marketing: The Definitive Guide

Your website is a whirlwind of activity. Due to your recent email and SMS marketing campaign, you’ve received a large number of visits. You’re overjoyed since this spike in sales is just what you’ve been looking for, especially since the debut of your most recent product. However, you soon discover that, despite the fact that your website’s traffic is increasing, many of the visitors are leaving as quickly as they arrived. Sales have not increased as a result of the additional traffic. You’re discouraged: how can you get those leads to stick?

The constant dilemma for businesses, particularly internet ones, is how to convert leads into consumers. You can’t expect your leads to just browse; you need them to take action and interact with your company. How can you get them so enthralled with your stuff that they act immediately? The conversion marketing paradigm will assist you in moving those leads.

What is Conversion Marketing, and how does it work?

“Conversion marketing refers to strategies that urge customers to take a specific action, “converting” a visitor browsing your website into a consumer of your goods or service,” according to Marketing Schools.

The delicate art of converting browsers to buyers is known as conversion marketing. Conversion marketing encompasses a variety of strategies, ranging from the design of your website to the messaging you send to prospects who have abandoned their shopping carts.

Why should you put conversion marketing to the test?

It’s what enables you to achieve your sales targets in a reasonable, strategic manner. It’s not about making a spectacular transaction. It’s all about setting objectives and establishing plans to help you attain them more easily.

Building a business takes effort, and this is one of those endeavors that might pay off handsomely if you put thought and effort into it.

What is the definition of a conversion?

What exactly are you hoping for from your consumers when it comes to conversions? When a customer visits your online store, he is frequently not yet a customer. He may have seen your banner ad, heard about you from a buddy on Facebook, or been intrigued by your products because they came up top in his Google search.

It’s up to you to transform that enthusiasm into action. It could be the purchase of a product, but it might also be something else. “Conversion” is defined as “getting someone to respond to your call-to-action,” according to MarketingSherpa. The following is an example of a conversion:

Adding a new email address to your contact list

Opening an email and clicking on a link

Taking action in response to a text marketing campaign

A conversion is any activity that your lead makes to advance farther down the sales funnel. Your ultimate goal is to convert those conversions into sales and maintain that customer relationship over time.

How Do You Calculate Conversion Rates?

How can you track all of the minor activities that your clients perform if conversions equal action?

You’ll need to work with a variety of metrics that you can track on your website or through your marketing campaigns, such as:

Direct visitors, visitors through social media, and visitors from search results are all examples of traffic sources.

New visitors’ actions on your website.

Repeat visitors to your site’s behaviors.

When people come to your site and instantly leave, this is known as the bounce rate.

The various forms of interactions that people have with your website.

The sales that occur as a result of each visit and visitor.

Each of these indicators can reveal distinct information regarding the effectiveness of your conversion marketing campaigns.

Conversion Marketing: How to Get Started

What’s the best way to get started with a conversion marketing campaign?

Please hold your horses. Before you begin, you must first comprehend the purpose of your campaign.

Begin by determining who your target audience is. What are the needs and desires of the various visitors to your website? Have you created identities for each of them? Do you know what they want at different stages of the sales process?

What is your company’s relationship with that target market? What kinds of needs do you meet?

What are your company’s objectives? Is there a particular product you’d want to promote?

What is your audience’s preferred method of communication? If you have a lot of millennials on your team, text messaging might be the best option. If you have a lot of information to present, blog posts can be a better option. Figure out what combination of communication methods will motivate your prospects to take action.

Test out some conversion tactics once you’ve figured out what your leads want, how you’ll address those needs, and how you’ll interact with them. If your leads wish to move swiftly through a purchase process prompted by a text message, for example, you might construct a basic landing page with a plain design that takes them from a call to action to conversion. For example, if you sell pizza and want a football-obsessed audience to order online in response to a marketing text, create a simple landing page that gives them a free drink with their pizza if they purchase right now via this simple online approach. You may use phone, email, and text marketing lists to test various conversion calls to action and determine which ones work best for your leads.

generation of leads

How to Persuade Customers to Buy

How do you put conversion marketing into practice in a way that actually works now that you’ve decided to accept the concept?

Know who you are and who you’re talking to. Project your ideals and speak with a consistent and engaging tone of voice. Customers feel more comfortable making a commitment to your firm when they know who you are.

Make adjustments, but be constant. Don’t make drastic changes all at once, otherwise your loyal clients may get dissatisfied, and you may lose their business.

Make an investment in your content. This covers not only your advertisements, but also your blog entries, website copy, and social media posts. Poorly written copy hurts your business, but well-written copy motivates people to take action.

Use the headlines to your advantage. You’ll need bold, unambiguous headlines that let prospects know exactly what they’ll get when they click on a page, read a paragraph, or respond to an offer.

When the leads go, keep an eye on them. Work to improve these places so that visitors may continue to progress through your sales process.

Create a sense of belonging. Create a sense of community by posting on social media and inviting your leads and customers to participate. This will also assist you in gaining a better knowledge of your target audience.

Recognize how your audience like to communicate and speak to them in that manner. It’s pointless to call if they prefer to text. Why email all the time if they prefer to talk on the phone?

Diversify your communication methods. Customers don’t all communicate in the same way, and they don’t all communicate in the same way all of the time. Multiple touchpoints assist you build a long-term relationship with your leads.

Make your website visually appealing to encourage visitors to click on specific parts and progress through the marketing funnel.

Simplify your website’s actions. For example, if you can persuade individuals to utilize a social media login instead of signing up and giving you their personal information, it will be lot easier for them to act.

Make your CTAs stand out by making them obvious, understandable, and appealing. A poor CTA will not inspire your leads.

Make preparations for a repeat performance. While it’s tempting to focus on converting new leads, your current customers are already invested in your company. Consider their requirements and how you may entice them to return to your website.

Start a Lead Generation and Customer Conversion Campaign Today!

You’re ready to increase the number of customers who convert on your website. What can you do right now to turn your ideas into action?

Make a strategy. Consider the goal of your campaign and the demands of your leads before diving in. Examine chances that arise at different times of the year or over the life cycle of your leads or company.

Create possibilities for participation. This could be anything as basic as a limited-time offer or sale. If you’re having trouble getting your leads to bite, offer them a reason to.

To make your marketing more labor-intensive, collaborate with a marketing partner. You can ensure that you spend the majority of your time working on your business strategy and less time understanding the technical aspect of marketing when you engage with a marketing partner.

Five Easy Ways to Increase Customer Retention

Do you devote enough time to marketing to your current customers? Small businesses sometimes devote the majority of their resources to obtaining new clients, yet the greatest strategy to increase revenue is to target existing clients.

It’s much easier to persuade existing clients to make additional purchases than it is to persuade newbies to make their initial buy. One of the most difficult components of customer acquisition is earning trust. As a result, repeat clients are easier to obtain because they are already familiar with your brand and have placed their trust in it enough to make a purchase.

Do you want to develop a loyal consumer base and increase repeat business? Here are five simple techniques to help you increase customer retention and keep them coming back for more.

Texting service for businesses

Loyalty programs are one of the first things that come to mind.

Create a loyalty program to show your valued customers that you care. Customers that are loyal to your company and products are rewarded through a loyalty program. Offering your customers incentives for purchases not only strengthens your relationship with them, but it also promotes client retention.

2. Reintroduce yourself to lost consumers and remind them of your existence.

Customers who enjoy your products may quit purchasing them because they have forgotten about your company. You can possibly have clients that have stopped purchasing but are prepared to return. Remind customers of your products and what your brand has to offer, and give unique discounts as incentives, to enhance client retention and recapture lost clients. However, do not press for a sale. Demonstrate that you cherish their company and that you value their opinions. Even if only a small fraction of prior consumers repurchase and become loyal customers, your retention effort will be worthwhile.

3. Handle customer complaints/reviews

Texting service for businesses

It’s hard to keep every single customer, but you can improve your overall retention rates with a little effort. Managing client reviews, particularly bad ones, is one approach to do this.

Negative reviews might hurt your brand, but if you attempt to fix them, they can actually help you raise brand awareness. If you receive bad feedback, respond with a heartfelt apology and a strategy for how you intend to solve the situation. Include a phone number where the consumer can reach you personally, and once the issue has been remedied, mention it in the review thread. If you satisfy the customer sufficiently, he or she may also share the news on the review thread.

4. Surveys of customer satisfaction

You won’t be able to keep customers if you don’t understand what it is that draws them to your brand and products. While you can’t get inside their heads to get this information, you can poll them. Find out what your present customers like about your products and what, if anything, you can do to improve their experience with your brand. Offer a prize to persons who complete the survey to encourage them to participate.

5. Texting service for businesses

Long surveys can dull customers and lead to lower participation. Using a business texting service is one approach to enhance engagement and receive a better response to your inquiries. Business texting services are a cost-effective solution to send messages to all of your consumers at the same time. Texting is also very successful since text messages have a stunning 95% open rate and people text on a daily basis.

Offer rewards and provide brief, easy-to-answer questions to attract people to participate in your survey. For example, your restaurant could ask, “What’s new on the Valentine’s Day menu?” Which meal would you like to try first? A: The first menu item, B: The second menu item, and so on.” Participants would simply have to write a letter in response.

Three Methods to Assist Your Small Business in Communicating Like a Big One

Always Pick Up the Phone – IVR

If your phone ringing and ringing, or if it goes to an amateur-sounding voicemail, you won’t stand out among your larger competitors. The good news is that you don’t always need a large call center to answer the phone. Using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, you may set up an auto-attendant phone system that directs incoming calls to the correct line or answering service.

Call tracking allows you to quickly test different marketing strategies.

How do you decide if a radio ad, a billboard, or a direct mail piece is the most effective? You can bet the big boys know what they’re doing. Consider purchasing your own local and toll-free numbers to use in advertisements from our database. Each number can be applied to various aspects of your plan and tracked to see what connects best with your contacts. With this information, you can make smarter judgments about what works best for your company.

Text Marketing – Text Marketing – Text Marketing – Text Marketing – Text Marketing – Text Marketing – Text Marketing

Don’t you enjoy it when one of your favorite large businesses sends you an SMS reminder? To send out bulk text messages, you don’t have to be a large brand. SimpSocial provides a simple online interface for sending promotions, notifications, and reminders. You can upload subscriber lists and personalise your message in minutes.

To be good, you don’t have to be big.

Even if you’re smaller than your competitor, communicating successfully informs consumers and prospects that you’re a real, professional firm. Have you considered how IVR, Call Tracking, and Text Marketing can benefit your company?

Voice Broadcasting Has 5 Advantages for Real Estate Agents

A real estate agent’s life can feel like a roller coaster. One day, there are plenty of leads, and the next, it’s a barren wasteland. To succeed, you must stay ahead of the competition and maintain a regular and consistent lead generating process so that you can close more business. However, doing so successfully necessitates implementing solutions that allow you to save costs while also attracting and reaching out to a larger audience.

Voice broadcast is one method that real estate brokers can utilize to increase lead generation and reduce money. Voice broadcasting is a type of mass communication that sends your personalized message to all of your contacts at the same time. Here are five of the most significant advantages of using voice broadcast.

1. Lead generating at a low cost

generation of leads

Voice broadcasting can help you generate more leads by allowing you to follow up with leads and notify them of new listings. Perhaps you conducted an open house and collected phone numbers from those who agreed to be contacted further. Send a voice broadcast message when new listings or updates on the property they’re interested in become available. By using this tool, you can encourage prospects to keep in touch with you for future listings, boosting the likelihood of a sale. By phoning all of your contacts at once rather of manually dialing each one, you save time and money.

2. Enhance client interaction

generation of leads

Your customers are likely to have a lot of questions, yet calling each one individually can take a long time. Failure to respond to their questions, on the other hand, may result in their contacting another agent. Use voice broadcast to automate frequently requested queries so that your customers may get rapid responses without having to speak with you. If clients cannot get answers to their questions, use a “Press 1” feature to direct them to a live agent.

3. Effectiveness of administration

Calling your contacts, giving updates, and reminding them of appointments has become too much for you? You may utilize voice broadcast to automate appointment reminders, send promotional messages, and keep your clients up to date on new and existing listings, making it a useful administrative tool.

4. Add your own personal touch

generation of leads

Even if individuals aren’t conscious of it, the most effective marketing methods capture people’s emotions and impact them emotionally. This effect can be achieved by using a human voice in your marketing and evoking emotion in your prospects. One of the reasons voice broadcasting is so effective is because of this. The audio message adds a personal touch to your marketing, allowing you to engage with your prospects and increase lead production.

5. Instant feedback to help you improve your marketing

What is the effectiveness of your marketing? Speaking directly with your clients and soliciting feedback is one approach to improve your real estate marketing and increase lead creation. Send voice surveys to your contacts and ask questions that will help you better serve them and improve your marketing via voice broadcast. Participants can easily engage in voice broadcast surveys by just pressing a key or activating their voice. To motivate individuals to participate in your survey, give them a prize if they finish it.

How to Make Your Customers Fall in Love With Your Company

It’s not as simple as uploading some great Instagram photographs and advertising special offers to get customers to love your business. Consumers want to have a positive experience with your brand, and the more pleasant and consistent these encounters are, the more sales you’ll make—and the more customers you’ll win.

Promotions by text

The key to establishing customer loyalty and making them love your business is to provide an amazing customer experience. According to an Oracle study, 74% of executives believe that their customers’ experiences influence their inclination to remain loyal advocates. Six out of ten of these executives believe customers will switch companies as a result of bad encounters, according to the survey. Failure to provide a favorable brand-relevant customer experience might result in a loss of up to 21% of annual revenue, according to respondents.

How to Deliver an Unforgettable Customer Experience

What steps should you take to cultivate these great encounters and make your clients love your brand?

The first step is to ensure that everyone on your team understands your overarching goal. What are your guiding principles? What are the guiding concepts that guide your company’s customer service? Create a series of statements that define your overall vision and distribute them to your customer support representatives. To make an impression on customers, everyone should be on the same page and exemplify your fundamental values. Before sending any SMS promotions or launching any marketing campaigns, check to see if your values are in sync.

Deepen Your Understanding of Your Customers.

Promotions by text

After you’ve established your basic values, the following step is to gain a thorough understanding of your clients in order to foster empathy and connection. Customer relationships must entail more than simply reciting values from a company handbook. To have an influence on your clients’ lives and create truly unforgettable experiences, you must feel them deeply. This necessitates a thorough understanding of what makes your clients tick, what they want, what difficulties they have, and their deepest pain areas. This will necessitate more investigation than simply creating a consumer persona with basic demographics (age, gender, income, etc.). Here are a few suggestions:

Find out what questions your customers frequently ask your customer care team. This will assist you in better comprehending their issues.

To obtain the same information, speak with your sales team.

Directly address your customers! It’s sometimes best to strike up a discussion with a consumer. Perhaps this is a quick exchange on the sales floor. Alternatively, send a voice broadcast survey to your consumers to find out what would make them happier and more satisfied.

Find out what people are saying to their friends and peers by monitoring social and internet conversations. These unstructured talks might tell a lot about your consumers’ true desires and wants.

Have your customer service representatives ask clients how you can improve their experience.

Take Action With It

Promotions by text

It’s time to provide your customers exactly what they want now that you know what they want! Identify how you are connecting and servicing your customers at every touch point they have with your company. Start modifying your strategy and implementing your consumer research findings if you notice any flaws or ways in which you are not completely pleasing and delighting your customers. Continue to gather direct feedback from your customers as you develop so you can improve their experiences with your business over time and alter your marketing.

How to Make Your Company Phone Number More Valuable

How many times have you urged your customers to contact an 800 number for more information or to get in on a once-in-a-lifetime promotion, only to wonder if this is the ideal strategy for engagement?

SimpSocial, it turns out, thinks your existing business line is pretty powerful, and our platform has some built-in features that can show you how it can help you grow:

Tracking of phone calls

You may use call tracking to track inbound calls, record them for customer service, and even see how long they last. If you have multiple numbers that you broadcast to the public, SimpSocial’s tracking tools can help you figure out which ones are more effective at generating sales and new clients. Our tracking solutions can help you enhance every business metric that is related to a call.

Assign one number to a billboard, another to social media, yet another to a radio advertisement, and so on. Multiple numbers can be programmed to ring to your main number, and SimpSocial’s platform will categorize these inbound calls so you can discover which phone number (and the messaging that goes with it) resonates best with customers and promotes sales.

Activating Text

Customers call you on your phone numbers, but you may also text them. Texting is enabled by default for SimpSocial numbers, but we can also text-enable existing toll-free or local numbers assigned to your company. As a result, SimpSocial can handle all of your calls and bulk messages in one place!

Our technology provides a dashboard that can distinguish between texts and phone calls, allowing you to view how customers interact with each line. You can also set up immediate emails to notify you of incoming calls or messages so you can analyze them or reply to consumer enquiries while you’re on the go. You may use any phone number you have for everything from marketing to customer service when you enable texting. Our simple keyword methods make it simple to specify phrases like HOURS or LOCATION, allowing for a higher level of involvement than was previously possible with a speech tree or an IVR.

IVRs with a Tree

Did you know that SimpSocial has a team of IVR experts who can help you create your phone tree? We have you covered, whether you need a simple voicemail system or a complicated inbound call response system.

What is the TCPA and Why Should You Care?

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) was created by the United States Congress in 1991 to govern how marketers contact people. The TCPA was created to protect customers from harassing phone calls. Telemarketing calls, automatic dialing systems, and pre-recorded messages were all covered under the law.

The TCPA evolved alongside marketing strategies. The nationwide Do-Not-Call Registry was established in 2003 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), allowing consumers to opt out of all business-related telemarketing. The FCC improved the statute in 2012 by introducing new permission criteria for telemarketing and automated calls.

Why is the TCPA Important?

