The quote โWith great power comes great responsibilityโ has been attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to Spiderman, and this relationship of power-to-responsibility is certainly true for text message marketing campaigns.
The โgreat powerโ of text marketing campaigns is made obvious when your customer grants you permission to contact them in the most direct and personal way possible. The โgreat responsibilityโ starts with the FCCโs requirement to get prior consent before sending automated promotional texts.
The good news is that Mitchell 1 is here to help with some tips on text marketing best practices that will have you texting marketing like a super hero.
Texting Best Practices
Here are four steps to text marketing success.
1. Obtain Consent – Mitchell 1 has You Covered!
Before promotional texts can be sent, the law requires that you have โexplicitโ permission from the customer, and that this โconsentโ has been clearly documented. Mitchell 1 is committed to helping your shop obtain consent by sending customers an email requesting consent every 90 days. ย When customers click the link in the email and agree to the promotional texting terms they become a part of your texting subscriber list.
Pro Tip: Talk with your customers about your texting program at the front counter. You can even manually send them a consent email on-the-spot from your SocialCRM auto repair shop marketing product.
2. Add an Element of Exclusivity
Consider what it means when one of your customers gives your permission to send them marketing texts. Theyโre giving you access to the most direct and personal way to reach them.
If your text campaigns are only providing the same promotions as your current email or website coupon then youโre not giving customers a reason to sign up and continue to subscribe to texting promotions.
Pro Tip: Successful texting campaigns offer exclusive value not offered elsewhere.
3. Be Consistent With the Number of Texts You Send
Itโs probably obvious that sending too many texts is a bad thing, but what about sending too few texts? Since your customer has provided you with their consent to receive texts, they obviously expect to receive yours. Text them too infrequently and they may forget that they subscribed in the first place. Then months later when you send them a text they may respond to your text with โSTOP,โ removing them from your text subscriber list.
Pro Tip: Start by consistently sending one text campaign per month. This is likely within your customersโ expectations for receiving marketing texts from an aftermarket repair shop.
4. Make Sure Youโre Responsive
Because 20% of customers read a text within one minute and roughly 90% read text messages within 30 minutes, youโll want to send your campaigns during times when youโre prepared to respond. If youโre going to schedule a text campaign to be sent sometime in the future youโll want to set yourself a reminder so that you remember to be available to respond at that future date and time.
Pro Tip: You can get notifications on your personal cell phone when a consumer responds to your text. The default is to receive an email notification with a link for responding, but you can also configure your SocialCRM auto repair shop marketing product so you receive a text on your personal cell phone while still keeping your cell phone number private.
For more details and to get started, talk to your SocialCRM support agent and read this blog post, Mitchell 1โs โSuper-Secretโ Texting Feature.
