Where can SMS fit into your marketing strategy?
In this article I’ll show you exactly where you might consider adding SMS to dramatically improve your customer experience and results!
SMS is extremely effective because it grabs attention. So when your marketing in a world of distraction, just adding SMS to your funnels and marketing can instantly improve your results.
Here are some places to consider plugging in SMS:
Adding SMS To Live Events & Webinars
This is likely one of the most effective places to implement SMS, both for getting people to register for and mostly to show up for live events.
Adding SMS to live events often dramatically increases the results, without changing anything else.
We developed our Roezan Events feature to automatically send reminders to your audience for your live events.
Additionally, if you’re using Zoom webinars, we even have a native integration that will pull in your contacts and send reminders. See more here.
Here’s how to plug in SMS for your webinar / live events:
Webinar Promotion: If you have an existing list, promoting your upcoming webinar can be an excellent source of signups and registrations.
Webinar Registration Confirmation: After they register, confirm the registration, remind them of the date and time
Warm up / reminder sequence: Leading up to the webinar or event, send a series of reminders. This can be simple reminders about what they event is and when it is, and you can also send out pre-event content to get them excited.
Going Live Now: his is likely the MOST important message of the sequence, where you tell people you’re starting now and they should hop on.
Replay: If you offer a replay, you can also send out the replay + deal info via SMS.
Deal Close Down: Send reminders as your deal is closing.
See more:
Add SMS To Lead Magnet Funnel
If you have a lead magnet funnel where you give away something for free, you can add SMS to improve your results and engagement. Here’s where you can consider adding messages:
Confirmation / Welcome Text: After opt in, send a confirmation / welcome text to introduce yourself and re-send them the lead magnet.
Bonus Training: A great idea is to offer a bonus training for opting in with their phone number. This can be a bonus PDF, a video training, or anything that can help them achieve a small result.
Community Push: You want leads to come “into your world” and engage, so sending a link to join your FB group or community is a great way to get them more involved.
Qualifying Engagement: Ask them a series of questions via SMS to qualify them for your offers and then push to a call.
Book A Call: Send an automated message asking them to book a call after they opt in or after they consume your lead magnet.
BONUS Promoting New Lead Magnets: Every time you come out with a new lead magnet, push it to your existing SMS list via broadcast. This will show you who is engaged and you / your team can take action and prioritze leads based on it!
SMS Promotions
Adding SMS / text message marketing to your promotions can create a massive instant boost to your performance. Here’s a few ideas and places to plug in SMS:
Deal / Discount alerts: Discount alerts are often some of the highest ROI messages you can send.
Special SMS Only Promotions: One popular idea is to give “VIP SMS Discounts” to those who subscribe to your SMS list.
Seasonal Promotions: Depending on the nature your business, you can add SMS alerts to your seasonal promotions - New Year Promotions, Sumer Deals, Black Friday Deals, Cyber Monday, Etc.
Add SMS To Low-Ticket Ascension Funnels
Low-ticket products are often used as “lead gen” and the real money is made on the ascension to the higher ticket backend products.
With a low ticket funnel you can plug in SMS in multiple places:
Cart Abandon / Upsell Abandon: If you collect email / phone number before asking for payment you can add a cart abandon sequence with SMS.
Upsells: Customer didn't take the upsell? Remind them with an SMS sequence to crank out higher AOV!
Post Purchase / Product Access Confirmation Text: After the customer purchases, it’s a great idea to welcome them, confirm their purchase, and even better, ask them to make sure they were able to access the product.
Qualifying Engagement: Sometimes in a Low Ticket Funnel, the most valuable thing actually isn’t getting them to buy the upsells, it’s learning / qualifying the lead to get them on a call for the high ticket. You can set up an automation to ask them qualifying questions to learn if they are a good fit, then push to a call.
Book A Call CTA: Low ticket products often push for lead to get on a call, often in the OTO2 slot OR somewhere inside the product. You can compliment this by adding trigger based SMS sequences that push toward this content / push toward this call + follow ups!
Content Consumption: For low-ticket, we want to turn people into raving fans, and that’s hard to do if they never consume the content. You can use SMS to push people / remind your customers to consume the content!
Post Purchase - Review: After they purchase, you can ask for a testimonial, a review, or a trustpilot review to increase your social proof, all via SMS.
BONUS - Promoting Low Ticket Offers: If you already have an SMS list, it’s a great idea to launch your Low-Ticket Offer to your existing list.
Add SMS To VSL Funnel
If you have a VSL funnel (Video Sales Letter), you can add SMS to dramatically improve your results. Many VSL funnels in our niche are book-a-call funnels, but you can adjust the strategy depending on your goals.
Adding SMS To Your Form: You can add an SMS / phone optin to your landing page and offer a bonus training or other incentive for giving their phone number.
Confirmation Text: Add an SMS confirmation text post opt-in that sends them a link to the video OR gives them a CTA.
Bonus Training: Send them a bonus training or bonus video just for opting in that further pushes them toward your CTA.
Qualifying Engagement: Post-opt in, you can also ask them simple questions to qualify them and get them to engage, and eventually push them to your CTA or booking a call.
Book A Call: Ask them to book a call via SMS after they opt in or watch the video.
BONUS - Promoting VSL Funnel Optins: If you already have an existing SMS list, you can promote your VSL funnels by sending a mass SMS to your list!
Adding SMS For Sales Calls
High ticket is often sold via phone call, and SMS can help in multiple ways here, including getting people to show up, reducing no shows, and even getting people to book more calls.
