How to Get Started Using Mobile Messaging in 2019

As Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service teams continue to plan their 2019 strategies we thought it would be helpful to provide a resource for mobile messaging. The goal of this article is to help those new to mobile messaging develop a successful strategy. We also hope to provide some useful tricks for those who have been using text, Facebook Messenger, and other mobile messaging platforms to communicate with their customers and prospects.

 

Layout the Purpose of Mobile Messaging

Every interaction with your contacts should have a purpose. Every business unit is in charge of some metric or action within the business. Here are some KPIs we have seen working with our partners

Marketing:

  • Engagement Rate
  • Percentage MQL
  • Response Rate

Sales:

  • MQL to SQL rate
  • Conversation Rate throughout the funnel
  • Time to close

Support:

  • Time to respond
  • Time to close a claim
  • Repeat Conversations

Recruiting:

  • Time to Hire
  • Time to collect hiring documents
  • Connection Rate

 

Once you have a clear KPI to track then you can start to evolve your plan around that KPI. From here there are two important questions to ask yourself. What is our ideal customer conversation journey look like them to achieve our KPI? How can I measure success in a mobile messaging strategy?

 

Customer Conversation Journey

We have found that our partners that have the most success, tend to use SMS and other forms of mobile messaging to drive their customers to accomplish actions. These customer actions can come in the form of doing something on a website, responding back to the message, or any other ideal activity.

For those sales professionals, you might be looking at your sales pipeline and see that for you to complete a proposal you need certain pieces of information. Using SMS and mobile messaging you can specifically ask for those pieces of information which give your prospect an area to focus their efforts. For the marketing individual, it could be that you want to elicit responses to have people opt into a particular product, discount, or campaign you are running for your brand.

Once you have an ideal action plan for your customers start drafting the copy of your messages. You probably have an idea of what language and tone work best for your customers but there is always opportunity to learn how your customers utilize a channel like SMS. You all know this but utilize A/B testing with your messaging as much as possible to continue to learn and evolve to what resonates best with your customers.

One thing our partners utilize in Sonar is the ability to send mass message campaigns to subsets of their customer base. This functionality allows marketers and sales individuals to send personalized messaging to their contacts at scale. There is also an instant feedback loop as analytics on campaign performance are provided whenever someone needs them.

Another highly leveraged ability is Follow-Ups. For our Sales and Recruiting partners they have found Follow-Up Sequences to be extremely helpful to automatically have SMS touch points with their prospects. This allows their prospects a unique experience and journey as each prospect goes through a Sequence at their own pace.

 

Measure your success

Depending on which KPI you select to monitor will determine how everything should be analyzed. The most important thing is to track your success with mobile messaging. When we first work with partners sometimes they are so anxious to get started they want to get everything set up before discussing how to track the success.

Some of our partners integrate directly into Sonar using our API and webhooks so all of their trackings is done in-house. Others use the Sonar conversion endpoint and activities to track customer conversions in Sonar. Sonar provides an analytics dashboard to review how well your team is performing so you can see who is a leader in the team and who requires extra coaching sessions.

 

Conclusion

Steps to develop a plan for mobile messaging in 2019

  1. Establish a KPI
  2. Develop an ideal customer journey
  3. Develop a metric tracking and feedback loop
  4. Execute and iterate!

If you want to learn more about how Sonar might be able to help you and your team in 2019 send us a note at sales@sendsonar.com. We would love to hear what you are working on for the upcoming year.

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