Because SimpSocial’s technology allows users to make automated calls with pre-recorded messages, the TCPA laws apply to them. We want our customers to be successful in their marketing efforts, and remaining compliant is a key part of that. We are not providing legal advice, but the following are some of the most important provisions currently specified in the TCPA:

Before adding a customer to an automatic dialing list, telemarketers must obtain written consent (digital consent is also acceptable).

Doing business with a consumer does not imply that they have given their consent.

Customers must be able to opt out of automated calls during the call itself, according to telemarketers (ie. Press 9 to opt out).

Much more is covered by the TCPA. When telemarketers can contact consumers, how quickly they should disconnect from ignored calls, and marketing exemptions for NGOs are all governed by rules. A more detailed summary of the TCPA may be found here, as well as a more in-depth look at the Telemarketing Rules.

Interactive Voice Response from A to Z

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response and is a tool that allows businesses and organizations to:

Make a survey

Create polls

Remind them of their appointments

IVR enables you to handle a larger number of consumers with a less crew. It also makes interacting with your business more engaging. Additionally, it may be utilized for both inbound and outgoing calls, making it a relationship-building solution.

Examine some of IVR’s characteristics to learn how it might help your firm make a bigger impression on your contacts.

Routing of Phone Calls

Answering every inbound call is a Herculean undertaking that can deplete a company’s resources tremendously. Call-routing is an IVR function that allows users to choose how their calls are filtered. You could, for example, create a phone tree that reads, “Thank you for calling Wayne’s Widgets.” Press 1 to order a new widget. Press 2 to change or cancel an existing widget purchase, and so on…” Customers will be sent to the most suited employee for each option you present, saving you time and money.

Surveys by phone

Wouldn’t knowing what items and services your customers wanted help your bottom line? Or you might ask them for suggestions on how to improve your operations? You can accomplish just that with phone surveys! You can create an outbound call tree that asks contacts questions like these: “Say something to Danny’s Doo-dads! If you think we should provide more seasonal goods, press 1. If you believe we could improve our customer service, press 2. If…”, press 3 Regardless of how your business functions, it will only succeed if you understand how to effectively serve your clients, and phone surveys can help you do that.

Data Gathering

What good is a phone tree if you don’t know whether it’s giving you any useful information? You’ll be able to access a world of data with SimpSocial’s IVR system in seconds, all of which is easily exportable. You can obtain data to assist you:

Determine where clients are falling out by tracking call length; perhaps your call tree has too many branches, or you should simplify what you’re asking them.

Collect replies – All of the “Press 1” and “Press 2” options are added together, revealing what customers want from you and where you can improve.

Measure results – Find out which element of the IVR process customers value the most; if they all want to chat about customer service while ignoring product or service comments, your IVR is saying a lot!

You can never have too much data; all you have to do is evaluate it appropriately and remain flexible. This has the potential to result in true bottom-line growth.

These 4 Strategies Will Help You Increase Customer Loyalty

Customers who are loyal to you can be a gold mine for your company. And the more committed they are to your brand, the more likely they are to become brand ambassadors, spreading the word about it without costing you a penny in customer acquisition.

Read on if you want to build a loyal customer base that will spend more money on your items and function as another promotional arm for your business.

1. Make a personal connection

Marketing via text message

The yearning for human interaction has grown as the world has gotten more tech-savvy behind the computer screen. People are unable to truly experience rewarding real-life encounters because they spend so much time immersed in the digital realm. As a result, people want for genuine interactions, particularly with the brands they care about and buy from.

Create more meaningful encounters with your consumers to build customer loyalty by:

Improving customer service communication and attempting to get to know your consumers on a more personal level.

Investigate your target to learn about their deepest desires and pain spots. Utilize this information to strengthen your online and offline communication and content so that it speaks directly to them and establishes a relationship.

Use voice communication solutions like voice broadcast, which uses a voice message to give your campaign a personal touch.

2. Customer satisfaction

Marketing via text message

Poor customer experiences cost US businesses an estimated $83 billion each year in the form of abandoned sales. Customer service is cited by two-thirds of customers as a factor for terminating a business connection.

Don’t fall prey to these numbers. Create a memorable experience for customers right from the start. How do you do it? One method is to always provide them with more than they expect. To satisfy them, go above and beyond and provide more than the bare minimum.

Another strategy to improve the consumer experience is to anticipate what they might want—even before they realize it. Anticipating your clients’ wants necessitates continuous listening and interaction. Every connection with a consumer should be a new learning opportunity that brings you closer to your target and allows you to better grasp their inner aspirations.

3. Consistent communication

Marketing via text message

Customers want to feel like you know who they are and that you cherish their loyalty, so thanking them for choosing your company will make them like you even more. Keeping your consumers informed about your firm and its activities is one method to contribute to this connection. Maintain contact with them and interact with them on a regular basis.

Here are some suggestions:

Send customized messages and well wishes during the holidays.

Send them an email with a special discount coupon on their birthdays.

Let your customers know if you’re celebrating any company milestones so they can feel a part of your brand’s success.

Interacting with your clients on a regular basis can help you connect with them and maintain your brand in their minds.

Text marketing is a low-cost, high-impact mass communication strategy that can help you achieve this level of engagement. To send these updates via text messages, use text marketing. Text messages have a high open rate, and because your consumers are likely to carry their phones with them wherever they go, they will be ready to receive your texts right away. Text marketing is also a useful communication tool because it can send messages to hundreds of thousands of clients at once and in a matter of minutes.

4. Disseminate relevant information and offers

Marketing via text message

Customers would appreciate special discounts and promotions if you offer them. If you have a consumer niche that includes new mothers, for example, give diaper and baby product discounts on a regular basis. Personalize your messages and material for them to make them feel special and distinct.

What is a Text Drip Campaign, and Why Should I Use One?

Drip campaigns allow you to send your clients and prospects a sequence of automated and triggered messages. Text drip campaigns convert an email strategy into a text message. The following are the fundamentals of a text-based drip campaign:
What is a Drip Campaign, and how does it work?

You can deliver automated messages to contacts at specific moments in your sales cycle using a drip campaign. It can be used for a variety of purposes, depending on your target audience and business needs.

Send out communications on a frequent basis to keep your company front of mind.

Send instructive information to prospects so they are better prepared to buy.

Send cold leads offers or content that will re-engage them and help them convert into customers.

Texting can be used to nurture leads.

A nurturing program might assist you prepare someone who is interested in your business but isn’t ready to buy. Consider what obstacles your automated texts can assist you overcome when creating your strategy.

Consider texts with links to case studies, best practices, and pricing breakdowns for a nurturing.

Increase Engagement by Texting

Drip campaigns can be used for more than just education. Regularly sending text messages to your customers might help to increase engagement and keep your items or services top of mind. When it comes time to make a purchase, people are more likely to choose your company over the competition. What is the ultimate goal? Increasing the likelihood of a one-time customer becoming a repeat customer.

Consider testimonials, competitive analysis, and seasonal greetings to increase interest.

Send Relevant Content Using Triggered Messages

You can send out customized communications customized to the interests of your audience segment by creating a drip campaign. For example, if a buyer looks at a product on your website, you might send a text message containing information about it. You can also send a message with a link to a white paper that explains how to use a product after they’ve purchased it.

Messages that are triggered

Consider sending promotions, product information, and frequently asked questions.

How Can Texting Help Your Business? Texting for Collection Agencies

Is there such a thing as texting for debt collectors? Yes, we concur! You might not have considered texting as a new and effective means of communication. So, how might texting assist you in reaching out to contacts in a timely, cost-effective manner? Text Messages are a great way to get in touch with people. Why not utilize text messages to connect with clients, vendors, and partners? You probably already send text messages to friends and family, so why not use them for business? You could send the following texts as examples of collection-related texts:

“Just a friendly reminder that your Douglas County Municipal Services payment is due in full in 3 days.”

“For judicial services, Jacksonville Legal has asked for payment. To view your billing details, click on this link.” Text messages may help you communicate messages to vendors and clients faster and for less money, no matter what they are.

Reminders that pop up on a regular basis

Maybe you need to send messages to partners or contacts on a regular basis. Consider using recurring reminders instead of creating that message every time, which wastes time and resources. You can use them to generate and schedule messages for a specific date, such as two days before a payment is due. Do you send out invoices on the 15th of every month? You can schedule a recurring reminder for the 13th; the’relative’ send time is two days before the event. However, you have complete freedom to personalize it.

Short codes and keywords

Many companies require collection assistance but are unsure where to begin or have a misunderstanding of how the industry operates. Encouraging people to text your keyword to a short code will help you attract these potential clients, allowing you to explain how you work and possibly retain them on a long-term basis. To send messages, SimpSocial customers dial a short code, such as 67076. Our clients rent keywords, and when people text that term into a short code, the message is delivered to the client’s inbox. Consider using printed materials, website copy, or a Facebook post like this to capture people’s attention “Assist your customers in being paid! Get free collections advice from Christine’s Financial Services by texting COLLECTIONTIPS to 67076.” The keyword is COLLECTIONTIPS, the short code is 67076, and your free consultation offer is an offer for new business.

Spring Forward In Style With Texting – Everything You Need to Know About Daylight Saving Time

Pulling the covers over your head is not a good idea.
It’s critical to be extra alert of shifting schedules – and bleary-eyed coworkers! – in the days after the switchover. Think golf clubs and BBQs. Daylight Saving Time is also a terrific opportunity to communicate with your customers and enhance sales. So, how might texting aid in the changeover to Daylight Saving Time while also strengthening client relationships? Consider the following ideas:

“Set your clocks forward an hour!” send a reminder message. What better approach to demonstrate your concern for your clients than to send them a polite SMS reminder about the time change?

Let your consumers know if your company will be making any changes as a result of the time change; they’ll appreciate the thought.

If your business is in a location that does not observe Daylight SavingTime, inform your customers that you will not be ‘springing forward,’ and that the hours of operation and time variances will remain the same.

Keep your staff informed about the time change to avoid them arriving late or confused. Send them all of the information they require by text message!

Send out a promotion for an outside activity or product – with extra hours of sunlight to enjoy, your clients could appreciate an incentive to stock up on outdoor fun gear.

How Can Texting Help You With Your Voice Strategy?

Texting’s Benefits
Nothing beats text messaging for ensuring that your message is received. Texting is the most reliable technique to get in front of your customers’ eyes, with a 98 percent open rate. If you’re trying to reach out to Millennials, who prefer to text rather than converse, texting can be extremely useful.

What SMS Texting Is Good For

Texting is the ideal way to transmit a brief message (160 characters or less) that has to be read quickly. Texting can be useful in a variety of situations that you may not have considered:

Sending a text message to a group of people is a terrific method to let them know about a promotion, update, special offer, or event.

Let clients know when their deliveries have arrived by sending delivery confirmations.

HR Notifications – Make sure employees are aware that it is time to report their hours or that a resume has been received from a job seeker.

Texting and SimpSocial Voice Products: How Do They Work Together?

While SMS can be used on its own, it may also be used to supplement your existing marketing, customer service, and operational strategies:

Consider offering callers the option of receiving more information by text message if you utilize an IVR to route and receive calls.

Consider sending text messages instead of Voice Broadcast alerts, especially for shorter messages and emergency notifications.

Consider adding text functionality to your phone number if you utilize Call Tracking to catch prospects that prefer to text.

How to Boost Your Political Campaign Using Text and Voice Outreach

Your political campaign communications might be boosted with automated text and phone messaging. With election season rapidly coming, now is the ideal moment to double-check your outreach strategy. Here are a few tips to ensure you’re on the right track.

Using an SMS Keyword Campaign and Notifications, you may increase your subscriber base.

To get residents and voters to sign up for your mailing list, use keyword contests and promos. You can utilize mass text messaging to communicate with your voters and volunteers using your list for a variety of reasons:

Please keep me informed about upcoming events.

Remind yourself of crucial dates, such as election day!

Encourage volunteers to maintain their enthusiasm.

Send a Voice Broadcast Message to Your Audience

Voice Broadcast messaging can instantly connect you with tens of thousands or millions of people.

Make targeted phone calls to your key constituency groups.

Notify workers or voters about upcoming campaign rallies.

Access to statistics and data can assist you in making more informed decisions.

IVR can help you expand your capabilities (Interactive Voice Response)

To deliver excellent support to your campaign, you don’t need a large call center. Send automated messages with various key-press options for donating, answering inquiries, or signing up for a rally using IVR.

To conduct surveys and polls, use IVR.

Exportable stats that are simple to utilize to help you improve your plan

Call tracking can help you improve your results.

SimpSocial allows you to purchase as many toll-free phone numbers as you need to test various strategies and audiences. Place one number on a billboard and the other on your advertisement or mailer, and see which one receives the most calls. Real-time data are provided by SimpSocial, making it simple to track and alter your strategy.

How to Make the Most of Your Text Marketing Campaigns

It’s becoming increasingly simple to market things via email, social media, and texting, but this also means that markets are more competitive than ever when it comes to keeping subscribers and getting your message out there. Automated text messages are an excellent approach to reach out to your target demographic and increase sales. Mass texting is a terrific way to engage directly with your customers, and it’s more personalized than TV and radio commercials. People generally enjoy receiving texts, and studies have shown that mass text marketing messages are more effective than other digital advertising initiatives. What’s the bottom line? In a retail setting, mass texting can boost your marketing efforts and get the results you’ve been looking for. To ensure your company’s success, read on for mass texting etiquette and best practices.

Select a Service Provider

Choose a company that offers the services you’ll need for your SMS marketing campaign before you start. You’ll want to look for a service that makes it simple to divide your consumers into groups, send and receive messages, and access analytics. When it comes to assisting retail firms with bulk texting, make sure to hire a reliable service with a strong reputation.

You’ll be given a short code once you’ve decided on a supplier. When clients want to subscribe to messages, they will text a code to this five-digit number. You’ll need to choose a Keyword for customers to use when opting into your mass texting service once your short code has been allocated to you.

A mass SMS, for example, might ask you to text “JOIN to 67076” to join a texting campaign. When a consumer uses the Keyword to enroll in the texting service, they will be added to your list of contacts and will be able to receive your mass SMS.

Obtain Permission From Your Clients

You must first seek clear written authorization from your consumers before sending them information. By putting an opt-in button in your emails, you can simply obtain this consent. Once clients have signed up for your mass SMS program, let them know how often they will be contacted. Using Keyword marketing, for example, you may persuade your clients to opt up to mass SMS.

Setting clear expectations will aid in the development of a positive relationship between you and your clients. Spamming clients with SMS they didn’t want to receive is not only unlawful, but it also makes a negative impression on potential customers.

Make it clear to your customers what kinds of communications you’ll deliver and how often you’ll send them, and then keep your word. See page 15 of this book for further information on how to develop a compliant text marketing program.

Individualize your service.

Keep in mind all of your clients’ unique requirements and worries, and send out different mass SMS to different groups based on the type of customer they are. Send information on gluten-free or dairy-free baked goods to consumers who have specified certain dietary limitations, for example, if you own a bakery.

Schedule your bulk SMS so that customers receive them when it is convenient for them, rather than when it is inconvenient. Late-night texts, for example, may wake up your consumers, whilst texts sent during rush hour may distract them throughout their journey.

Tips for Texting in Large Groups

Text marketing is a low-cost approach to provide critical discounts, discounts, and promotions information. Coordinate your text marketing initiatives with your email and social media activities so that your texts help your emails reach a wider audience. Create special offers for clients who receive text messages; this will encourage people to stay subscribed.

What Text Marketing Promotions are the Most Effective?

Mass texting is an excellent approach to spread the news about your special offers. After all, with a 98 percent open rate, you can be confident that your message will be read. But what kind of offer should you make? Here are four examples of effective text-based promotions.

1. Offer of a free gift with purchase

Isn’t it true that free is everyone’s favorite price? Giving your customer a free present with purchase provides them a sense of worth. They are, after all, essentially receiving something for free. Choose a gift that doesn’t eat into your profit margin too much. Choose something that feels wonderful to the buyer but isn’t particularly valuable in terms of bucks and cents. If you want to create a sense of anticipation, make it a surprise gift. For example, your text could state, “From now until May 20, visit CF Deals and receive a free t-shirt with a $100 or more purchase.”

2. BOGO (Buy One, Get One)

Another form of offer that makes clients feel like they’re receiving a good deal is a limited-time offer. This offer can be implemented in a variety of ways, such as a buy-one-get-one-free or a buy-one-get-one-at-a-discounted price or a percentage off. “Buy one t-shirt at CF Deals and receive one free of equal or lesser value,” for example. To the cashier, please show this message.”

3. Subtract a dollar from the total price

This is the most straightforward and straightforward for clients to comprehend. Simply send them a voucher that reduces the price. It’s crucial not to underestimate yourself into losing money, as you would with other strategies. If you play your cards well, you might be able to make a really appealing offer. “Happy Birthday, Tom!” for example. Get $5 off your next purchase at CF Deals with this coupon.”

4. Purchase Discount in Percentage

Offer a percentage off instead of a flat rate. This encourages customers to buy more! Make the proportion reasonable, otherwise you may find yourself in the red. “Visit CF Deals on Friday and get 25% off your order when you show this message,” for example, is an example of this style of text.

Best Practices for SMS Marketing: How to Get Results the Right Way

SMS may appear to be a simple marketing method. However, sending improper text messages to your audience can result in a large number of unsubscribes. In addition, not messaging your contacts frequently enough can have a negative impact on your outcomes.

SMS marketing, like any other effective marketing effort, is strategic. To stand out among the onslaught of communications that today’s savvy customers get on a daily basis, it must be smart, well-executed, and deliver value.

Restaurant Example of SMS Marketing Best Practices

Fortunately, there are several SMS marketing best practices that can aid in the development of your text communication plan and help you achieve better outcomes.

SMS Marketing’s Advantages

Before getting into SMS marketing best practices, it’s important to understand why SMS is such an important marketing tool.

The following are some of the most significant advantages of SMS marketing:

1. Availability

With 92 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds owning a smartphone and 80 percent of millennials checking their phone first thing in the morning, SMS marketing has a huge potential audience.

