Marketers and salespeople tend to focus on email versus other channels. But in many cases, business SMS may be more effective than email. Texts have a high open rate of 98%, while email has a low average open rate of 20%. Texts have a high response rate of 45%, while email has a response rate of 6%. Regardless, email is still one of the most popular forms of communication today. It’s reliable, accessible, and ideal for long-form content. That’s why it’s one of the most popular choices for drip campaigns—right alongside your drip SMS campaign or other SMS efforts.
Considering the unique benefits of both channels, professionals will be pleased to hear that business SMS can easily work with email drip campaigns to improve campaign results. Marketing and sales teams can run cross-channel drip campaigns, send email leads to SMS sales teams, and even use critical business SMS data to improve sales forecasting.
Let’s dive in.
Create Cross-Channel Email and Drip SMS Campaigns
In this age of omnichannel strategies, marketing campaigns are rarely conducted on one channel. When consumers encounter a drip email or drip SMS campaign through a single source, they are more likely to forget about it.
Teams usually use cross-channel marketing to drive home their message. For example, an SMS drip campaign can help increase opt ins to an email drip campaign.
For example, marketing and sales teams can encourage contacts to sign up for an email drip campaign by:
- Including email opt-in links in their drip SMS campaign
- Sending a dedicated text regarding an email campaign
- Adding an email address in each SMS signature
With these simple SMS efforts, marketing and sales teams can help boost the effectiveness of email drip campaigns.
Direct Email Leads to SMS Sales Teams
Email drip campaigns have a lot of benefits. For one thing, emails can be designed well with HTML. They can be engaging and aesthetically pleasing. Plus, nearly everyone has email, so email campaigns can reach most target audiences. However, emails are a notoriously slow form of communication.
Everyone on your sales team knows how important speed is. Responding to leads quickly is the best way to maintain their interest in your brand—and stop them from purchasing something from a competitor. As soon as a lead writes your business, you have to respond immediately.
Teams that use SMS sales can connect with leads far faster than email-based teams can. With a shared inbox, all team members can see incoming messages, so no texts get lost in the rush. Sales teams can even auto-route messages based on intent or specified keywords, so messages arrive in the appropriate inboxes quickly.
To capitalize on this speedy channel, marketing teams can encourage email drip campaign leads to sign up for your business text messaging service or drip SMS campaign. Marketing teams can:
- Include a link to business SMS services information
- Add a button directing email leads to an SMS opt-in web form
- Include business SMS numbers in email signatures
By pushing email leads to SMS sales teams, your business can increase the speed with which you engage—and convert—leads.
Use Email and SMS Marketing to Improve Sales Forecasting
You can tell a lot about how your leads feel from their communications. For example, if your email opt-in rate increases by 50% after you introduce a new product, you can expect sales to increase in the near future. Business text messaging just makes your sales forecasting even more accurate.
Every business text messaging platform will offer SMS reports. The platform will automatically track KPIs like:
- Inbound message volume
- Outbound message volume
- First response time
- Average response time (customer or team member)
- Resolution time
- Subscription rate
- Unsubscribed contacts
Sales teams can then choose to review this data based on specified parameters. They can filter the reports by time period, inbox, or agent. These categories can be critical for sales forecasting.
For example, a cleaning franchise might expand to a new city, opening an SMS sales inbox for those local customers. If teams review SMS reports and notice that their inbound volume for that inbox exceeds the inbound volume for all of their other locations, they can know where to direct their resources.
Then, the sales team can look at email drip campaign data to determine whether a similar phenomenon is happening. If more leads are responding to emails regarding that location than before, teams will know that they need to dedicate even more resources.
Reporting and sales forecasting is one of the best examples of how email and SMS marketing work together.
Ready to start your drip SMS campaign? Try our platform to see how email and SMS marketing work together.
