Agencies are often asked to provide marketing or advertising strategies as well as implementation. To help their clients reach their goals in the most efficient way possible, today’s savvy agencies are looking to new technologies—like business text messaging—to help their clients appeal to customers.
Business SMS platforms help agencies send, receive, and organize all of their client’s messages with customers. However, clients considering the adoption of an enterprise-grade texting solution often have a lot of questions. How can their agency implement business text messaging? Can clients text with customers through their main landline number? Do companies that use business SMS have to consider any regulations? Can they automate follow-up messages like they do with email?
To help agencies and clients new to business text messaging, we’ve created a basic guide for using business text messaging to help your clients succeed.
Client Use Cases
To help clients succeed with a business text messaging strategy, agencies can offer help with:
Setting Up Business Text Messaging
It’s easy for an agency to set up a client’s business text messaging platform. First and foremost, the client’s business needs a phone number to text. If they have a landline, they can text-enable the landline, and if they don’t have a number, they can get a free number from the platform. Once they have a number, they can advertise their texting capabilities either using a web widget or Google My Business.
Handling Marketing Campaigns
Agencies are commonly tasked with increasing qualified leads for their clients. Often, agencies create ad campaigns where leads provide their contact information. Once a lead submits their phone number, agencies connect with the lead to encourage engagement or a conversion. Texting is one of the best ways to connect with those leads, as it has a historically high open and response rate. Plus, with enterprise texting platforms, agencies can automate the follow-up process, which means they can handle more leads for each client without having to add team members to the project.
Helping Clients Scale Leads
Once clients start receiving more incoming leads, they may start to worry that they’re limited by the time and number of their staff. Luckily, with Heymarket, you can introduce your client to key time-saving tools, like reusable template campaigns, integrations, and automations, helping your client save resources and time.
Answer Customer Questions 
Customers often have questions about a client’s brand or product, particularly during or after a big advertising campaign. Answering these questions over the phone can be time-consuming for you or your client, and emails can take too long for busy customers’ satisfaction. With business text messaging, customers can quickly text their questions to a shared inbox. An available team member, either on your team or your client’s team, can see and respond to the message within minutes.
Engage with Customers
Once leads provide their information to your client after an advertising campaign, you’ll want to start engaging them. But 90% of leads would prefer to be texted than called, which means your engaging should be done via business SMS. This can involve sending notifications, like opt in confirmations, or asking whether customers would like more information about the client’s product. Your team can even send these messages en masse; business SMS platforms automatically personalize each outgoing message with merge tokens that draw on custom fields.
Increase Online Reviews
Clients are often very interested in increasing their presence on online review sites. After all, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from friends and family. Business SMS is a great way to do send online review requests for your clients. While the average person opens only 20% of emails, 98% of texts are opened. And although 4.2% of people click links in emails, 19% of people click links in texts. In other words, business SMS’s high open and link click rates can help your client get more online reviews for their customers. When sending review requests to your client’s customers, there are a few key ways to ensure they will send in a review. First of all, don’t directly ask for a positive review, which can have an adverse effect. Additionally, include a link to the review site of your choice, like Google Reviews or Yelp, to make it easier for them to access the online review site.
Business Text Messaging Setup
Once you have chosen a business text messaging provider, they will give you instructions for text-enabling your landline, VoIP, or toll-free number. Throughout the entire process, customers can still call that number, but once the process is complete, they’ll have the option of either texting or calling. Incoming text messages will arrive straight into your client’s business SMS platform’s shared inbox, which your team can access from their web app or phone app. If you want to use a new number entirely for texting, your client’s business text messaging platform will be able to provide that, too.
Growing Business Text Messaging Lists
Once your client adopts a business SMS platform, you’ll want to let their customers know that you’re open to texting. Add the business SMS number to messages sent through your client’s other channels, like email, as well as any webpages or social media accounts. If you have room for verbiage, be sure to mention how quickly your team can respond, and which hours they’ll be checking the line.
Legal Considerations
Your client and agency should consider and review both local and federal regulations with your legal team. You’ll find that the most important requirement is that customers must opt in to your client’s SMS services before you start sending texts. Provide customers with multiple options for opting in (such as by keyword or web form) and don’t forget to let them know how to opt out, too. Opt-out information must always be included in your initial texts, and the business text messaging platform your client chooses must be able to opt out customers who send messages containing certain keywords, like STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, or QUIT.
Is your client ready to adopt business text messaging? Try our text service for business for free today.