2. Immediacy

People respond fast to text texts. The average text response time is 90 seconds (compared to a 90-minute email response time), so your message will reach your audience in minutes. SMS marketing outperforms email marketing by a wide margin, with an average open rate of 98 percent.

Texting is a personal and preferred method of communication (it’s the most prevalent cell phone activity). People send texts to friends, family, and coworkers on a daily basis. SMS marketing allows you to combine customized, direct communications with larger, more traditional media initiatives.

3. Reliability

With a delivery rate of nearly 98 percent, SMS is far more reliable than email in terms of reaching your target audience.

Best Practices in SMS Marketing

If done correctly, SMS marketing is an excellent approach to contact your target audience.

Immediacy also entails a higher level of risk. Customers are more inclined to unsubscribe from persistent, unpleasant text messages than they are to ignore a bothersome email.

To avoid potential fines, you must evaluate compliance issues before initiating an SMS marketing campaign.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is a good place to start when it comes to understanding SMS marketing compliance.

Let’s begin with the legal guidelines that govern SMS marketing best practices.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) governs how businesses communicate with their customers. It initially only applied to telemarketing calls, auto-dialed calls, prerecorded calls, and unsolicited faxes, but in 2013 it was expanded to include text messages.

What are the legalities behind SMS marketing?

The TCPA, like best practices for email marketing, requires businesses and organizations to obtain express authorization to send text messages.

Before text marketers can send any SMS marketing messages, they must first convince consumers to opt-in. Getting someone’s phone number or making a purchase isn’t the same as getting their permission to contact them.

Text marketers and brands, for example, frequently employ branded shortcodes at events, in-store, and in traditional marketing campaigns. By texting the branded short code, customers can opt-in to receive SMS messages.

Retail SMS Marketing Best Practices

What are the ramifications of not adhering to the TCPA guidelines?

Individuals can bring lawsuits and collect damages under the TCPA, which means you could be held financially liable.

In 2016, the Federal Communications Commission (which supervises the Telephone Consumer Protection Act) received over four billion complaints about unsolicited calls. Customers who were still receiving texts or calls after unsubscribing made the majority of the complaints.

Violations of SMS marketing best practices and TCPA standards can result in significant fines as well as damage to client relationships and your brand.

The Eight Crucial Elements of SMS Marketing Best Practices

It’s not just about following the letter of the law when it comes to SMS marketing best practices. It’s all about designing a campaign that gets results while also providing a clear, direct advantage to your target demographic.

Here are eight SMS marketing best practices that assist you in running successful text messaging campaigns.

Customers must opt-in to receive SMS messages, as indicated previously. It’s both a legal necessity and an excellent practice in SMS marketing.

There are a few options for doing so

Persuade clients to join your mailing list. A shortcode can be used to do this. They consent to receive SMS messages by texting the shortcode.

If you’re manually importing contacts, you’ll need written or verbal consent.

Here are some amazing SMS marketing campaign examples.

Unsubscribing is a crucial compliance problem that many firms overlook. Any service must allow customers to opt out by texting the word “STOP.” The Telecommunications Industry Association recommends bolding words like “STOP” and “HELP” in texting calls-to-action. You must also state that ordinary data and messaging rates will apply.

Hours

According to the TCPA, you must only send messages during business hours. Remember to factor in time zones.

Even if your audience has agreed to receive text messages from you, you don’t want to annoy them. It’s best to send two to four texts per month. If you send any more emails, you risk annoying your consumers and increasing your unsubscribe rate.

Language

With the limited number of characters available, it can be tempting to use catchphrases, nicknames, or slang, such as “GR8!” “Look at you, L8ER.” While it may be tempting, using such informal language can make your company appear unprofessional and alienate your young audience. Short, direct, and to-the-point texts are best.

Value

This is something that is sometimes ignored, especially by beginning text marketers. Don’t bombard your clients with meaningless messages. Make the value obvious. They use text messages to send time-sensitive, urgent communications that they can’t send via email or other means of communication. What is important to them? Make your statement as clear, specific, and concise as possible.

Text communication is instantaneous. Make a point of responding to consumer texts as soon as possible. You can send customised follow-up text messages right away using an auto-responder.

Measure

To understand which messages and language resonate with your audience, you have to measure the results of your SMS marketing campaigns.

SimpSocial can help you get started with SMS marketing.

Businesses must adapt as users’ preferences change toward mobile.

SMS marketing is a great method to boost mobile engagement and reach out to your audience in new ways.

Text marketing allows you to contact thousands of people instantaneously, whether you’re sending out appointment reminders, discounts, updates, or SMS campaigns.

SimpSocial also blends text messaging, voice broadcasting, and interactive voice response (IVR) technology, allowing you to create high-quality multichannel campaigns that better reach your target demographic.

Consider providing your audience with the choice of receiving information such as your location or hours through phone or text.

Customers get more immediate value and opportunities to interact with your brand when you combine SMS marketing best practices with voice components. When you give your audience the option to interact on their own terms, they are more inclined to participate.

6 Results-Driven B2B SMS Marketing Strategies

It’s no surprise that in today’s mobile-first society, consumers prefer text messages to emails. This is true both for company decision-makers and for customers. At any given time, 97 percent of American business professionals are within three feet of their phone.

SMS text message marketing’s capabilities are continually improving, making SMS as crucial to your B2B marketing efforts as email and paid advertising. Open rates for SMS communications are well over 90%, and text messages are frequently opened in about 90 seconds.

With quick, easy, and personalized messages, B2B SMS marketing is a terrific method to retain ties with existing clients and nurture prospects. In this blog, we’ll go over the advantages of SMS campaigns and how to include them into your B2B marketing plan.

picture b2b

The Advantages of Using SMS in B2B Campaigns

Text message marketing is often misunderstood to be solely useful in B2C campaigns. Your corporate clientele, on the other hand, share many characteristics with regular consumers, such as their dependency on mobile devices.

Texting has grown in popularity as a means of business communication, with 80 percent of professionals using SMS for business purposes. SMS can be used by businesses to send relevant content and offers to leads and consumers who have signed up for their mailing list.

The following are just a few of the many advantages of B2B SMS marketing:

High Open Rate: Text messages are opened at a rate of up to 98 percent, compared to an average of 22 percent for email.

Cost-effective: SMS marketing may be scaled to match any budget, from a large corporate to a small neighborhood shop.

Mobile-Friendly: SMS is compatible with almost all mobile phones. In a more concise and accessible format, SMS may give equivalent content to email.

Strong Customer Interaction: SMS generates six to eight times more engagement than email, with a 19 percent average click-through rate (compared to 4.2 percent for email). SMS keeps you connected to your customers on their preferred device at all times. People answer to SMS in 90 seconds on average, while emails take two days on average to receive a response. • Quick Turnaround: In marketing, time is money. Text messages do not necessitate any preparation. Without having to wait for designs, asset development, or campaign approvals, B2B SMS marketing allows you to convey your message to the right person at the right time. All you have to do now is compose your message and submit it.

Tips for Creating Successful SMS B2B Campaigns

Here are some key points to keep in mind when incorporating SMS into your marketing approach.

Stick to the Rules After You’ve Learned Them.

SMS is a severely regulated industry. Businesses must follow tight procedures to avoid exploiting customers’ cell phone numbers. Study the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) (TCPA). In accordance with the law:

Before sending any text messages for commercial or marketing objectives, you must obtain written authorization from the consumer. As long as the electronic signature complies with the E-Sign Act of 2000, you can gather consent signatures electronically via email, internet forms, text messages, and other methods.

By reacting immediately to the text message, recipients must be able to opt out of receiving correspondence.

You don’t want to irritate existing customers by sending them too many texts or making it tough for them to opt out. Following proper SMS procedures will keep you in good standing with your clients – as well as with the law.

See our SMS compliance guide for more information.

Create a B2B SMS Contact List.

You can’t send text messages to your list without their permission, so you’ll have to start from scratch with your SMS list. Here are several strategies for getting your contacts to text a term and add to your list:

Send an email to your contact list. To advertise your SMS campaign, use your existing email marketing list. Tell them what type of information you’ll be sending them by SMS.

Your SMS campaign should be promoted on your website. To encourage users to text your Keyword, provide CTAs on your high-converting web sites.

Make use of social media. To market your offer and keyword, write social posts and make advertising.

Make an irresistible offer.

Customers must be enticed to join your SMS campaign through an attractive offer. Customers that join your SMS list might get a free template, a business consultancy, or a gift card. Make the most of this opportunity to get creative and come up with a relevant and appealing offer for your target market.

To get the best results, spell out the action you want readers to take and use limited-time offers to create urgency. Incorporating your company’s name can also help to clear up any ambiguity and boost open rates.

List Segmentation.

Segment your list so that distinct SMS codes can be promoted for different types of communications. You don’t want to spam someone who has opted in to get software updates with PR notices.

Send Content That Is Relevant

Your SMS messages should include material that is informative, funny, or beneficial to customers and urges them to act or reply. Here are some content examples you can send by SMS:

Updated product information

Discounts are available

Answers to frequently asked questions

Links to new corporate blogs, webinars, podcasts, and other resources

Polls and questionnaires

Publicity announcements

When it comes to developing a B2B SMS campaign that gets results, brevity and relevancy are key. To prevent sending long-winded SMS, use a URL shortener like Bitly and make your message short and direct.

Improve Your SMS B2B Campaigns by Using Two-Way Messaging

With two-way SMS messaging, you can easily design and modify your SMS B2B campaigns in response to client input.

Two-way messaging allows you to quickly follow your clients’ behavior and preferences while also collecting data for future marketing by developing a dialogue with them and streamlining engagement.

B2B marketers can employ polls, questionnaires, and short code text answers to better understand their audiences.

Checklist for SMS Compliance in Steps

SMS has swiftly become the go-to marketing method for both small and large businesses, with a 98 percent open rate. Text marketing, on the other hand, brings with it a whole new set of SMS compliance requirements and best practices.

Businesses that do not follow tight SMS restrictions risk losing their programs, furious customers, and unwelcome legal attention. Multimillion-dollar lawsuits have been filed against companies like Jiffy Lube and Papa John’s for sending illegal text messages without sufficient approval.

It may seems that achieving compliance is a difficult undertaking, but it does not have to be. Using this SMS compliance checklist, make sure your text campaign ticks all the legal boxes.

Who Makes the Rules for SMS Compliance?

Marketers must comply in order to stay in line. It’s dangerous to believe that all marketers have the best interests of their clients at heart. Some businesses would bombard customers with irrelevant material if there were no restrictions and laws, and tailored messaging would be replaced by irritating, obtrusive marketing.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Telephone Consumer Protection Act created the groundwork for SMS compliance regulations (TCPA).

The CTIA (Communications Technology Industry Association) is

The CTIA is a trade association in the United States that represents the wireless communications industry.

It protects mobile phone consumers from unwanted, improper, or irrelevant SMS marketing messages by enforcing SMS marketing practices and legal rules, as well as auditing SMS marketing programs. Despite the fact that CTIA rules aren’t formal regulations, the organization has the authority to terminate noncompliant programs.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is a federal law that

For SMS mobile messaging campaigns, the FCC’s TCPA establishes legal guidelines and provides basic consumer protections. Because the TCPA is a federal law, failure to comply can result in legal action.

The Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) establishes regulations for telecommunications, including interactions with mobile devices. It specifies which acts determine permission granted and what firms are permitted to perform once a subscriber has given authorization.

Checklist for SMS Compliance

Follow this SMS compliance checklist to send effective text marketing campaigns and keep subscribers pleased.

Requirements for Opt-In Messaging

Keep the Opt-In Requirements in mind.

Before sending SMS marketing messages, a corporation must obtain “express written consent” from contacts, according to the TCPA. The consent should be explicit and unambiguous, rather than buried in a long form of terms and conditions.

The most important part of SMS compliance is opt-ins. Texting somebody without their consent is considered spam, and you could face legal consequences.

Customers can opt in to your SMS marketing in a variety of ways, in addition to providing physical, written authorization. Mobile opt-in and web opt-in are the most frequent.

Consumers can opt in by texting a keyword to a short code number using their cell phone. Encourage individuals to subscribe to your list by promoting your Keyword and short code in adverts, emails, or adverts.

Send a Text Confirmation

The first thing you should do when a new subscriber opts in to your SMS program via Keyword is send a confirmation text. This paragraph should include the following to comply with best practices:

Include your company name in the program name so that clients know who is contacting them. o For instance, [Company Name] Mobile Alerts

What kind of messages will they get as part of the campaign? Will you give out special offers, announcements, or insider information?

Sales, discounts, and breaking news are just a few examples.

Include the average number of texts clients will receive in a normal week or month in the estimated text frequency.

For instance, you can send up to four messages every month.

Message and Data Transmission Rates Notice: While unlimited texting is becoming increasingly popular, some users may be charged for receiving text messages. Customers should be informed that standard messaging and data fees may apply.

Msg & Data rates may apply, as an example.

Instructions for Unsubscribing: Include instructions for unsubscribing in bold text. STOP, END, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, or QUIT are all words that subscribers can use to opt out. You must remove a member from your SMS marketing list if they react to any message with one of these words.

For instance, to cancel, text STOP.

Instructions for Help: Inform users that they can get further information by replying to any text message with the word HELP. If a subscriber does this, you must respond with a phone number or a site where they may learn more about the program or your company.

For instance, text HELP to get more information.

Your confirmation text might look like this if you keep these factors in mind:

[Enterprise Name] Sales, discounts, and breaking news are all available via mobile alerts. You can send up to four messages per month. Rates for messages and data may apply. To cancel, text STOP. For more information, text HELP.

Send a Text Confirmation

Consumers can also opt in by filling out a website form or visiting a landing page. You can never be too cautious when it comes to obtaining consent. It’s vital to understand that giving you a customer’s phone number isn’t the same as giving you permission to text them. You should provide the program data provided above if you utilize an opt-in form.

Recurring SMS Program Requirements

The requirements for recurring text programs are included in Part 2 of your SMS compliance checklist.

Write clear terms and conditions and post them on a regular basis.

Customers frequently complain when they forget they’ve signed up for text message marketing lists.

To avoid this problem, make your text message marketing terms and conditions and privacy policy available in as many places as feasible, such as:

Your internet site is excellent.

Within your physical establishment

Opt-in forms were collected on landing pages.

Time Your Messages Appropriately

You’ll undoubtedly get a lot of irate consumers and unsubscribes if you start emailing promo codes at 4 a.m. Sending SMS messages at odd hours is not a good idea.

When You Change Your Program, Notify Your Subscribers

If your terms and conditions change in any manner, you’ll need to notify your subscribers and ask them to affirm their continuous approval by responding CONTINUE or YES.

Every message should include the program’s name.

Every SMS should indicate the name of your company or program, and STOP instructions should be included in all messages to ensure that recipients know how to opt out.

With SimpSocial, you can keep your SMS campaigns compliant.

SMS marketing is a terrific approach to keep your customers informed and encourage two-way contact. However, if you want to create a strong list of subscribers while staying out of legal issues, you must adhere to the regulations.

Through low-cost SMS marketing, SimpSocial helps businesses of all sizes enhance client retention and dramatically boost marketing ROI.

8 Ways to Increase SMS Sales

Using SMS to increase sales is a no-brainer in an age when 95% of consumers own a cellphone.

It’s really simple to contact your clients where they’re most engaged using mass text messaging. Smartphone users spend more than five hours every day on their devices.

SMS may be a powerful tool for driving sales and sustaining customer connections when utilized effectively. However, there are certain key guidelines to follow.

Why Should You Use SMS for Sales?

Every day, your customers are bombarded with dozens or hundreds of emails. Why not send your message through a channel that is sure to be opened and read instead of struggling through packed inboxes?

Take a look at the following SMS marketing statistics:

Within three seconds, 90% of text messages are read.

In comparison to email, which has a response rate of 6%, SMS has a response rate of 45 percent.

The average click-through rate for SMS is 19%, compared to 2.43 percent for email.

People respond to SMS in a different way than they do to social media, emails, and other forms of marketing.

SMS marketing makes your brand more accessible and personable, as consumers rely on messaging for quick and easy communications.

Tips for Increasing SMS Sales

1. Use all marketing channels to promote SMS opt-in.

First and foremost, you must create a subscription list. If customers haven’t agreed to receive texts from you, you won’t be able to create SMS sales.

Your SMS program (short code and keyword) should be promoted in the following places:

Use of social media

The internet site

Landing pages are a type of web page that is used

Newsletter sent by email

Point-of-sale (POS)

Materials to be printed

Your subscriber list (and sales prospects) will increase faster if you display your text short code and SMS Keyword in multiple places.

Want additional advice on how to start up your SMS campaign and increase your subscriber list? Check out our top SMS marketing tips.

2. Make Tempting Offers

How can you keep your clients engaged in what you have to say when they can opt out of your SMS list at any time?

If you want people to buy from you, you must be willing to reward them. 75% of customers prefer to get offers by SMS, and mobile coupons are redeemed 10 times more than email or print coupons.

Exclusive rewards make members feel valued and increase SMS sales. Use the following ways to get ideas:

Offer a discount or a reward.

Request that users complete a quick survey.

Inform customers about impending sales.

Send subscribers end-of-season reminders with special discounts.

Make a specific marketing offer based on a customer’s recent purchases.

The options are limitless. Experiment with different forms of incentives to determine which ones result in the greatest sales.

3. Keep Customers Up to Date

Once a customer makes a purchase, your line of connection should not be cut off.

Use SMS to keep subscribers up to date on shipping status, delivery specifics, and other important information. You can text them when their order is ready if they place an order for in-store pickup.

If the ordering and delivery processes are simple and fun, customers are more likely to become repeat consumers.

4. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Using SMS to deliver special information keeps your brand top of mind and gives your audience extra ways to interact.

Consider offering specialized material, targeted rewards, or interesting company or industry information.

Sending relevant information to your audience will help to establish loyalty while also quietly urging them to visit your site and make a purchase.

