Business texting has a clear advantage over other marketing channels by, hands down, consistently creating a better overall customer experience. Engaging customers in convenient, personalized, and meaningful two-way conversations, texting is fast becoming the preferred way for both customers and businesses alike to communicate with each other.
People want responsive, personalized messaging, reliable and efficient customer support, and easy access to the latest product offerings. Companies want to leverage the high engagement, performance, and conversion rates that come from this improved customer experience.
Exceptional CX is already a huge win, but texting’s benefits are not just isolated to individual nodes in the customer journey. By continually driving customer satisfaction before and after purchase, texting improves overall customer retention and bears fruit throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
Given its importance to overall business health, let’s take a deeper look into how texting benefits each stage of the customer lifecycle and how companies can use texting to enhance customer retention.
How texting benefits the customer lifecycle
Most models of the customer lifecycle include variations on the following stages, and each here is followed by an explanation of how texting improves them.
Awareness:
A customer relationship begins after they first become aware of your brand, product, or service. However, your work starts long before this stage as you are crafting content and working to get it in front of customers.
- Texting likely won’t be the point of first awareness for a new customer, but it does factor into the next lifecycle, offering a quick and easy channel to inform customers of new products, services, or special offers, where messages can be personalized according to interaction history.
Engagement:
Aware of your brand and moving towards making a purchase, customers engage your channels and content, whether going to your website, following you on social media, or opting in to receive texts.
- Given its integration into our daily lives, people are already primed to be engaged with text messaging, a channel vastly more convenient and accessible than unresponsive email newsletters.
Evaluation:
Customers research, compare, and seek answers before finalizing their purchase. Offering them tools to get fast, easy answers helps you stand out from competitors and shows them you take their concerns seriously, even before they purchase.
- Nobody has time to price-shop in stores anymore. Texting, as a responsive two-way conversation, allows the customer to really talk through all of their options before they make a purchase.
Purchase:
The “make or break” stage where consumers make their final decision. Most customers require support to get here, so ensuring they have everything they need is critical at this point. Without answers to their questions, they will abandon ship.
- Likely the warmest hand-off you could give to sales rep, texting equips the customer with all they need to know and makes for a smoother, shorter transaction. In purchase conversations, sales reps can create the solution that best meet customer needs and begin building a trusting relationship.
Product and support experience:
Lasting opinions about your company only truly come together after a purchase. But this means more than just delivering quality products and services - you need to continually provide exceptional service and support.
- Deploying an array of post-purchase texts about order confirmations, thank-you messages, welcome campaigns, product feedback, or customer support creates a supportive experience that makes customers feel valued.
Bonding:
Every quality interaction demonstrates your interest in customers as people and not just wallets, so proactively engaging them with authentic, responsive conversations - which invite and welcome them back into purchasing again – builds the healthy bonds that lead to loyalty.
- Texting is a fast and convenient way to start nurturing the growth of your budding relationship with personalized check-in messages, loyalty program offers, upselling or cross-selling deals that has them happily returning on another seamless and familiar purchasing journey.
How texting supercharges the customer lifecycle
Texting directly enhances each individual stage of the customer lifecycle by providing a better experience that customers now expect. But the sum is also greater than its parts - texting gives customers more and better reasons to stay with you.
Texting’s not-so-secret superpower is retention, the key ingredient to a better overall customer lifecycle and longer-term growth because it can be nurtured in many ways at many touchpoints.
Take welcome campaigns, for example, where quick follow-ups seeing how customers like their purchase engages them about any potential issues, confirming their decision, limiting post-purchase concerns, builds a trusting relationship and opens up future conversations. Or messages tailored to early adopters, who are eager to hear about product-specific updates and offers and primed for upselling and cross-selling. Text messages can also ask customers for feedback on their purchases, letting them feel cared for and that their opinion is important.
There’s no mystery here: by turning a customer journey into fast, frictionless, and solutions-focused experience, texting shows customers you take their time and needs seriously, even more so with its personalized, responsive conversations. This sets the stage for longer-term value - customers want to engage in meaningful dialogue that makes them feel heard and valued, which strengthens relationships and increases retention.
Powering the cycle of life
While we all know business texting is great for customer experience, don’t forget that its benefits stretch well beyond that, impacting overall customer lifecycle and your bottom line.
From keeping your brand top-of-mind to continually strengthening bonds, texting adapts to and improves every stage of the customer lifecycle with convenient, responsive and personalized two-way conversations. In other words, texting is the thread that weaves through and ties your customer lifecycle together, securing your customers in an ongoing, meaningful relationship with your brand.
Book a demo now to see how texting improves each stage of your customer lifecycle!