At Roezan we built in a Calendly SMS integration to automatically send confirmations + reminders for this!
Here’s where to plug in SMS:
Call Confirmation: Send a confirmation right after booking a meeting via SMS to remind them of the meeting, time, who it’s with, and any other information.
Call reminder sequence: Send reminders as the call is approaching, and especially 5-10 min out to remind them the call is starting. You can also encourage them to watch pre-call content.
BONUS - Getting People To Book Calls: You can send out broadcasts to your lists, or list segments to fill up your calendars. We’ve written about this in multiple places, check out these articles:
SMS Conversational Sales
With Roezan’s Conversations feature, you can have 2 way conversations vis SMS.
Often times these conversations start with an automated trigger based message or broadcast, and then picked up by a human to continue the conversation.
For example, after someone purchases a low-ticket product, you could automate a message that asks them if they were able to get access, then transition the conversation into identifying their issues etc.
Or, sometimes near the end of a promotion, you could send a broadcast to a segmented audience that has showed interest, tell them the promotion is closing down and ask them to respond if they have any questions before the promotion is over. Then have a human continue the conversation to close the deal.
There are lots of ways to do this, and Roezan's conversations enable you to close more deals by chatting with prospects!
SMS Conversational Support
Similarly, it can be helpful to have a customer support agent manage your Roezan account and field incoming questions and support.
You can do this in Roezan conversations. This allows customers to be served where they want and you can increase your customer experience.
Trigger Based Events
You can set up trigger based SMS when prospects or customers take specific actions, to further help push them through your funnel or to help them achieve a desired action.
Page View Based Triggers: For example, let’s say someone is already on your list and they haven’t visited your website in a long time, but all of a sudden they come back and hit your pricing page. This may be a good time to fire off a follow up SMS to re-engage that lead, even if they didn’t fill out a form.
*For this to work, you need to have a CRM that can identify your leads on pageview. You can set this up for example using our ActiveCampaign native integration, or with many other CRMs / Marketing Automation software using our Zapier integration!
Link Click Triggers: Anther example of increasing engagement with SMS is to have link click triggers, for example if you’re sending a promotion and someone click on it, you could send a follow up text. Or if someone clicks a link to your pricing page but doesn’t buy, you could send a follow up text.
Form Fill Trigger: As another example, let’s say someone fills out a contact form on your site, or another type of form. You could send a confirmation message, or a follow up SMS sequence with Roezan Automations!
Transactional SMS
Transaction SMS are non-marketing SMS text messages that help more on the ops / customer service side. These often include post-purchase notifications that aid the customer. Here are some examples:
Post-purchase confirmation / instructions: Add an SMS confirmation after they purchase to confirm their order. Sometimes in the case of a course purchase, you could also follow up here and make sure they were able to get access!
Delivery Status Confirmations: Another popular SMS notification is delivery status if you’re shipping physical products. For example, when your oder is shipped, what the tracking number is, when it’s out for delivery, etc.
SMS Autoresponder & Nurture Sequences
Before a prospect makes a purchase, they often have to change their false beliefs. They should know you, like you, and trust you. They often have incorrect assumptions or they lack knowledge. So the best way to combat this is to indoctrinate them and send them cool content that help answer their questions and solve their problems.
Note - You can use either our Native Automations feature or our ActiveCampaign integration to setup an SMS autoresponder.
Adding SMS to your autoresponder can increase engagement and get them to consume critical content that will increase your conversions.
SMS For Content Consumption: Often when I speak to clients, they have at least a few pieces of content that they know - if consumed the prospect is more likely to buy. This could be a blog article, a short video, a PDF, a podcast, or any other piece of content. By adding SMS to your autoresponder / nurture sequence you can increase consumption of your important content!
Follow up Engagement: Another way to implement SMS into your sequence is to trigger off engagement questions at key points. So for example, in a traditional autoresponder / nurture email sequence, you might have a few emails of pure value followed by a harder push to buy or book a call. You can add SMS to this sequence to increase engagement.
Broadcast Strategy
Almost everything here is about the automation strategy - what automations can you trigger as people opt into and go through your funnels every day.
However, you can also send broadcasts.
New Content: Send out SMS notifications for new content - especially if it can be consumed on mobile, like podcasts, social media posts, short videos etc.
Book A Call: Sales calendars looking light? Send an SMS to book more sales calls. Here’s a bunch of ways that have worked for us.
Invitations To Events: Promoting events and webinars via SMS can be a huge source of registrations.
New Funnels: Launching a new funnel? Kick it off with a promotional SMS to prospects to engage.
New Product Launch: Launching a new product? SMS can grab attention and get people warmed up ready to buy.
Promotions & Discounts: Alert your prospects of new deals and discounts. Cut through the noise with a promotional SMS broadcast.
News: Hot news? New product updates? New things happening in your industry? Send out a valuable SMS to keep your prospects in the loop and engaged.
Other Ways To Implement SMS
Review Requests: After a purchase you can automate a follow up SMS reminder to ask for a quick review, increasing your social proof.
Survey / NPS: Send surveys and NPS via SMS to gather feedback.
Re-Engagement SMS Campaigns: Send a SMS after someone hasn’t engaged with your website in a while. Winback discounts can often be high ROI.
Support SMS: Offer support via SMS, and/or notifications on updates to support tickets.
Conclusion
Adding SMS can be a simple way to increase your engagement and revenue and there are nearly unlimited ways to implement it.
If you’d like to get a free trial of the Roezan software, you can get an account here.
And if you’d like to have us help design your SMS strategy for you, check out our SMS Accelerator program.