5. Make a powerful call to action

Your audience will require instructions on how to redeem your offer, and a strong call to action will greatly enhance the chances that they will click through and convert.

Promotional SMS campaigns with strong calls to action and defined timeframes, in fact, have a conversion rate of 23.3 percent on average.

After reading your material, what action do you want customers to take? Think about if you want people to buy something online, come into your store, or RSVP to an event.

To lead clients to the next step, use simple, straight language. Include a link to your website or landing page if you want visitors to visit it, but don’t go overboard.

The SimpSocial team discovered that having more than one link in a message reduces response rates after studying successful SMS campaigns. To reduce confusion and drop-offs, give your audience one action to take.

6. Instill a sense of urgency in your audience

When customers act on a spur-of-the-moment urge or take advantage of a limited-time offer, their reactions to sales, promotions, and events are the most positive. Customers are more likely to buy on the spot if your offer has an expiration date or a restricted quantity.

Let’s say your restaurant is offering a half-price appetizer special on Tuesday nights from 6-8 p.m. Wait until late Tuesday afternoon to inform your contacts about the arrangement. If you compel them to make a spontaneous decision, you’ll get a better response.

7. Keep it simple with your message

Nobody wants to read a long wall of text in a text message.

Avoid using long sentences and superfluous words in your SMS texts. Keep your message brief and to-the-point, using abbreviated terms whenever possible.

8. Experiment with New Techniques

SMS is one of the most adaptable marketing tools available to your company. You can run a variety of SMS sales campaigns, including the following:

Sales that happen in a flash

Inventory warnings

Notifications of events

Codes for discounts

Questionnaires

Information on the product

However, don’t limit yourself to these tactics. Experiment with different strategies to determine which ones result in the greatest SMS sales for your business.

SMS is an effective tool for enhancing marketing and sales efforts. However, many organizations are still not taking advantage of the benefits.

The adaptable and scalable SMS text messaging platform from SimpSocial is designed to assist companies of all sizes enhance SMS sales and customer engagement.

Send hundreds of compelling text messages every day by taking advantage of multiple price options and limitless customisation. Plus, to connect mobile customers on a deeper level, you can combine SMS with voice broadcast or an interactive phone experience.

How Do Ecommerce Businesses Use SMS?

MS marketing is an efficient technique to attract, engage, and keep ecommerce customers by cutting through the clutter. It’s scalable, simple to use, and has the potential to make a big difference.

However, the majority of ecommerce businesses aren’t receiving the full rewards – and they have no idea what they’re missing out on.

Today, we’ll go over the benefits of SMS for ecommerce, as well as how to include SMS marketing into your ecommerce strategy and the dos and don’ts of SMS for ecommerce.

Why Should You Include SMS in Your Ecommerce Marketing Plan?

SMS is a direct communication method with near-instant delivery to customers. Here are a few ways SMS marketing can help you grow your online store.

Mobile-friendly. For years, Google has promoted a mobile-first strategy. However, the move from desktop to mobile marketing isn’t limited to mobile-friendly websites. Text messaging is now used more than voice by smartphone owners, making it one of the most popular communication mediums.

Customers have direct, unrestricted access to you. SMS allows ecommerce businesses to reach out to a more specific clientele. With a 98 percent open rate, SMS much beats email, which has a 24 percent open rate. Without having to fight spam or email filters, your message is flying through to thousands of pockets in minutes.

Create a memorable customer experience. Did you know that 55% of customers are willing to pay a higher price for better customer service? When used to communicate with your audience, SMS marketing can help to establish relationships and increase client retention.

How to Use Text Messages in E-Commerce

The two main aim of SMS for ecommerce methods are to increase revenue and improve customer service.

Here are a few ways you may utilize SMS marketing to enhance sales and provide an amazing client experience in your ecommerce business.

Sales and special offers should be promoted.

To grow your subscriber list and enhance sales, send out text messages with exclusive discounts, specials, or product release announcements. You may also use SMS software to target and deliver different messages to different consumer segments by integrating it with your CRM.

Here’s an example of a campaign utilized by a retail store to re-engage clients who hadn’t been in a while.

“Erin, we’ve been missing you around here! On your next visit, you will receive a 10% discount on your purchase. Go to bitly.x.com to learn more. (This offer will expire on August 5th.)”

Here’s why it’s effective:

It’s unique to you. Customers are addressed by name in the message, which also says that they haven’t visited the website in a while. It’s one-of-a-kind and personalized, making it ideal for the more direct SMS communication route.

It’s priceless. Customers receive a one-of-a-kind, beneficial offer that they won’t find anyplace else with the exclusive discount.

It provides a sense of urgency. Including an expiration date also encourages the recipient to act.

Reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts

Are you squandering revenue opportunities?

Nearly 70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts. Users’ interest in your goods might be reignited through text messaging, which can lead to purchases.

Create SMS campaigns that remind people through text of unfulfilled orders and urge them to finish their transaction.

Engage Your Audience in a Novel Way

Texting is an excellent way to stay in touch with customers and establish brand loyalty.

Remember the famous Snapple facts on the back of every bottle? To receive daily facts right to your phone, text REALFACT to Snapple.

Getting creative with SMS may help engage people with your brand, whether it’s a contest or an amusing fact.

Improve the customer service experience

Ecommerce companies have become accustomed to providing quick, painless customer support and communication, and customers demand a smooth experience.

Nothing is more aggravating than being unable to locate your order details, and poor customer service can harm an ecommerce company’s customer lifetime value and longevity.

You may automate a variety of consumer notifications with SMS, including:

When popular things are available again

Confirmations of orders

Notifications of shipment

Updates on the status of orders

Automating customer support functions not only provides clients with real-time information, but it also relieves support employees of some of their responsibilities.

Obtain feedback from customers

Use text messaging to get real-time feedback from your customers. Customer happiness may be measured through SMS platforms like SimpSocial, which allow you to send surveys, polls, and purchase follow-ups.

An example of an SMS poll is as follows:

Thank you for choosing to buy with us! We’d love to hear your feedback. What level of satisfaction do you have with your purchase? A) I am extremely pleased. B) Satisfied to a degree. C) Unsatisfied with the results. (Select A, B, or C as your answer.)

Here’s why it’s effective:

It happens right away. Customers may not get the email for several days when using regular email surveys. You can check in with clients within 24 hours after their purchase using SMS messaging.

It makes you want to do something. The wording is straightforward and easy to understand, and the customer responds in a matter of seconds.

SMS Ecommerce Tip: Know your limits and avoid spamming or overburdening your consumers. To get any messages, subscribers must first opt in.

Here’s a link to our SMS compliance guidance.

Integrate with other tools for multi-media campaigns that are more comprehensive.

SMS isn’t a stand-alone marketing strategy. To construct sophisticated, multichannel marketing campaigns, it interfaces with social media, digital marketing, and call monitoring technologies.

Here are some examples of how you may incorporate SMS marketing into your current ecommerce marketing strategy:

Website: Include a banner on your website and social media pages encouraging people to sign up for your texting service by using a keyword like “JOIN.”

Email marketing efforts should include a text keyword.

Deliver personal messages over the phone and follow up with texting.

Purchase and promote local, toll-free numbers to track campaign results using call tracking.

See how other companies have increased their reach by combining SMS and voice promotions.

Do’s and Don’ts in SMS Ecommerce Marketing

DO reply right away.

Make it worthwhile. Texting is a private matter. Make it worthwhile for your audience to spend their time with you. Provide them with corporate updates, a discount, or information they won’t find anyplace else.

ACT IMMEDIATELY. Texts can be interacted with. Customers should be encouraged to respond.

TEXT THEM ONCE IN A WHILE, NOT EVERY DAY.

Sending rambling mails is not a good idea. You’re not writing a blog post; you’re texting. To avoid unsubscribes, keep the copy short, simple, and to the point.

DO NOT COMMAND THEM TO COMPLETE AN ESSAY. All responses should be brief and simple — no more than a few words.

5 Best Practices for Creating a Survey with Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

You spend a lot of time trying to figure out what your consumers want and need by asking for input, issuing surveys, and observing their behavior.

However, the most effective technique to discover more about your clients is to simply ask them.

Office employees from the millennial generation

Surveys provide valuable input to your business, allowing you to improve customer happiness and loyalty while also demonstrating to customers that their opinions count.

Traditional surveys are made easier and more convenient with interactive voice response (IVR) polls. They’re simple to set up and provide a seamless experience for receivers. Participants interact with the survey by a quick keypress or vocal answer rather than filling out obtrusive internet surveys.

Today, we’ll go over the main advantages of IVR surveys, the many types of IVR surveys you can use right now, and IVR survey best practices to ensure you get the most accurate data.

The Advantages of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Surveys

IVR stands for interactive voice response, and it is a telephone system that recognizes, segments, and directs calls. Participants in IVR surveys respond to a sequence of automated, preset questions using speech recognition technology or a keypad.

IVR surveys provide various advantages over traditional survey methods:

They’re simple to implement, inexpensive, and don’t require a lot of consumer information to get started. In addition, IVR surveys are much less expensive than engaging personnel to conduct live surveys.

Using automated IVR surveys, you may reach a larger audience and get responses faster than using postal or email surveys.

Organizations may rapidly record and act on consumer feedback using the findings of IVR surveys. If you’re conducting a customer service survey, for example, you may track survey findings in real time and allocate issues to the appropriate department or team as needed, ensuring that bad customer experiences are addressed swiftly before they become a problem.

Case Study of an IVR Survey

QuesGen Systems was testing the efficacy of medicines in impoverished nations with OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical firm formed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They needed a mechanism to swiftly acquire large amounts of data from poorer countries. They were able to collect massive amounts of data in real-time using an IVR survey, which was significantly faster than typical paper surveys or SMS.

The whole case study can be seen here.

IVR Surveys: What Are They and How Do They Work?

IVR surveys can be modified in hundreds of ways to match your business and organizational demands, and IVR surveys can be used in a variety of ways. The following are some examples of IVR surveys:

Prospects or customers are invited to participate in an inbound IVR survey (this can be sent via an email, letter, or printed marketing material).

Ideal for: Long-term customer satisfaction programs centered on a single, constant phone line.

Call Transfer IVR Survey: Also known as post-call IVR surveys, these campaigns offer clients to participate at the beginning of the contact and then transfer them to a pre-recorded survey after their transaction or service call is completed.

Ideal for: Getting quick, top-of-mind customer feedback, analyzing customer care calls, or getting feedback on a single transaction.

Send voice broadcast messages to a specific population requesting them to participate in a survey via outbound IVR.

Political and community surveys are ideal.

IVR Hybrid: Individuals are invited to engage in an automated IVR survey by a live person.

Ideal for: Finding a cost-effective balance between live surveys and interactive voice response.

More IVR case studies can be found here.

Best Practices for IVR Surveys

If you want your customers to react to an interactive voice response survey, you’ll need more than cutting-edge technology. The seven recommended practices listed below will assist you in creating interesting IVR surveys that yield the desired results.

1. Determine the purpose of your IVR survey.

Your customers will rapidly abandon your survey if it isn’t well-designed. A focused, precise topic keeps your survey on track and produces unmistakable findings.

Take a time to think about your objectives before you start designing your survey. What do you hope to get out of the survey?

The first thought that comes to mind is to start brainstorming survey questions. Instead, consider the questions you’re seeking for:

Our customers are looking for a product of type “X.”

When ____, they become irritated.

The cornerstone of your IVR survey is the list of answers. Answers will help you test your hypothesis and give precise, distinctive solutions that can help you achieve your higher goal.

2. Create IVR questions that are specific to you.

Vague, generic queries can easily perplex your clients and jeopardize your results. The attention span of your audience is limited. Each question takes up significant space in your survey, and broad, general questions might skew survey findings. Make sure your queries are accurate and crafted with a specific aim in mind while writing your IVR script. Assume you wish to assess the effectiveness of your customer service. “Was your agent knowledgeable and helpful?” and “Was your agent knowledgeable and helpful?” are two separate questions. What if they were well-informed yet obnoxious? To gather precise data, make sure the questions are unambiguous and without ambiguity.

3. Keep it succinct and to the point.

Customers are more likely to abandon a survey if it is too long. Keep the survey short to encourage people to complete it. Respondents should take no more than five minutes to complete a survey (post-call surveys should be two to three minutes in length). Providing an estimate of how long it will take to complete the survey at the start of the call can also assist boost response rates.

Here are a few pointers on how to keep your IVR survey questions succinct while still having enough to reach your goal:

To increase the response rate, place the crucial questions near the start of the survey.

Break down large concepts into smaller questions: Open-ended questions can yield a wealth of qualitative information. Customers may find them overwhelming, resulting in reduced response rates. (In addition, evaluating the data takes time.)

Make it easy for your audience to respond to open-ended questions by breaking them down into organized responses.

If you’re trying to figure out how many times a respondent has bought from you, for example, give them ordered answers like “Press zero for never, one for once, and two for twice.”

4. Make Use of the Correct Scale

After you’ve chosen your questions, you’ll need to figure out how to measure your results.

Extreme responses, such as “extremely great” or “very horrible,” are rarely given in surveys.

When using a five-point scale, the majority of replies will be within three points of one another, limiting variability and potentially leading to ambiguous results. Depending on your questions, you may wish to use a larger scale to obtain more precise results.

5. Use Clear, Simple Language

Clear phrasing reduces friction in the process and encourages respondents to complete the survey.

Remove any difficult terminology or industry jargon from your survey if you want the best results. (This is particularly important when conducting political polls.)

Check out these ten ideas for raising funds for your political campaign.

6. Plan Out Your Survey Complexity-based questions

By completing your survey, your customers are doing you a service. So make it simple to finish!

Examine the survey’s structure after you’ve picked your questions. Begin with short, uncomplicated questions and work your way up to more difficult ones. Don’t jump around from section to section, and combine questions that are related together.

7. Make the Most of Your Send Time

Consider when your interactive voice response survey will be sent out.

Send it when your consumers are available to participate to receive the best response. These times will vary every business, and the best time will be determined by your target audience’s demographics.

Send the poll during the day around a typical child’s nap time, for example, if you’re targeting stay-at-home mothers. Sending the survey after work hours, on the other hand, will earn you the best response rate if you’re targeting career professionals.

8. Run a small segment of your survey to see if it works.

Don’t send out the survey to the general public without first testing it. Run a test with a small client segment and evaluate the results to see if there are any gaps.

Is there a particular question where the majority of individuals abandon the survey? Is it possible to improve or clarify the questions in order to generate more responses? Before delivering the survey to your full audience, iterate as needed.

10 Fantastic SMS Marketing Strategies That Work

Smart marketers recognize the value of SMS in driving more clicks, reactions, and revenues from their campaigns.

This is because SMS has a 98 percent open rate and is roughly eight times more likely than email to elicit a response.

Customers want you to respond to them via text messaging. In reality, 85 percent of customers want to receive text messages from companies and be able to respond.

While SMS marketing offers a lot of possibilities, one bad move can easily irritate your audience and undermine your campaign.

Stay tuned for a list of 10 SMS marketing tips that truly work

SMS Marketing Can Help You Build Stronger Relationships

Why are SMS messages so successful?

Unlike other marketing channels, the text message inbox is primarily reserved for family, friends, and intimate contacts, and it is free of unsolicited messages.

It’s a privilege when a consumer lets you into a personal area like this.

Commercial or “junk” email, phone calls, and direct mail are all expected by consumers, but SMS messages are not. As a marketer, it’s critical to recognize and respect the importance of SMS communications.

10 SMS Marketing Tips to Keep Customers Engaged

It’s critical to plan out your SMS marketing strategy before sending any messages if you want to see results from your campaigns. Texts that are badly worded or timed can irritate customers, reflect negatively on your business, and lead to unsubscribes.

Follow these 10 SMS marketing tips to avoid abusing this great tool:

1. Create a List of Qualified Candidates

Building a contact list is the first stage in any SMS marketing strategy. On the other hand, you don’t want just anyone on this list. You want subscribers that are “qualified” – those who are really interested in getting material, offers, and promotions.

What’s the best way to get qualified subscribers? By encouraging people to freely opt in to your marketing.

A subscriber must text a keyword to a short number to opt in to an SMS marketing campaign. If you wanted someone to join your mailing list, for example, you could tell them to “Text JOIN to 1234.”

The greatest strategy to get people to sign up for your short code is to promote it through other media. You should give opt-in instructions and attract them to join. The more places you advertise your SMS campaign, the bigger the list you’ll get.

You may also post your adverts in strategic locations to reach the people who are most interested in your company. Here are some suggestions for getting the word out about your SMS campaign:

At the bottom of every marketing email, include opt-in instructions. This method allows you to develop a list of contacts who will pay special attention to your communications and content.

Use social media to share your images. Customers and prospects who follow you on social media are a devoted bunch. Using branded posts and images, get them to opt in.

Use banners on your website to promote your business. Display SMS campaign adverts prominently on your website banners. Visitors that come on a regular basis will notice and join.

Make a competition. Do you need to entice people to participate in your first SMS campaign? Offer a small discount to those who sign up, and post this information wherever you normally offer deals and promotions.

Display advertisements in your physical location. Opt-in directions can be shown via posters, leaflets, banners, and table tents. Place them in high-traffic places to ensure that they get the most attention.

Make use of digital advertisements. Prospects and consumers should see digital ads with opt-in instructions. To get their attention, give them a tiny incentive to join.

2. Create Subscriber Segments

Because SMS messages are personal, you’ll want to customize them for different consumer groups.

You can divide your contact list into groups based on demographics, region, and interests, depending on your campaign goals.

Using secondary Keywords is a simple approach to segment subscribers. You can set up an auto-reply that asks contacts to segment themselves with a secondary keyword when they opt in to your campaign with a main keyword.

