SMS marketing is now one of the most personal marketing communication channels across the globe spanning almost every industry imaginable, including financial services. This blog post brings together 3 ways you can use text messages to improve customer loyalty and increase the open rate of your communications in the Financial Services field. SMS/text messaging as a marketing channel helps improve your overall customer interactions. More and more companies are beginning to implement two-way text messaging as they look to gain a competitive advantage in a saturated market by using SMS technology.
There are many benefits of SMS marketing for businesses globally including high deliverability and open rates, increased customer engagement and more revenue, just to name a few so let’s see how these benefits can be utilized in the financial world.
Benefits of using SMS marketing to increase engagement with your customers in the financial sector
- Building stronger relationships: Personalized text messages make a difference. Customers feel respected, seen and trust a business more when they receive a personalized text message, which builds your relationship and overall customer loyalty.
- Boost the effectiveness of your campaigns: SMS marketing improves customer response rates and response times: Text messages have a 45% response rate, while emails have an 8%. One in five emails sent from commercial addresses ends up in junk mail. This can be a problem in the financial industry as critical information is shared but not always read. 1 in 3 consumers check their text notifications within one minute of receiving a text message, meaning as an institute you know your message is reaching its target.
- Make your company stand out: Many financial institutions still use old-fashioned methods. Text messages break the mold and modernize your company. When it comes to age differences, younger generations such as Millennials are the speediest at checking their text messages throughout the day.
- Reduce human error: Launching bulk SMS minimizes the chance of making mistakes however large or small. Bulk SMS is sending an SMS/MMS message to multiple end-users simultaneously and it is typically a broadcast or one-to-many type of message.
Want to start using SMS in your marketing strategy? Click here to find out which 4 things you should keep in mind when getting started with SMS marketing.
Common use cases of SMS marketing in the financial sector
We have seen the benefits of SMS marketing but now let’s look at how SMS can be used to increase the success of your marketing strategies for your financial business in this new era of omnichannel marketing.
Introductions/Welcome Messages
To build a trusting relationship, you can use SMS to introduce your financial services to customers and express your appreciation for them once they have signed up. It’s good practice in B2C companies to send customers a welcome message after converting them into clients.
Don’t forget to also allow customers to configure their own preferences to define through which channels they prefer to be contacted by.
Notifications of Policy Change
Are you changing your terms and conditions? Instead of printing and mailing out policy change documents which will take a lot of time and effort, send customers an SMS with a link to all documentation. In addition, it’s an excellent way to adopt more sustainable practices. Improvements towards reducing paper use are not only necessary for our planet but also demanded by environmentally conscious customers.
Inform Customers About Unique Offers
When banks are looking to run a promotion offer to customers when opening a specific account, banks and financial institutes can run special SMS promotions. This can include different messages based on your objectives, such as offering cash incentives or alternatively, a higher interest rate on a savings account, or potentially no-account fees for the first year.
Though the 160-character limit is frequently perceived as a barrier for SMS, it is in fact, one of the channel’s greatest advantages. It encourages your teams to be as precise and direct as possible, enabling your customers to quickly and easily understand your message.
SMS messaging has many benefits and use cases for the financial world and is quickly becoming a marketing norm in the B2B and B2C world. Adopting this marketing communication channel will not only improve the quality of your customer relationships but also provide your internal marketing teams with the ability to send instant comms across your customer base. SMS marketing has so much potential in the financial world and businesses that introduce it into their overall marketing strategy have a lot to gain.
It is clear that SMS marketing is not going away and is in fact getting incrementally better for many industries, including financial services. Find out more about the ClickDimensions SMS Marketing feature here or contact us now and we can assist you to uncover its fullest potential.
