If you didn’t already know this, SMS marketing is widely regarded as one of the most personal marketing communication channels on the planet which can be used across multiple industries, even including financial services.
In our latest blog article, we discuss why your business should use SMS marketing in the financial services industry.
So, why use SMS messaging as a form of marketing communications?
The reason behind using this channel is simple, it helps to improve your overall customer engagements. It is a recurring trend for more firms to turn to two-way text messaging as they try to stand out from the rest of the competition in a pretty saturated market.
You will find that there are a whole host of benefits that can be gained from using SMS marketing which include higher open rates, improved customer engagement and more revenue. Let’s take this further by seeing how using this form of marketing can help those businesses operating in the financial services industry.
- Enables you to forge better relationships: Adding the personal touch to text messages is a real gamechanger. Customers will feel valued, will trust your business more when they get sent a personal text message which will enable you to forge better relationships and build customer loyalty.
- Improve overall campaign effectiveness: It is a fact that SMS marketing can help to drive both customer response rates and response times. This is typically 45% in text messages with emails only 8%. Even worse is the fact that 1 in 5 emails ends up in the junk folder. This is a significant issue in the financial services industry as vital information is shared but not always read by the customer. It is said that around 1 in 3 consumers read their text messages around a minute after receiving them which means you will know quickly when it's landed.
- Stand out from the crowd: The financial services industry can be seen as somewhat old-fashioned. By using text messages can help break this assumption and revolutionize the firm. When it comes to technology, you will find that statistically millennials are the fastest people at checking their messages during a working day.
- Minimise human mistakes: Sending out bulk SMS reduces the chances of mistakes being made. When we refer to bulk SMS, we mean sending out SMS messages to a number of end-users at the same time which consists of the same sort of message.
Examples of how SMS messaging is used in the financial services industry
Now that we know what the benefits of using SMS marketing are, let’s look at how it can be used as part of your marketing efforts in your financial services business.
Initial contact/welcome messages
In order to establish a trustworthy relationship, you can use SMS to send out information about the services you provide to your customer base as well as thanking them after they have signed up.
Remember don’t forget to allow your customers to select which channels they want to be contacted on.
Changing policy notifications
Have any changes been made to your terms and conditions? Save yourself the time of printing or mailing them out by simply sending your customers an SMS with a link to the necessary document. As well as this, it’s the perfect way to ensure that your business works towards becoming more sustainable.
Send your customers exclusive offers
You will find that when establishments such as banks want to run promotions to existing customers to encourage them to complete a certain action, this can be completed through the use of SMS messaging. This can be organised in several ways depending on what you wish to achieve.
Despite the fact that the 160-character limit can be viewed as a negative of SMS, it can also work the other way round and prove to be a significant advantage. It helps to ensure that your teams are much more direct with their messaging and thus allowing customers to easily understand the message.
There are no doubts that SMS messaging has a place in the financial services industry and it has rapidly become adopted by both B2B and B2C marketing teams globally. Choosing to make use of this marketing channel will not only help to improve customer relationships but also enable your marketing teams to send out instant messages to your customers. The world is your oyster when it comes to SMS marketing particularly in the financial services industry if businesses choose to introduce it.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that is looking to change the way you communicate with your customers through SMS messaging via ClickDimensions or are looking to continue to improve your engagement across your email channels through ClickDimensions Sales Engagement then please give our team a call today to discuss it.
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