Let’s pretend you own a winery called The Grape Escape. You want to send distinct SMS marketing messages to three different types of customers: wine enthusiasts, cheese lovers, and event planners. You might invite a contact to segregate themselves when they opt-in to your list by sending them the following message:

“Thank you for signing up to receive The Grape Escape’s mails. Text WINE for wine discounts, CHEESE for cheese specials, and EVENT for event discounts. To cancel, reply STOP.”

You can segment your contacts based on how they respond to this message in your campaign. This manner, you can send relevant information to each group while also giving unintentional subscribers an opportunity to unsubscribe.

3. Deliver unique and significant value

You don’t want to bombard your customers with irritating messages and low-value offers because SMS texts are personal. More than any other marketing channel, SMS marketing campaigns should offer deep discounts and high-value content.

Treat your SMS subscribers with the respect they deserve. Give them first access to promotions, offer them exclusive event invitations, and deliver content that isn’t available to your regular customers. Offering exclusivity will reduce unsubscribes and encourage more people to sign up.

Sending shareable, interesting material via SMS can also help humanize your brand. Games, quizzes, one-on-one conversations, and other interactive material make you more appealing to your audience while also giving you with crucial customer information.

4. Recognize and reward loyalty

Your SMS contacts have gone above and beyond to engage with your brand and execute the actions you desire. So why not give them tiers of discounts, promos, or content as a reward?

The longer someone stays on the list, the greater the discount. Customers will be more likely to stick around as the value of list membership increases over time.

5. Create messages that are clear and concise.

With SMS, you only have a limited number of characters to convey your message. Make sure to use clear and succinct wording so that subscribers can recognize the value you’re offering right away.

When creating SMS marketing messages, keep these criteria in mind.

Make a value statement right away. Tell your subscribers right immediately what they’ll get. Make your offer in the first sentence, not the last.

Use straightforward language. Avoid using flowery or convoluted terminology. Use simple language and don’t use complex phrases to convey your message.

Include a call to action in your message. The next action you want your subscriber to perform should be included in every message. Do you want a discount if they “Show this text,” “Use promo code at checkout,” or “Click here”? Let them know, and if required, offer a shorter link.

Make good use of keywords. Your keywords should be brief, simple to remember, and easy to spell. Avoid using keywords that are likely to be autocorrected. To accommodate misspellings, set up supplementary keywords with the same auto-reply.

Be open and honest. When a contact opts in, choose the frequency and number of messages you’ll send.

6. Make Your Message Cohesive Send Goals and Times

It’s all about the timing when it comes to SMS marketing.

Your target audience does not want to be inundated with texts. Non-marketing communications (alerts, reminders, and notifications) can be sent more frequently, but promotional communications should be limited to one per week at first.

Of course, you can gradually adjust the cadence to find the appropriate balance for your list. To make the opt-in worthwhile for your audience, your messages should have a clear, timely objective.

If you want your SMS messages to have the most impact, the day of the week is also important. Mondays, rush hour, early mornings, and late nights should all be avoided. Subscribers may be disturbed if they receive messages at certain times.

When planning your SMS marketing campaigns, keep the following guidelines in mind:

Send messages before lunch to encourage individuals to stop by your business, workplace, or website during their lunch break.

Send messages on Thursdays and Fridays from 2-5 p.m. to increase weekend traffic.

To boost event attendance, send reminders and special offers at regular intervals beginning a few weeks before the big day.

One to two weeks before customers need to act, send seasonal and holiday marketing messages.

7. Demonstrate a sense of urgency

Instead of a strict deadline, consider setting up an expiration window. As a result, each contact has the same number of days to take advantage of your offer, and late subscribers have plenty of time to do so.

8. Make Your Campaigns More Effective

You should continually seek to improve your marketing campaign, just like any other. To maximize your return on investment and gather data for future initiatives, you should:

A/B comparison. Sending two versions of an SMS message to two groups allows you to test different components of the message. When the campaign is over, look at the results to discover which one did the best. To get precise results, only update one attribute at a time.

UTM codes are used to track links. UTM codes can be used to track the click-through rate of distinct segments. These are hyperlinks that connect to the same webpage but appear differently in your analytics system, allowing you to see who has clicked the most.

Provide promo codes that are unique. Send different discount codes to different segments to discover which one performs the best.

9. Keep track of your results.

Calculating a few key performance indicators will give you an idea of how successful your SMS campaign was and where you should make changes for future campaigns.

Measure the following campaign KPIs to see if your SMS efforts are paying off:

Rate of redemption. The difference between the number of people who redeemed an offer and those who received a campaign. This KPI allows you to determine how appealing your offer is.

The percentage of people who click on an advertisement. If you’re running a campaign, this just applies to you.

10. Select the Most Appropriate SMS Marketing Service

If your clients are entrusting you with invading their inbox with SMS messages, you must provide an amazing

experience by utilizing a trustworthy SMS marketing platform.

SimpSocial’s SMS marketing service includes everything you’ll need to run a successful SMS campaign.

You can use SimpSocial’s SMS marketing solution to:

In only a few minutes, you can mass SMS your entire audience. There are no setup costs or sales interactions necessary.

To save time, automate text messages. Set up recurrent text messages and reminders to keep your users’ attention, and plan them to send at the most convenient time for them.

You can text or call from any phone number. Rent textable numbers or generate outgoing texts from a phone call.

Enhance your workflow with innovative features. SimpSocial’s API integration allows developers to create complicated message sequences.

Customize your messages to your heart’s content. To personalize messages, quickly add dynamic variables.

Create a text list. To opt in to text communication, rent and market text keywords.

Text communications may be easily managed. To better regulate your text cadence, create lists and establish text restrictions. From the SimpSocial platform, you may manage auto-replies.

Bring in your CRM contact list. CallFire interfaces with various CRM systems, making it easier than ever to build your list and schedule SMS.

How can you improve your email marketing conversion rate?

It’s not easy to convert website visitors into consumers. Your visitors only have so much time and attention to provide, and your competitors are striving for it all. Email marketing has been shown to enhance conversion rates, but it must be done strategically to maximize its impact and cut through the clutter that your audiences face when looking for solutions to their business problems.

con
How can you improve your email marketing approach so that your audience is more likely to engage with your team at the correct moment and convert? The following guidelines will give a foundation for evaluating your email marketing strategy and revisiting best practices.

Segmentation of data

You must begin with segmentation in order to design an email strategy that will enhance conversion rates. Your chances of conversion are lower if your emails are sent to the incorrect person at the wrong time than if the same individual receives a message at the proper time in their purchase process. Segment your database’s leads by categories such as lead source, material downloaded, industry, or company size before you start sending messages at scale. These categories will assist you in customizing your content so that your email recipients are more responsive to your message.

The content

You can solve for the content piece of the email marketing equation once your audience has been properly classified. As you work to improve your email conversion rate, it’s critical to create content that’s both relevant and timely. Take the time to craft messaging that is appropriate for the target demographic. If someone has downloaded a white paper or seen a video, mention it in your messages to them. Ask them a question about their ideas on the subject, and then suggest future steps in the same direction.

Create templates that include the recipient’s first name, company name, and, if relevant, their title. This tailored approach demonstrates that you care about their process and success as they consider options.

Also, without employing gimmicks or being deceptive, utilize subject lines that are likely to be opened. No one wants to be duped into opening an email, so compelling subject lines should avoid trickery. You can display personality and use witty terminology while remaining appropriate and in accordance with your audience’s preferences. Above all, remember that the subject line is an excellent place to be straightforward and stand out from the crowd.

Expected and comprehensible

Do your email recipients anticipate you to send them messages? To avoid ending up in spam folders, use your email marketing software’s double opt-in functionality. Because you desire an engaged email audience, an unsubscribe link should be prominent. Individuals who self-select out of receiving your messages are preferable to email recipients who are irrelevant. Keep your to-do list up to date and active!

In terms of practicality, make sure your messages are easily digestible. Formatting should not be an afterthought when creating messaging for your audience; it should be at the heart of your strategy. Use mobile-friendly and aesthetically pleasing email templates to enhance conversion rates. Pay attention to how margins, white space, and embedded pictures are presented. Ascertain that the aesthetic is also readable in plain text.

Triggers for behavior

Automate communications based on audience behavior with your marketing automation software. Create triggers in your automation system to send contacts to different communication buckets based on how they interact with your content.

If you offer your leads the opportunity, they will tell you what they want from you. Discounts, customer reviews, and other giveaways are all excellent ways to entice customers to connect. As they take activities that indicate where they are in the buying cycle, automate their next step and the new segment.

Conversational AI-based sales enablement products, like as SimpSocial’s AI Assistant, can help enhance lead scoring for leads in marketing automation software like Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua, and are easily linked with Salesforce.

Always do tests

If AEs and SDRs should be closing all of the time, your marketing team should be testing all of the time. A/B tests are highly useful for increasing conversion rates because they allow you to dig down on the method that converts leads the best. Experiment with subject lines, the day of the week and time of day sent, and even the sender’s name. Conduct a bold test, such as simply sending text-based emails, if you’re seeking to make substantial changes. Allow the results of these tests to help you in how you implement these parts of your email marketing strategy in order to maximize audience engagement.

Leaving some final thoughts

In order to construct a lead generation machine, you’ll need to use email marketing. You can boost your email marketing efforts by focusing on distributing high-quality content to the relevant individuals and harnessing the power of your email and marketing automation platforms. As a result, you’ll understand more about your audience than your competitors, which is exactly what you need to boost conversion rates.

Using marketing automation solutions to manage email communications and lead scoring, such as SimpSocial, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and Salesforce, helps ensure that you are engaging the most important leads.

This is a learning process, so be patient and adaptable as you figure out how to engage your target audience most effectively. Your clients will appreciate your sincere efforts to meet them where they are in the buying cycle, and your strategy should work well.

There are six reports that can help you enhance your sales numbers.

Improving what you measure will help you achieve better results. Fortunately, we have mechanisms in place to assist us in doing so effectively. CRM dashboards may be used to alter how we think about business and focus our goals by presenting data in granular detail in real time. There are a plethora of reports you can run and provide in dashboard format, but the six report ideas below will help you enhance your sales metrics and reinforce the habits that propel your team forward.

Reports on sales progress

These reports provide critical sales data that illustrate how individuals and teams are doing in terms of meeting quarterly and weekly targets.

1. Sales metrics by individual

Create a leaderboard to track reps’ progress over the course of the week. Demos set should be the major measure shown to SDRs, while revenue linked with closed sales should be shown to AEs. Displaying this report on the team dashboard for all to view promotes team accountability and gives basic information about the team’s weekly progress.

2. Expected results

Make a report that illustrates the team’s progress in relation to the quarterly revenue forecast. The report should immediately update and present the accurate figure on a dashboard for the team to see when the team updates the CRM with closed / won opportunities. Because the sales staff will be able to see how they are contributing to the broader goal, this statistic should be both useful and inspiring. You’ll always be able to see where your team is at as a manager, and you’ll be able to provide updates and coaching as needed.

3. Daily demonstrations

Demonstrations are a critical component of pipeline health. A report that illustrates the daily trend of demos held is useful in determining how well the funnel is working. Closed won agreements will suffer if the demos held number is heading downward. Keep an eye on this number to ensure that your funnel is being filled with good prospects who have a strong probability of becoming customers.

Reports of errors

It’s critical to keep track of sales indicators that both help and hinder your final goal. As they switch between various sales activities such as providing demos, documenting activity within CRM records, and learning about new product features, sales agents are busy and make typical blunders.

Some of these mistakes can have serious implications, such as prolonged deal cycles, missing follow-up, and lost revenue. You can use these reports to help your team spot faults and follow up on earlier losses.

4. Last quarter was closed / lost

When a sales agent closes an opportunity as lost, it is common for them to never return to it. Reps can be reminded to follow up if the customer’s decision to not move further is still correct by providing a report for them that allows them to identify which opportunities were lost 90 days ago. Creating a report like this encourages good selling practices and leads to some wonderful win backs.

5. Possibilities for aging

Poor CRM cleanliness leads to inaccurate pipelines and jeopardizes your forecasting capabilities. Create a report that identifies opportunities that are still in the pipeline but have not advanced through the phases of the sales process within your deal cycle time frame. Sales reps and managers should review this report on a weekly basis to ensure that forecasting is accurate and pipelines are realistic.

6. There is no next step.

Opportunities that lack a next step status and deadline are more likely to be neglected. These opportunity records should be recognized and rectified so that the sales rep is reminded to act and engage with the prospect in order to increase conversion.

Examine the report.

Salespeople generate a lot of information. Revenue is the ultimate data point, but there are many moving parts that require your attention along the road. These fine-grained aspects of the sales process are critical. At all times, the spotlight on these operational aspects should be sharp and focused.

Managers that focus on operational details have a competitive advantage. You’ll be able to spot issues early on, before they become unmanageable and result in severe consequences such as missed sales targets. You’ll also be aware of the current health of the company, reducing the number of unknowns in terms of team performance and deal momentum.

The reporting infrastructure should be tweaked to give the most accurate image of the future based on current activity. Consider how you might extract insights that provide you foresight when you develop your suite of reports to help you track the metrics that matter. As your company grows, you may find that the sales data you’ve been tracking are no longer relevant. You can assist your team in achieving success by keeping these reports current.

How to Select the Most Appropriate Sales Automation Software

You understand the value of sales automation software because it saves you time, money, and effort. You won’t have to worry about inputting that lead’s information into your CRM, finding that customer testimonial, or wasting time attempting to book a meeting with a lead if you use sales automation software. However, it appears that there are numerous sales automation tools available. How do you pick the best one?

This guide will help you through the stages of selecting the best sales automation software, including what to evaluate, who to involve, and what aspects to consider.

When it comes to sales automation software, what should you consider?

The initial step in this procedure is to concentrate on your company’s needs and objectives. Sales automation software can be beneficial to your company, but only if it has the necessary features. You require a solution that enables you and your team to complete tasks.

“What tasks does my team need to execute, and how might sales automation software assist them in doing so?” This activity will help you narrow down the features you’ll be looking for. Having a shortlist of features may seem paradoxical, yet having too many features might be distracting. You’ll be able to focus more on getting your task done if you use fewer features.

You should also consider your team’s procedures. Current procedures should be made more efficient by sales automation software, but it must also accommodate them to some level to guarantee team buy-in.

What Functions Do You Require?

After you’ve considered your demands and objectives, consider what features you’ll require in sales automation software to make it efficient and useful.

The ability to work together is crucial. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where data silos exist. Contact information for a client should only be entered once, but it should be available to anybody who needs it. Furthermore, data on opportunities and leads should be easily accessible. Nobody wants to lose money because a salesperson couldn’t discover a suitable opportunity or because a lead was misclassified.

Sales automation software should also make it easier for salespeople and managers to accomplish their tasks. Email templates, reporting, and automated contact generation, deal formation, and deal administration all aid in the effective completion of repeated yet critical duties.

Locate a Framework That Is Both Flexible and Customizable.

It’s important to remember that your sales automation software won’t exist in a vacuum. It’ll have to work well with the rest of your company’s IT stack.

You’ll need to discover a solution that works with all of your other programs. As a result, whichever provider you choose must be able to provide integration capabilities (which is not the case for everyone).

Speak with your sales team as well as your IT staff to determine which programs you need to integrate. The sales team can tell you about the programs they use on a daily basis, and the IT department can tell you about other corporate software that would need to be integrated into a sales automation solution.

Read the Testimonials

It’s time to start evaluating sales automation software once you’ve a clearer understanding of your requirements. Reading software reviews is a fantastic place to start in this regard.

Talk to your peers at other organizations that are similar to yours (reviews from a lot larger or smaller firm won’t help much because their requirements and goals will be different than yours). You may also find a plethora of web reviews that can help you determine whether or not a particular solution is successful.

Make a matrix of vendor comparisons.

It’s time to develop a vendor comparison matrix, which is an orderly way to examine whether a sales automation software vendor is the correct fit now that you know what you’re looking for and which software might match your needs.

To create such a matrix, start by writing out your needs. Keep in mind the term “requirement”—you must evaluate whether a feature is absolutely vital or only a “good to have.” Evaluate how well a vendor satisfies your needs based on reviews or requests for proposals.

Obtain employee buy-in and create a plan of action

The adoption of software by employees is critical. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles new software has if employees don’t use it. Employee adoption of new software is typically poor because employees do not see the benefit of the solution. Explaining why it’s important and how it can assist them do their jobs can increase adoption.

The final stage in selecting sales automation software is to create a plan for implementation. An execution plan outlines the steps you must take, who is responsible for them, and when they must be completed. An execution plan keeps you on track and maintains the software selection process under control.

What Should You Do With Low-Quality Leads?

This is the first of two parts in a two-part series. The first part of this article discusses what to do with your low-quality leads. Part two goes over how to collaborate with your SimpSocial Customer Outcomes Manager to get the best results. Keep an eye out for next week’s episode!

Many of our customers have told us that they want our Intelligent Virtual Assistants to work all of their leads, even if they know they’re low-quality. It can be difficult to get results with these leads, but we’ve learned a lot along the way.

Here are three simple steps to ensure that we are working your leads as effectively as possible and, as a result, getting the best results possible.

#1 Examine your lead segmentation strategy.

The first step is to assess how you go about identifying and working leads for work. Are you selecting the best SimpSocial skill for each lead bucket with care?

Consider the following questions: Are your leads’ backgrounds consistent with the descriptions of each skill in our articles? Are your objectives in line with the conversation’s direction? Are you rejecting leads based on certain characteristics, such as the ones listed below?

When your Marketing Automation System (MAS) or reps emailed you previously, it bounced.

You may have previously unsubscribed or marked your emails as spam.

The “Created Date” is older than two years, or the “Last Activity Date” is older than 100 days.

A representative has recently or is currently disqualifying you.

At the moment, I’m working on a new project.

Existing Clients

Resellers or Partners

Accounts that aren’t in your ideal customer profile should be targeted (ICP)

Leads in these categories, if not carefully segmented and targeted, may appear unhealthy, negatively impacting your results. It’s a good idea to think about what you know about your leads and target them appropriately.

#2 Take a look at the Lead Quality Report.

The second step is to review the Lead Quality Report in your SimpSocial dashboard to determine which leads may require additional nurturing before being worked by your Intelligent Virtual Assistants:

On the right, you can see our healthy lead thresholds. We understand that no one has 100 percent healthy leads in their various systems, but there comes a point where continuing to email low-quality leads is too risky. On the right-hand side of each health scale, this is indicated (i.e. no more than 5 percent of your overall lead volume should bounce). To put it another way, if you see red, you should be aware that something requires your attention.

Most of the time, all you need to do is educate a specific segment of leads before contacting them with your Intelligent Virtual Assistant. When leads bounce, unsubscribe, or mark our emails as spam, they’re telling us they’re not ready for sales, and thus aren’t ready for SimpSocial. They are, however, ideal for your Marketing Automation System.

Use your MAS to further educate your leads about your product or service and warm them up. You should be able to send content-rich emails with images, pricing and discounts, and links using your MAS. This is ideal for informing your leads and piqueing their interest in your product.

Your MAS can be used to direct leads to consumer content or webinars. These actions generate organic leads for MQL and prepare them for SimpSocial outreach. This is a perfect scenario.

However, we recognize that not every situation is ideal. If you don’t have a MAS, you could use a free/low-cost solution like MailChimp for manual uploads, or you could use SimpSocial’s Drive Action Standalone conversations to encourage your leads to consume your content or attend your events.

If you want to use SimpSocial to drive content consumption rather than sales conversations, you’ll need to filter and suppress bounced email addresses, leads who say they don’t want to be emailed (in writing or over the phone), and those who opted in to your outreach more than 270 days ago.

You should set up an ongoing cadence of adding unconverted leads into SimpSocial every few months, regardless of whether you use MailChimp, a MAS, or SimpSocial to drive content consumption. You can do this with conversation types that refer back to the nurturing emails you sent, such as Reengage (if nurtured by MAS 3 months ago), Sales Attempted Contacts (if DQd or unconverted by Sales recently), or Dual Outreach (if contacted in any way recently without converting). SimpSocial then checks in to see if they’re ready to talk about sales now.

#3 Figure out where your low-quality leads are coming from.

The third step is to pinpoint the common source, list, or campaign that is supplying your account with the lowest-quality leads.

Begin by concentrating on the metrics that are red or cause the most concern. Hover your mouse over the red bars to see what’s going on. Then click “View Leads” to see if any of them share a Lead Source value or a campaign name. If you can find a common source, weigh the benefits and drawbacks of continuing to contact those leads or considering putting them through a MAS nurture stream before re-entering them into SimpSocial.

You can also use the “Compare” button to see unhealthy metrics across conversations, lead sources, client lists, and other areas to see which ones contribute to the most unhealthy leads. To identify contributors on a relative basis, percentage metrics can be selected from the comparison report (e.g. which lead source has the highest percentage of leads unsubscribing).

If you’re getting a lot of bounces from a paid source or a partner, you should try contacting them and asking for compensation, exclusivity, or newer leads.

Tandem Technology: How Similar Technologies Collaborate to Increase Revenue

There’s no denying that technology is changing how revenue-generating companies approach their markets. Marketing and sales technology has been thoroughly tested since 2012 in the hopes of unlocking revenue-growth potential. The results have been extraordinary, as Salespeople and Marketers now have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t, allowing them to learn faster and develop better strategies.

However, today’s problem is that businesses are inundated with a never-ending stream of solutions that claim to empower and innovate their sales and marketing teams. When evaluating technology partners, this makes for a stressful decision-making process.

In previous years, the $64,000 question has been which marketing or sales technology is best suited for your company. Nowadays, the better question is which technology combination is best suited for your company. More valuable than gold is the pursuit of a concert of sophisticated solutions that complement each other as well as your people.

What Will Marketing and Sales Technology Look Like in the Future?

The pursuit of efficiency is never-ending in today’s environment, and it is ultimately what binds our teams to technology. Organizations will inevitably demand that these tools integrate seamlessly into their tech stack in order to derive maximum value. Three trends, according to marketing guru Scott Brinker, will define the Second Golden Age of Martech:

Technology ecosystems will shift from all-in-one or best-of-breed solutions to open platforms that welcome third-party applications. This will increase the demand for technology integrations that are both reliable and secure.

Both SaaS and professional services firms will focus on integrating technology and maximizing its utility, so their offerings will merge.

As the demand for customization grows, businesses will be forced to digitally transform.

Many organizations are already noticing and reacting to these trends. People are recognizing the value of using a variety of tools to achieve a common goal.

Sales, for example, is widely regarded as a numbers game in which a certain percentage of leads will convert. As the theory goes, the more leads you have, the more conversions you’ll have. What happens, however, when salespeople are unable to keep up with the volume of leads generated? Before their capacity is reached, sales representatives can only engage with so many potential customers.

Thankfully, thanks to recent technological advancements in intelligent automation, salespeople can now reach an exponentially larger number of prospects while maintaining a personal touch.

Yes, some will argue that business is done between people rather than through technology. That is correct. This is why it’s critical for businesses to implement technologies that automate repetitive tasks so that salespeople can focus on building trust, relationships, and closing deals.

What Organizations Are Doing to Adopt These Trends

Sales engagement tools like Outreach or SalesLoft, combined with SimpSocial’s Intelligent Virtual Assistants, are one example of how to do this.

Outbound selling tools like Outreach and SalesLoft are great because they help sales reps manage their workflow and are built to handle content-heavy messages. Salespeople can use these tools to warm up a large list of prospects by using content from their Marketing and Sales enablement teams.

SimpSocial, on the other hand, is designed to automate lead qualification on a large scale and works best when the lead and the organization already have some sort of relationship (e.g. content consumption, demo request, virtual event attendance). The Intelligent Virtual Assistant recognizes hot leads and handraisers on its own and passes them along to Salespeople for a meeting. For inbound and outbound sales, this combination of technology and business professionals is a highly effective strategy.

Of course, many businesses use SimpSocial in conjunction with Outreach or SalesLoft to accelerate their digital transition. They utilize SimpSocial to select prospects that want more information and then add them to an Outreach or SalesLoft campaign so the sales agent may work with them until a meeting is set up.

Another method is to use SimpSocial to send messages to leads who haven’t engaged with one of these campaigns. Because the IVA’s messaging is intended to acknowledge a rep’s earlier attempts, it’s frequently utilized to create the connection between these tools and SimpSocial. An Outreach or SalesLoft campaign customized to acknowledge the SimpSocial Sales AI Assistant could be used in the same way.

These are just a few ways that businesses can use technology to supplement their revenue-generating teams. There is currently a lot of sales and marketing technology available, and this industry will continue to expand as the demand for more effective revenue generation grows.

People-power is no longer a constraint for sales and marketing teams. Organizations can guide customers through the buying process on a massive scale using a combination of tools. This frees up employees to focus on what they do best: engaging in meaningful conversations with leads, prospects, and customers.

Sales managers frequently instruct their employees to “keep it simple.” In this case, the best way to keep things simple is to provide your teams with the most impactful combination of technology. When it comes to putting together a tech stack to boost revenue, less is more.

What Is an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, and How Can It Benefit Your Company?

This article was first published in Smart Selling Tools, and it is reprinted with the author’s permission. The piece has since been updated to reflect technological advancements.

We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been made possible by the convergence of connectivity, data, and processing power. While we are only scratching the surface of what AI can do, we are seeing an increasing number of businesses – from small startups to large corporations – offering specialized AI applications.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are a type of specialized AI that has recently gained a lot of traction. But what is an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, exactly?

Continue reading to learn more about what an Intelligent Virtual Assistant is and how businesses can use it to improve efficiency and revenue growth.

What Is an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, and How Does It Work?

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are the next generation of intelligent automation, allowing businesses to scale personal interactions in order to attract, acquire, and retain customers.

IVAs allow businesses to provide a personalized experience to all of their contacts, leads, and customers. The ability to communicate in a human-like manner represents a significant advancement over how businesses have previously interacted with contacts, which has been limited by employee capacity or largely generic mass email programs up until recently.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation are essential components of an Intelligent Virtual Assistant (NLG). This, according to Dr. Sid Reddy, SimpSocial’s Chief Scientist, entails having a system that precisely classifies intents and entities. By intent, we mean the end-goal user’s – what is the customer trying to accomplish? That intent’s context is provided by the entity. In other words, an entity is the data that is useful in responding to the user’s request.

Machine learning, which refers to a computer’s ability to learn without being explicitly programmed and become “smarter” as more information is received, is another important component of an IVA. Human languages are incredibly complex – whether you speak English, Spanish, Mandarin, or any of the world’s 6,000+ languages, language is nuanced and ever-changing.

Consider the various methods for requesting information. “Where are you located?” I might inquire if I need to get to a specific restaurant. or “Can you tell me your address?” or even “Can you tell me where I can find you?” Even if the entities differ, all of the variations of this question have the same intent. If you’re looking for an AI solution that can deliver human-like messages, look for applications that include machine learning, natural language understanding, and natural language generation.

In addition, you might want to inquire if potential IVA providers:

Have a lot of information? (information shared by people in conversations). This data will be used by an AI solution, such as an Intelligent Virtual Assistant, to improve language understanding and generation while also providing useful analytics.

Allow you to customize interactions and conversations to some extent.

Integrate with your current IT infrastructure. If you already have a CRM system or a marketing automation tool, make sure the IVA solution you’re considering will integrate with it so you can have a single source of data.

Incorporating Intelligent Virtual Assistants into the Workplace

To optimize key functions, businesses of all sizes and industries are turning to AI, intelligent automation, and specifically Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Sales is one traditional aspect of business that is getting a technological boost. Rather than relying on your workforce to reach out and follow up with interested prospects, an Augmented Workforce, which combines IVAs and people, automates this important but time-consuming task.

It’s important to remember that using an IVA to handle initial contact and lead engagement does not replace employees; rather, it allows them to better manage their time. Sales reps spend only 37% of their time selling, according to InsideSales.com. This means that the majority of a Salesperson’s time is spent on activities that do not generate revenue, such as administrative tasks (dealing with internal policies and approvals) and researching target accounts and contacts. Your Salespeople will be able to focus on high-value work that they actually enjoy by automating these repetitive tasks.

As customer expectations for prompt, courteous, and personalized communications rise, businesses must meet or exceed those expectations to earn the customer’s business. It only makes sense to invest in a solution that can deliver that much-desired prompt, personalized attention at a large scale.

The good news is that we’ve arrived at a point where we can use Intelligent Virtual Assistants to make customers feel as if they’re being heard and their needs are being met. That’s a competitive advantage your company can’t afford to overlook.

SimpSocial Takes Pride in Serving Our Automobile Dealerships

With our Intelligent Virtual Assistants, SimpSocial is happy to assist and support our auto dealership customers across the country, from making a lasting impact with sales prospects to cultivating lifelong service customers (IVAs).

SimpSocial continues to provide service to over 1,000 dealerships and 25 auto groups across the United States. We’re still devoted to the automobile industry, which inspired our technology over a decade ago. SimpSocial’s first Intelligent Virtual Assistant was built specifically to help salespeople in the car industry.

Our IVAs collaborate with members of the Sales and Service teams to provide the best possible customer experience, engage every lead, and produce more Sales or Service appointments. This is still the case. Our approach to our car customer prospects has changed as a result of COVID-19’s economic effects.

We’ll go over the reality of the auto industry, our future plan, and how we’ll continue to show our devotion to our current auto customers in the sections below.

The Automotive Industry’s Reality

Single stores and mid-sized or large dealership groups make up the automotive dealership industry’s ecology. We’re now servicing new independent dealerships through our reseller channel, while SimpSocial concentrates its direct sales efforts on dealership groups.

We recognize that independent dealers benefit from both our Automotive Sales AI Assistant and our Automotive Support AI Assistants, which is why, as part of SimpSocial’s Agent Partner program, we are empowering our resellers to service individual dealerships. Dealerships are focusing more than ever on keeping car buyers by scheduling service appointments and implementing technology to help scale a high-quality end-to-end client experience.

SimpSocial’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant solutions are being included into resellers’ offerings to provide more comprehensive end-to-end solutions that independent auto dealerships can use to scale their sales and fixed operations.

Our Automobile Club Program

SimpSocial is establishing an auto group initiative to assist auto groups in boosting their Marketing, Sales, and Automotive Service teams in light of our new approach. See how our AI Assistants attract, acquire, and develop auto purchasers and service customers at scale using our IVA packaging.

Similarly, we offer an Auto Group Enterprise License Program to groups interested in supplying our services to their dealerships. Under this scheme, auto groups can take advantage of large discounts and flexibility throughout their stores, which applies to all of the Group’s shops.

SimpSocial has been approved for use by General Motors.

General Motors recently authorized SimpSocial’s Intelligent Virtual Assistants as in-Market Retail (iMR) Turnkey Products. This accreditation entitles GM dealers who purchase or hire a SimpSocial IVA to a co-op refund from GM, lowering their overall costs significantly.

SimpSocial’s business strategy and ethos are based on a set of cultural ideals, the first of which is to be “Customer Obsessed,” thinking and acting in their best interests. Only by honestly attempting to comprehend our clients’ aims and pain points in order to assist them in achieving or alleviating them will we be able to aid drive or alleviate them.

In order to assist our customers through these difficult times, we are proactively offering extra services at no cost; all of our car clients who use either our Automotive Sales AI Assistant or our Automotive Service AI Assistant can add the other for free. To learn more, contact your Customer Success Manager.

Adapting as a Team

SimpSocial is no exception to the fact that these are difficult times for many businesses. As we traverse these new roads together, we will do our best to provide you, our customers and partners, with all of the direction and relief that we can.

How Using Intelligent Virtual Assistants in Combination with Sales Engagement Tools Improves Marketing Lead Connect Rates

The concept of Sales and Marketing collaborating to create a cohesive account-based marketing strategy isn’t new. These two revenue-generating teams collaborate to identify a list of accounts, define an outreach strategy, create campaigns, and track outcomes. The actual execution of the plan is where many teams get into trouble. Yes, it all sounds great on paper, but putting it into practice can be a challenge in and of itself.

Sales is frequently expected to touch an account a certain number of times (sometimes dozens) in a certain amount of time. While Marketing tries to assist Sales in prioritizing, there is often so much information available that it becomes “noise” to Sales. When this happens, Sales defaults to a volume-based strategy.

What were the outcomes? Hot accounts are overlooked, opportunities for highly personalized conversations are missed, and pipeline production suffers as a result. Furthermore, concentrating on volume can be overwhelming for Sales. How are you supposed to put dozens of thoughtful touches on hundreds of accounts in a short period of time when a single rep may be responsible for hundreds of accounts at any given time?

Consider how Sales Engagement tools combined with Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) result in increased productivity and a higher return on investment, including:

After an IVA has worked a lead, the connect and reply rate on SDR follow-up has increased by 153 percent.

When stubborn leads are handed off to an IVA to work after the SDR has tried, there is a 10% increase in response rate in target account prospecting campaigns.

2.5x the personalized, persistent, and courteous outreach without adding more people to the team.

What Separates Intelligent Virtual Assistants from Sales Engagement Tools

The much-loved Sales Engagement tool is now available (i.e. Outreach, Salesloft, Groove). These powerful tools allow salespeople to take control of their territories’ communication and conduct mass outreach.

We mean it when we say “powerful.” Reps can use sales engagement tools to do their jobs at scale, such as:

Automating Outreach: Sales can automatically deliver relevant content based on a variety of triggers such as campaign engagement, content consumption, personas, and other factors, allowing them to deliver more relevant messaging at scale in real-time.

Prioritizing Prospects and Accounts: Sales engagement tools typically integrate with sales intelligence providers and account-based marketing (ABM) platforms to provide Sales with full visibility into which accounts and prospects require immediate attention, without requiring them to work across multiple platforms.

Aligning with Marketing: Sales engagement tools frequently integrate with Marketing engagement platforms to provide visibility into lead follow-up and to trigger additional activity based on engagement. Managers can easily monitor productivity and messaging effectiveness.

Where do Intelligent Virtual Assistants fit in if Sales Engagement Tools can do everything? The truth is that there are some significant differences between what an Intelligent Virtual Assistant can accomplish and how Sales employs Sales Engagement tools:

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) Are More Autonomous: IVAs are built on an Intelligent Engagement Platform, which powers millions of mundane but extremely valuable conversations on a daily basis. IVAs initiate contact, empathize intelligently to interpret responses, and respond with a tailored response using Artificial Intelligence (AI). While Sales Engagement tools can run leads through a cadence, they can’t respond for the rep, which necessitates human intervention.

Playbooks and Email Writing Routines Are No Longer Necessary: While Sales Engagement tools require Sales or Marketing to manually input content for each email in each cadence or flow, IVAs automate Sales nurture. IVAs can take a few key criteria inputs and run with them for an entire personalized, persistent, and polite communication flow, responding autonomously all the way through setting up a meeting between a lead and a Salesperson.

Your SDR team has air cover thanks to IVAs: IVAs take on the volume game, ensuring that your leads receive the appropriate number of touches 100 percent of the time, allowing your sales team to focus on what they do best: developing and closing opportunities. Sales can focus on the lowest hanging fruit instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks by sharing the prospecting burden with an Intelligent Virtual Assistant. In addition, leads who have been ‘warmed up’ by the IVA are more likely to engage with your SDRs later.

Using Sales Engagement and Intelligent Virtual Assistants to Implement an ABM Strategy

While there are some significant differences between the two technologies, there are some significant opportunities for these solutions to work together to increase Sales and Marketing productivity and results. While we could write an entire blog series about the different use cases, we’ll focus on one here: account-based marketing.

The tag-team approach can provide significant productivity and coverage benefits to your Sales and Marketing teams in the ABM use case. Here are some ideas for how to go about it:

1. The Account Tiering Strategy

Traditionally, Sales and Marketing have collaborated to place a high priority on the hottest, most relevant accounts. Tier 1 Accounts are what we’ll call them. This is usually a manageable number of accounts for Sales to handle, ranging between 25 and 50 accounts. These accounts should receive Sales’ undivided attention in the form of highly personalized outreach based on research, and they should consume a significant portion of a Sales rep’s time and effort. Where does that leave the rest of your list of accounts if Sales is so focused on Tier 1s?

Tier 2 and 3 are where Intelligent Virtual Assistants come in handy. Utilize the IVA to reach out to accounts that are demonstrating intent via Marketing engagement and intelligence to ensure relevancy. These accounts may be hesitant to raise their hands, but they are most likely still interested. The Sales team selects a few contacts per account for outbound prospecting by the IVA.

2. The Strategy of “You Take the Inbounds”

Another option is to have the Intelligent Virtual Assistant focus on processing any inbound interest related to your target accounts while Sales handles outbound prospecting. Simple automations between your Marketing Automation Platform, CRM, and Sales Engagement tool could help you achieve this.

Sales, for example, continues to prioritize outbounding into Tier 1 accounts, but the IVA handles any inbound interest in Tier 2 and 3 accounts. Instead of waiting for scoring to warm up these leads, send them straight to an ABM-specific IVA campaign for follow-up. You could run a few different IVA campaigns based on shared interests in this scenario (i.e., industry-specific, persona-specific, or intent specific). These leads can be routed to the IVA for follow-up in the same way that leads are routed to Sales.

Increasing Sales Productivity and Adding Value to Your Company

More personalized outreach equals more engagement, pipeline, and revenue, regardless of how you look at it.

While hiring more full-time employees to handle personalized outreach may appear to be a solution in and of itself, the truth is that these business professionals would still be spending a significant amount of time on repetitive, routine tasks. Rather than simply adding more people to your workforce, it’s far better to combine technologies that augment it. In many cases, organizations simply do not have the financial resources to hire new employees.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants, on the other hand, are low-cost virtual team members who assist teams in achieving common goals. Customers who use IVAs in conjunction with their existing sales team and processes achieve impressive results:

To reach out to prioritized accounts, Oracle used their Intelligent Virtual Assistant, Sales team, and Bombora intent data. The results were promising, with Oracle seeing a 40% conversion rate.

Epson America’s nurture process was restructured to include IVAs, resulting in a 240 percent increase in response rate.

Furthermore, they can improve the morale of their Sales team. Most sales reps are a lot happier when they aren’t bogged down by repetitive, mundane processes and are instead having good, productive conversations, which boosts productivity.

Sales can focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals – by enlisting the help of an Intelligent Virtual Assistant to handle the heavy lifting of qualifying interest and scheduling meetings.

You can improve your ROI, drive operational efficiency, and create a happier workforce by combining the right technologies on behalf of your revenue-generating teams.

Why Are Revenue-Driven Organizations Embracing the Augmented Workforce in Uncertain Times?

It is unnecessary to point out that things have changed. Right now, you’re experiencing it. Many businesses are being compelled to cut all discretionary expenditure, indefinitely freeze recruiting, demonstrate a great return on investment from decreased marketing budgets, and decide how to best target critical and non-critical industries. That’s a lot of weight on your shoulders.

While COVID-19 and the resulting economic slowdown are unfavorable features of the current scenario, another transformation in the workplace is providing additional prospects for growth, improved visibility into the B2B buying process, and assuring better customer experience throughout the purchase cycle. This shift is being characterized by the entry of intelligent automation into the workplace, which we call the Augmented Workforce.

Rashmi Vittal (CMO at SimpSocial) and Jessie Johnson (principal analyst at SiriusDecisions) explored the influence artificial intelligence (AI) is having on the B2B selling process, as well as how AI is supporting revenue-generating teams compelled to accomplish more with less during our Why Revenue-Obsessed Teams Embrace the Augmented Workforce webinar. The following are a few key insights from that discussion.

The Business-to-Business (B2B) Selling Experience

Both B2B buyers and sellers have their own set of expectations. However, for these two groups to effectively relate to one another, it’s better if their expectations are in line. Fortunately, technological advancements are assisting B2B sellers in meeting buyer expectations and speeding up the customer acquisition process.

For example, instead of targeting individual leads, vendors are opting for a more holistic strategy of targeting buying groups. After all, rather than an individual, your business solutions will most likely be employed by a team within a corporation. AI advances enable sellers to put together digital body language (such as downloading an eBook, attending a webinar, or requesting a trial) from several prospects inside the same organization, allowing them to target them more effectively.

The prospect-to-conversion pathway is admittedly not as simple as vendors would like it to be. Yes, the milestones and destinations are the identical, but each member of the buying group may engage in slightly different activities. Prospects’ interest levels fluctuate throughout their lives, thus having a solution that understands these signals is essential. Smarter automation powered by AI and machine learning allows businesses to eliminate blind spots regarding their customers and have a better picture of who is involved in the buying process.

Increased visibility and adaptability are just a few of the advantages AI provides to B2B sellers. Let’s look at how artificial intelligence can help revenue-generating teams.

Workforce Augmentation

Marketers are being forced to respond, remix, and re-plan in order to rebound and recover from the current position. In this recuperation phase, an Augmented Workforce can be extremely helpful. But, first and foremost, what is an Augmented Workforce?

A workplace where business experts collaborate with artificial intelligence to improve business outcomes is referred to as an Augmented Workforce. An Intelligent Virtual Assistant is one such AI-driven solution that is transforming customer-facing departments such as Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success (IVA).

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are the next generation of intelligent automation, allowing businesses to scale human interactions in order to attract, acquire, and retain clients. Many redundant, repeating jobs that people don’t want to do or don’t do well are automated by IVAs, such as following up with each and every lead in a human-like manner to see whether they’re interested in setting up a meeting with your Sales team. This action takes a long time, which is why you should delegate it to an IVA so that your salespeople can focus on developing trusting relationships, serving as strategic partners to their clients, and finally closing deals.

What are your strategies for utilizing intelligent virtual assistants?

As leaders in marketing, sales, and customer success assess the current circumstances, they will be forced to make difficult decisions that will impact the near and long term. The fact of these unpredictable times is that we will eventually settle into a new normal—and if you want to survive today, revive tomorrow, and prosper into the future, it is better to prepare for a new normal on your own terms with an Augmented Workforce driven by Intelligent Virtual Assistants.

The capacity to promote top-line growth (71 percent), create better customer experiences (58 percent), and boost employee job satisfaction are the top benefits company executives identify with Intelligent Virtual Assistants, according to original study on the Augmented Workforce (50 percent). IVAs have applications in Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, HR, and Finance because highly scalable human-like interactions are useful to customer-facing employees. The capacity to provide full coverage over the customer lifecycle is the fundamental benefit of an IVA.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants help businesses get the most out of every dollar spent on marketing and sales campaigns. Here are several examples:

Increasing the effectiveness of digital initiatives, such as virtual event engagement and follow-up

Resurrecting dormant leads and ensuring no stone is left unturned are examples of good housekeeping.

Also, by sympathetic outreach and presenting critical information at scale, you can keep your existing customer base.

Here are a few examples of how IVAs are now being used to assist revenue-generating teams in putting their best foot forward while interacting with clients or identifying hot prospects.

Making the Most of Your Digital Investments

Marketers are reconsidering their strategies for engaging virtual event participants. Marketers’ most expensive investments, events and tradeshows, have vanished. Instead, marketing departments are investing in virtual events by holding their own or sponsoring third-party events. While virtual gatherings are less expensive than in-person conferences, they are still an investment that needs to be maximized.

Only 69 percent of companies have structured lead follow-up processes in place, which is surprising. Organizations must swiftly follow up with each registration and attendance after an event to make the most of every dollar spent. According to our findings, organizations have a 21-fold higher likelihood of qualifying a lead if they are called within 30 minutes of an event. Those few moments are critical.

Fortunately, IVAs may be utilized both before and after an event to increase engagement and drive contacts to take the next best action (such as registering for the event or scheduling a call with a Salesperson after the event to learn more).

Raising the profile of handraisers among digitally sourced leads: Marketers are increasingly focusing on content syndication, PPC advertising, and other digital programs and campaigns to generate leads. These leads have a reduced conversion rate in some cases. How can marketers ensure that leads acquired through digital channels are handled properly?

By providing 100% lead coverage, Intelligent Virtual Assistants alleviate concerns regarding lead quality. Prospects who are interested in speaking with Sales are routed to your BDR or Inside Sales team right away. If a prospect is unresponsive or simply not ready for a Sales encounter, the IVA understands such signals and takes appropriate action, such as persistent follow-up or lead nurturing.

Housekeeping is important.

Identifying potential in dormant or disqualified leads: Many firms are currently experiencing a period of stagnation. For better or worse, now is the greatest moment to rethink your processes, do some housekeeping, and use buckets of dormant/disqualified leads to boost handraisers you might have overlooked previously.

Salespeople, admittedly, do not relish following up on cold or forgotten prospects. It requires a significant amount of time, which they just do not have. You can prove the warm or hot leads without putting additional burden on your personnel by delegating this redundant and repetitive activity to an IVA.

IVAs sifting through dormant or ineligible leads have an average engagement rate of eight to fifteen percent. Handraisers can make up 12 to 21% of people who are engaged. In terms of pipeline push, IVAs outperform standard nurturing programs by 33 percent in terms of reengaging dormant prospects.

Keeping your current consumer base: An Augmented Workforce can also help you keep your current consumer base. In this economic climate, businesses want to keep as much money as possible, which includes providing the best possible customer experience. However, with many companies cutting employees and Customer Success teams dealing with more accounts than they can handle on a regular basis, firms must find ways to fill in the gaps.

Our customers are already using an Augmented Workforce to swiftly respond to their client base, informing them of how the current circumstance is affecting their business. While maintaining a compassionate, informative tone, an IVA can send the following types of messages:

To express what your firm is doing during this time, start with a polite and sympathetic introductory statement.

To address the current issue, include a P.S. statement in the signature.

An informational statement that addresses any changes that your consumers should be aware of, as well as contact information for people who have questions.

Conversation cadences that are easily adjustable to meet this highly fluid moment in time

During this time, SimpSocial customers made up 37% of the total.

How Can Marketers Adapt in Tough Times?

You meticulously crafted a robust 2020 Marketing strategy that displays your capacity to contribute to pipeline and revenue goals. You’ve made a significant investment in tradeshows and events as part of your entire marketing strategy, and you’re ready to shake hands and sign contracts.

Uncontrollable occurrences, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19), have now put a stop to many of those eagerly anticipated activities, resulting in the cancellation of Adobe Summit, F8, GDC, Mobile World Congress, SXSW, and other events vital to you and your business. You watch the news with bated breath as more events are canceled, as well as headlines regarding global economic effect.

You immediately adjust your plans and tactics from in-person meet-and-greets to digital ways of pipeline growth, determined to sustain your momentum. You devote more time and resources to webinars, content syndication, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You run a report to determine if your recycled or DQed MQLs can be resurrected.

Despite your best efforts, you instinctively roll your eyes, knowing that your Salespeople aren’t interested in pursuing “those kind of leads,” even if you nail your ideal customer profile (ICP) to a tee.

What options do you have? How should you adjust your strategy and safeguard your numbers in these trying times?

These are topics I need to consider as SimpSocial’s Chief Marketing Officer. Not only do I want to safeguard the health and safety of my staff, but I also want to help my organization’s financial well-being and business continuity. I’m not the only one that feels this way. The same idea is on the minds of marketing executives all across the world.

Even in these difficult economic times, marketers can adapt by utilizing an augmented workforce to increase pipeline, qualify leads, and maintain strong marketing-sales communication.

Developing a Digital-First Mentality

To maintain staff productivity and business continuity, firms are already transitioning to digital-first solutions, such as revised work-from-home guidelines, using video conferencing, and presenting streaming events for customers and prospects.

A change to digital-first marketing entails re-allocating marketing budgets to digital programs and campaigns for marketing executives. Naturally, your sales team will be concerned about the quality of leads in your pipeline.

Marketers would do well to implement a digital-first solution that ensures attentive lead follow-up, regardless of the source, to alleviate concerns about lead quality. Lead interaction with Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) helps to elevate sales-ready leads at scale. IVAs engage and qualify new and existing leads by asking, “Are you interested in setting up a Sales meeting?” in a human-like discussion by email or SMS until a response is received or the next best step is understood. Because the lead told your IVA whether or not they are ready for a talk, Sales teams may be confident that the lead is interested.

Using a SimpSocial Sales AI Assistant to work leads in natural, two-way conversations to ascertain intent, you can demonstrate value in your digitally sourced leads by uncovering hand-raisers sooner, even if you’re facing widespread event cancellations or other economic issues.

What Can an Augmented Workforce Do for You?

Driving team productivity and performance while accelerating revenue creation and top-line growth are among the advantages of an Augmented Workforce, in which people and IVAs work together toward the same goals. Salespeople are allowed to focus on creating trusting connections and closing agreements by allowing the IVA to chase registrations and meetings on its own.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants can be used in the following scenarios:

Increasing registrations for your digital events, such as webinars and virtual conferences, as well as post-event follow-up to keep attendees engaged. After all, as digital-first solutions become the standard, digital events may become your most important events.

Low-scoring leads and pre-MQLs generated by content syndication or digital PPC must be qualified. You’ve already put money into these assets. Working on these things will help you live your life to the fullest.

Dormant or cold lines can be reactivated. Don’t let leads who have showed interest sit dormant. Reengage them to check whether they are still interested and willing to discuss.

Consider the following Talend example. When the next-generation leader in big data and cloud integration software added SimpSocial Intelligent Virtual Assistants to their workforce, they increased lead coverage and conversion rates. Talend’s Sales AI Assistant was created with the goal of recovering recycled or DQed leads. The SimpSocial Sales AI Assistant helped Talend win approximately $1 million in bookings, which was incredible.

As you can see, even seemingly low-scoring, digitally sourced leads have actual worth, and IVAs are a valuable resource for Marketers wanting to maximize every opportunity.

When You Need Optimal Lead Coverage

Marketers should implement a system that interacts, identifies, and qualifies prospects at scale in order to demonstrate the value of digitally sourced leads to their maybe hesitant Salespeople. After all, qualifying that your leads are Sales-ready is the finest safeguard against Sales apathy.

With economic uncertainty and fewer opportunities to meet prospects in person, it’s more vital than ever to maximize lead engagement and follow-up. With an IVA on your team, you’ll always have a devoted and dependable team member ready to pick up those leads and work them to their maximum potential.

Concern, but not panic, is warranted in light of the current economic scenario. Now is the time to act and prepare your business to weather the storm and maintain momentum.

Sales Teams Face a Capacity Challenge

Salespeople are overworked and picky.

To be honest, most businesses aren’t aware of the sales capacity issue because they assumed it would happen anyway. Marketing creates as many leads as possible, while salespeople pursue as many as possible. This method puts pressure on members of the sales team to concentrate on the leads that they believe are the most promising.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that salespeople only have so many hours to spend on each lead before moving on to the next, many leads go untapped. Because of this, some businesses use Business Development Representatives (BDRs) to help handle the inflow of leads by reviewing, qualifying, and nurturing them before passing them on to a salesperson to close. The method isn’t ideal, though, because BDRs (much like salespeople) will cherry-pick leads based on their own assumptions. Furthermore, many companies do not have BDR teams to rely on.

Humans are only human.

It’s tempting to believe that organizations can solve their sales capacity problem by simply recruiting additional people. While the reasoning is reasonable, it can also lead to a slew of issues. Businesses that overhire salespeople experience poorer work satisfaction as a result of bored and under-stimulated salespeople, as well as increased costs as a result of the addition of new team members. Each of these new hires will require extensive training and supervision.

It’s also crucial to keep in mind that people are simply human. They are prone to becoming ill, having poor days, and leaving for other employment chances. Clearly, adding additional employees isn’t the solution these companies require.

Sales Capacity Challenge-Induced Gaps

The failure to address the issue of sales capacity results in gaps in the outreach process. Leads that do not qualify as Marketing Qualified Prospects (MQLs), leads that go dark without reason, recycled leads, leads that require several outreach attempts, and, worst of all, leads that want to go to Sales but go undiscovered are all examples of these gaps.

While sales acceleration technologies can help with routine outreach and lead qualification, they still need to be managed by a Salesperson. In other words, these gadgets continue to consume an employee’s time.

A Sales AI Assistant is just what sales teams require.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants: The Answer to Increased Sales Capacity

Intelligent Virtual Assistants for Customer Engagement automate monotonous and routine duties so that your staff may concentrate on their core competencies. For example, the SimpSocial sends out tailored emails and texts to engage and nurture leads until their intent is discovered. It makes no difference whether it takes a week, five months, or two years. Only hand along Sales-ready leads when they are actually ready for such a conversation does the Intelligent Virtual Assistant stay polite and persistent in its contacts.

By touching every lead at scale, Intelligent Virtual Assistants supplement teams without adding to the capacity challenge. This also means you won’t have to hire or fire people to deal with changing lead trends. No one in your organization needs to hustle to pick up the conversation if an employee takes a sick day or goes on vacation. Best of all, the Sales AI Assistant’s chats with potential buyers feel genuine and individualized.

Finally, the Intelligent Virtual Assistant uncovers additional Sales-ready prospects from your existing pool, resulting in additional meetings, chances, and pipeline. If your company is experiencing capacity issues, AI may be the solution you’ve been looking for.

The Sales Capacity Challenge and Excess Lead Volume

Overbooking our to-do list is a pain we’ve all felt. We intend to complete ten, fifteen, or even twenty chores in a single day, but only complete one or two. It’s not that we don’t want to or aren’t capable of doing so. It’s just that each day is limited to a certain number of hours.

When Marketing delivers hundreds or thousands of leads for Sales to pursue, there is a similar misalignment of expectations. Organizations face the dreaded sales capacity dilemma when the amount of leads vastly outnumbers the Sales team’s ability to follow up with each one.

71% of participants claimed they have difficulty with sales capacity. While this poll is limited to those in attendance, many businesses face this problem without even realizing it. Excessive lead volume and overworked sales teams are, after all, rather common.

We’ll look at the sales capacity problem, its effects, and potential solutions in the sections below.

Faced with a Problem

While scheduling meetings and increasing engagement are critical for any Sales team, the ultimate goal is to create revenue. However, if you have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Marketing Generated Leads (MQLs) sitting around, it’s probable you’re missing out on Sales-ready chances.

To alleviate this burden, the most obvious solution is to hire additional people. For many firms wanting to cut costs, however, this is just not a viable choice. Similarly, some businesses only get a lot of leads at specific times of the year or after trade exhibits or other events. Hiring more employees isn’t a practical option in these circumstances of temporarily changing lead quantities.

This raises the challenge of how to efficiently contact the largest number of leads.

How Can You Effectively Contact the Largest Number of Leads?

Recognize that not all leads are created equal. Some incoming leads are “Sales-ready,” which means they are likely to contact your sales staff. Other leads are “nurture-ready,” which means they are interested in learning more about your organization and products but aren’t ready to speak with Sales just yet.

What distinguishes the two? Predictive scoring has traditionally been used by Marketing and Sales to qualify leads. The formula is simple: greater lead scores are given to incoming leads that fit your selected buyer profile. Prospects who download marketing information like a buyers guide are treated similarly. This method has a place in the big picture, but it’s just an estimate. All you have to do is ask to find out which prospects are Sales-ready.

This, of course, brings us back to the problem of sales capacity. It takes a lot of time and effort to ask each and every incoming lead whether they would like to talk with a Salesperson. It’s a tedious operation that will certainly yield a few “yeses” and a slew of “nos” and “not yets.” Rather than having your workers track down each and every lead, why not use an Intelligent Virtual Assistant to ask at scale, “Are you interested?”

Using an Intelligent Virtual Assistant to Solve the Sales Capacity Challenge

IVAs (Intelligent Virtual Assistants) assist people in doing what they are greatest at. IVAs allow employees to focus on what they enjoy doing, like as thinking creatively, creating relationships, and completing transactions, while automating many of the repetitious and boring duties that they don’t like to do.

“Do you think an AI Assistant can help ease your sales capacity challenge?” the question was posed. “Yes” was answered by 93 percent of webinar attendees.

Inside Sales only touch leads zero to two times on average, which is one of the reasons why a Sales AI Assistant is so beneficial. However, between seven and ten touches are ideal. Salespeople don’t have the time (or, to be honest, the inclination) to engage in this level of outreach. Fortunately, until purpose is confirmed, a Sales AI Assistant can handle the golden number of touches in a persistent, consistent, and pleasant manner.

A Sales AI Assistant also generates revenue. IVAs elevate Sales-ready leads the instant they exhibit interest in scheduling a meeting, it contacts incoming leads within minutes (rather than hours or days later), and it detects handraisers among low-qualifying leads that your team doesn’t have time to touch. All of these elements work together to ensure that no opportunity is overlooked.

Recommendations for Additional Reading

While an Intelligent Virtual Assistant can help you discover new possibilities, it can’t do everything. Teams must still collaborate to achieve a common objective. The alignment of Marketing and Sales is one such example. Prospects will experience a messaging disconnect if these two teams use distinct terminology in their communications. Because it is created that way, SimpSocial in a consistent manner. Your teams must also be based on the same messaging.

Brett Blackney of HackerRank also advises aligning Marketing and Sales before trade fairs, conferences, and major media pushes. This prepares the Inside Sales team for a surge in leads and ensures that the outreach process runs well.

Another suggestion is to figure out how to divide responsibilities between salespeople and IVAs properly. In the majority of cases, businesses employ a “start small and grow” approach. For example, a Sales AI Assistant could focus on re-engaging previous leads for a company. The company may broaden its use cases if the technique proves to be successful.

The Quick Fix

Expecting your Sales team to chase down every single lead is simply unrealistic. However, an Intelligent Virtual Assistant can help your staff focus on closing business by supplementing their efforts. It’s time to give individuals the freedom to do what they do best while technology does what it does best.

Personalized Marketing at Scale using AI

Every day, the ordinary person is exposed to millions of messages, advertising, and conversations. Much of this is muted, much like the background noise in a crowded restaurant. People perk up when they hear a message that is relevant to them, such as their name or order number.

For marketing and sales outreach, the same principle applies. The more tailored your messages are, the better chance you’ll have of engaging and converting your contacts.

In a recent webinar, Mike Madden (Marketo’s Head of Commercial Demand Gen) and Jan Sijp (SimpSocial’s Senior Director Product Marketing) discussed how each company employs Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help with tailored marketing at scale.

In that vein, here are some pointers on personalisation, email outreach, and artificial intelligence.

There’s a compelling argument for customizing everything you do. Here are a few statistics to persuade you of the effectiveness of personalized email marketing:

Personalized emails have a six-fold increase in transaction rates compared to non-personalized emails.

The click-through rate on emails sent from an individual’s address (rather than a business’s email account) is 31% higher.

Subject lines that are personalized are 26 percent more likely to be opened by receivers.

Personalized email messages increase click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10% on average.

Incorporating a signature into your email boosts response rates by 22%.

Emails that look like personal letters are opened 137 percent more often and have a 129 percent higher click-through rate than emails with generic “To” and “From” boxes.

A third of marketers said they would prioritize personalisation in the near future if given the chance.

These findings support the use of personalized outreach and email marketing, which includes messages from salespeople, marketers, and sales enablement software. Personalization, regardless of how you optimize your messaging, necessitates a significant amount of thinking and time.

Sure, it’s simple to send a personalized email to five different people every day. But what if you’re dealing with hundreds or even thousands of leads? How could your team create individualized, successful messages for each and every one of them? How many different emails do you believe your Inside Sales team can write before they feel burned out or bored?

Clearly, the goal of personalizing everything you do is a greater burden for businesses with high lead quantities.

AI-Powered Workforce Augmentation for Scaled Personalization

Marketing and sales teams who are having trouble balancing personalized outreach with their usual responsibilities might consider an AI-powered solution. AI is infinitely scalable and capable of handling many of your employees’ tedious, yet important, duties.

SimpSocial engages leads at scale through tailored, polite, and persistent two-way discussions. For a variety of reasons, this is incredibly beneficial. The first is that the AI generates customised and unique messages without the need for Salespeople or Marketers to compose each outgoing message. Second, these discussions are designed to be effective, and they are constantly on message and consistent. Third, and most importantly, the Sales AI Assistant finds handraisers and brings them to your Sales team’s attention, resulting in more prospects from your current lead pool.

SimpSocial operates in a similar way, personalizing interactions at scale for existing customers rather than prospects. Instead of asking contacts whether they want to schedule a Sales meeting, the Customer Success AI Assistant encourages them to do quarterly business reviews (QBRs), complete surveys, or look into upsell opportunities.

However, how can you tell if an email or text message has been correctly optimized and personalized? Each outreach email should have at least five individualized features, according to SimpSocial. These could include your contact’s name, the sender’s name, a distinctive subject line, a mention of the contact’s function within the company, and a smart sign-off. Of course, this is just one set of examples. There are numerous ways to give your outreach a more personalized feel.

Personalization is essential for engaging consumers and leads in two-way interactions, whether you use SimpSocial or write each communication manually.

Why Are Automotive Companies Behaving Like Businesses?

Automotive dealerships are becoming increasingly tech-savvy as they employ Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) for Automotive Sales and Service, despite the perception that they are trailing behind in terms of innovation. These virtual team members are becoming mainstays for dealerships aiming to attract and keep consumers, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and clever automation.

In a recent edition of the Modern Marketing Engine podcast, presenter Bernie Borges speaks with Micah Burgess (VP of Sales at SimpSocial) on the use of IVAs in dealerships to address Marketing, Inside Sales, and Service. Of course, IVA acceptance is only one facet of this rapidly changing sector. Here are a few reasons why automakers are starting to think like other businesses.

Automobiles are a Changing Industry

Micah Burgess has 15 years of experience in the automobile sector. And throughout that time, he has witnessed significant changes in the way auto professionals manage and operate their businesses.

Micah emphasizes that “it’s not just the automobile business anymore; you’re in business now,” implying that the sector is moving away from old methods and toward practices that are more in line with how other industries manage and conduct their businesses. The way dealerships approach marketing and sales, human resources, and technology adoption will change as the car industry embraces this “business mindset.”

Similarly, huge dealership groups are looking for new workers outside of the auto sector. They’re now bringing in top personnel from Fortune 500 firms, finance, technology, and other industries to assist them drive their entire business models to higher success and profitability. Mid-market and small-business dealerships benefit from this multi-industry experience as well.

Traditional marketing approaches, such as mailers or newspaper, TV, and radio commercials, still have a place in the sector, especially in the Midwest, but data-driven marketing initiatives are gaining traction. “It’s difficult to say where a consumer came from from a ROI standpoint unless they come in with a newspaper ad folder in their pocket,” Micah explains.

Customers want to know how their money is being spent and what return on investment they can expect as dealers become more data-driven and customers want more digital alternatives. “Data is more crucial now than it has ever been for the automobile industry,” Micah explains. “These businesses and dealership groups are using data to better attract and convert customers,” says the author.

Making the Sales and Marketing Process More Efficient

The automotive sector relies heavily on inbound leads. In the past, a typical shopper would go to their local dealership on the weekend to look at numerous models, compare costs, and test drive them. The great majority of that process now takes place online. A consumer begins their trip by studying various car models online, requesting quotes using lead forms from several different dealerships, and then comparing their selections as they arrive by email or text. It’s critical to follow up with leads as soon as they exhibit interest, because the first dealership to reply to a lead is more likely to seal the purchase.

Of course, sales teams frequently have more leads than they know what to do with. And it’s impossible to follow up with hundreds or even thousands of leads in a timely and personalized manner. The same can be true for service departments aiming to attract automobile owners who, on average, require multiple reminders to get them to arrange a vehicle repair or routine maintenance appointment.

Dealerships are implementing technologies like the SimpSocial Automotive Sales AI Assistant and Automotive Service AI Assistant to better handle inbound leads and outgoing service reminders to prior customers. The auto industry has a history of being sluggish to accept new technologies. Micah, on the other hand, is ecstatic to see how swiftly dealerships are using AI to improve customer experiences and increase sales or service appointments.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants are so successful because they provide human-like, two-way discussions at a large scale. These discussions are courteous, persistent, and timely – a winning mix that generates a better return on investment than traditional marketing tactics in a trackable and proven manner.

Micah says, “Customers enjoy it and don’t even realize they’re chatting with an AI Assistant.” Even better, Salespeople and Service teams adore AI Assistants because they promptly pass handraisers to Sales the moment they show an intent to buy, allowing them to spend less time chasing leads and more time completing transactions. This guarantees that dealerships are actively engaged and making the most of every opportunity.

The Augmented Workforce is a healthy synergy between Intelligent Virtual Assistants and people, and it is something that any company can profit from.

Choosing the Correct Route

Automotive dealerships are doing a better job of attracting, acquiring, maintaining, and growing customer engagements by adopting a business mindset and implementing AI technologies, all while managing their staff and capturing the data they need to make better decisions.

Skills in communication that will help you sell more

Communication is a key component in sales. Although sales is frequently seen to be a talent that people are born with, there are some essential communication habits that people can adopt to improve their sales skills. Communication styles are crucial—you must be able to convey enthusiasm and persuade potential consumers to take the measures necessary to become clients. Although some salesmen may have innate ability in this area, only those who train on specific communication skills develop into high performers who can consistently accomplish outcomes in a range of situations and market conditions.

In order to achieve the highest levels of success in the profession, successful salespeople must be able to listen, learn, and improve their communication abilities. Focusing on key components of effective communication may help sales professionals of all levels, from sales development reps to sales managers, improve their performance and results.

The major components of the sales communication toolkit are discussed in this piece, as well as how these skills can help you sell more.

Listening carefully

Do you pay attention to what’s going on around you when you’re not talking? When the customer introduces themselves or discusses their problem, are you already planning your next question, rebuttal, or pitch angle? If that’s the case, you aren’t paying attention. Many salespeople make this error.

Active listening entails not only hearing but also comprehending the entire message. Repeating client comments and asking, “Is that accurate?” is one technique to do this. Another technique to practice active listening is to ask questions based solely on customer comments until a complete comprehension of their point of view or issue has been achieved.

Knowing how to read people’s bodies

Although salespeople are not required to be mind readers, they should be able to understand body language. Customers can be placed at ease by mirroring and mimicking body language, conversational cadence, and eye contact. Additionally, salespeople can learn more about client problems and perspectives by recognizing bodily signs that reflect negative emotional states like discomfort or bewilderment.

Empathy and presumptions

Ask as many questions as possible and don’t make any assumptions. Even if something appears to be self-evident, asking the question allows the client to respond in their own words. This enables you to gain a better understanding of how they are approaching their challenge and the solutions they are likely to consider. Erroneous assumptions can lead to costly misunderstandings in the sales process. When you assume budget authority, timeliness, or a lack of competition in a deal, you can end up with agreements that don’t close and pipelines that are unrealistic.

When engaging with customers, asking questions rather than making assumptions allows you to be more empathic. Allowing clients to express their issues will help you understand how they think and will encourage you to communicate in their language. When clients feel heard and understood as individuals with distinct situations, the buyer-salesperson dynamic evolves to a more collaborative connection, which is beneficial as the buying process progresses.

Develop your expertise in a specific field.

Demonstrate that you are dedicated to being the greatest counsel possible by spending time in your sector. Don’t be scared to show your customers and prospects that your passion for this industry extends beyond your job title. Follow and share the material of published experts in your industry with your customers. This will demonstrate to your customers that you are a reliable source of information and new ideas. Your ability to talk with confidence will improve as you develop this reputation, making your advice more persuasive. As a result, you’ll be more effective when it comes to guiding clients through critical purchasing decisions.

Salespeople used to be information gatekeepers who could provide vital product and technical knowledge. Customers now consider this information to be readily available and instead seek advise and direction from salespeople. Salespeople who are regarded as trusted advisors stand out and succeed with a wide range of buyer audiences.

Honesty and sincerity

It is acceptable in some teams to lie or use cliched terms in order to convert clients. Although these methods may appear to yield quick results, they should never be encouraged in your workplace. When salespeople are trusted and believed for their valuable expertise and perspective, they are the most effective.

Salespeople have the distinct advantage of being able to speak with a diverse range of consumers who are experiencing the same issue. This provides salespeople with a deep awareness and awareness of how customers perceive the problem and the available solutions. When talking to customers about your product, pricing, or the competitive landscape, there’s no reason to utilize gimmicks or half-truths. Salespeople should be upfront and open in all parts of dealing with clients in order to generate trust and rapport, which leads to meaningful, long-term client relationships.

Machine learning software

Many components of the sales position are being automated as technology progresses. Sales teams may now perform follow-up actions at scale thanks to AI tools. These technologies will contact potential customers on a regular basis and respond to them in a personalized way. Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions accomplish this by comprehending and responding to individual client enquiries in a human-like manner.

This AI-assisted communication allows customers to get further in their purchasing process before engaging your sales team. Before they interact with your sales team, AI helps your customer base become more informed and motivated.

Briefly,

Sales success depends on constant improvement in communication abilities, whether prospects are engaged through phone conversations, web conferences, or in-person meetings. Salespeople at all levels will find that being a subject matter expert and incorporating technologies like AI into their prospect engagement process will help them be more effective, work better with clients, and close more business.

Learn about the SimpSocial’s features and benefits. Communication is a key component in sales. Although sales is frequently seen to be a talent that people are born with, there are some essential communication habits that people can adopt to improve their sales skills. Communication styles are crucial—you must be able to convey enthusiasm and persuade potential consumers to take the measures necessary to become clients. Although some salesmen may have innate ability in this area, only those who train on specific communication skills develop into high performers who can consistently accomplish outcomes in a range of situations and market conditions. In order to achieve the highest levels of success in the profession, successful salespeople must be able to listen, learn, and improve their communication abilities. Focusing on key components of effective communication may help sales professionals of all levels, from sales development reps to sales managers, improve their performance and results. This article will go over some of the most important parts of the sales communication toolbox, as well as how these skills can help you sell more. Listening carefully Do you pay attention to what’s going on around you when you’re not talking? When the customer introduces themselves or discusses their problem, are you already planning your next question, rebuttal, or pitch angle? If that’s the case, you aren’t paying attention. Many salespeople make this error. Active listening entails not only hearing but also comprehending the entire message. Repeating client comments and asking, “Is that accurate?” is one technique to do this. Another technique to practice active listening is to ask questions based solely on customer comments until a complete comprehension of their point of view or issue has been achieved. Knowing how to read people’s bodies Although salespeople are not required to be mind readers, they should be able to understand body language. Customers can be placed at ease by mirroring and mimicking body language, conversational cadence, and eye contact. Additionally, salespeople can learn more about client problems and perspectives by recognizing bodily signs that reflect negative emotional states like discomfort or bewilderment. Empathy and presumptions Ask as many questions as possible and don’t make any assumptions. Even if something appears to be self-evident, asking the question allows the client to respond in their own words. This enables you to gain a better understanding of how they are approaching their challenge and the solutions they are likely to consider. Erroneous assumptions can lead to costly misunderstandings in the sales process. When you assume budget authority, timeliness, or a lack of competition in a deal, you can end up with agreements that don’t close and pipelines that are unrealistic. When engaging with customers, asking questions rather than making assumptions allows you to be more empathic. Allowing clients to express their issues will help you understand how they think and will encourage you to communicate in their language. When clients feel heard and understood as individuals with distinct situations, the buyer-salesperson dynamic evolves to a more collaborative connection, which is beneficial as the buying process progresses.