Leveraging a Salesforce SMS Integration to Nurture Contacts

When it comes down to it, customer success and sales are all about forming strong relationships with your customers and leads. One of the many reasons that Salesforce is so popular is its ability to integrate with email and other third-party business apps, so that teams can reach out to customers, track their responses, and analyze overall performance. But while most businesses are familiar with traditional communication channel integrations like email, Salesforce SMS integrations are often less familiar.

Business SMS is a highly effective communication channel with an astonishing open rate of 98%. In the past, businesses didn’t use SMS as a communication channel for customers because texting from personal phones was not scalable or compatible with other business apps, but innovations have made enterprise-level texting a possibility. With a Salesforce SMS integration, businesses can use key features, like automations, to streamline their workflows and improve contact outreach.

Leveraging a Salesforce SMS integration is particularly helpful when it comes to nurturing contacts—read on to learn how.

Offer a Faster Way of Doing Business with Salesforce SMS

When you offer customers the choice of using business SMS to communicate with your team, you’re providing them with the chance to do business faster than ever before. With SMS, during the initial touchpoint phase, whether it be via an email or a Linkedin connection request, salespeople can now also ask whether a lead wants to move communications to texting for faster responses.

Why is Salesforce SMS faster than any other form of communication? Business SMS is already fast; 90% of texts are read within the first three seconds of receipt, and the average response time for a text is 90 seconds. But a Salesforce SMS integration can also:

• Allow agents and salespeople to send personalized business text messages in a single click from their existing Salesforce Lightning interface
• Automatically route incoming messages to an appropriate agent based on keywords, date/time, and intent
• Provide immediate access to updated information in the Salesforce CRM
• Enables teams to leverage existing contacts and custom fields, expediting the personalized contact outreach process
• Automatically log business text messages to the appropriate contact and lead in Salesforce

When contacts opt into your business SMS program, they can reach your teams quickly, receive relevant responses, and, ultimately, feel encouraged to engage with your business.

Segment Salesforce SMS Communications Based on Needs

While Salesforce SMS communications are almost always the fastest option, speed shouldn’t always be your focus. When your business leverages a Salesforce SMS integration, you want to choose situations in which texts will work best for contact nurturing.

For example, email works best for standard mass updates, long-form conflict resolutions, and technical support chats. Phone calls work best for conflict resolutions or highly confidential information exchanges. In general, business SMS is best used for timely notifications or updates, important reminders, appointment confirmations, quick customer service resolutions, Q&A forums, brief industry-related tips, and event invitations. These small tasks are quick and easy, and simplified through business SMS.

Above all, remember that a seamless omni-channel experience encourages contacts to respond or reach out through the channel that is most comfortable to them. This is key when it comes to lead nurturing; a contact may receive an SMS but feel more comfortable responding via web chat or another channel, even if they opted in to your SMS service initially.

Use a Salesforce SMS Integration to Automate Drip Campaigns

Systems like Salesforce are well-known for their top-of-the-line email drip campaign capabilities. For email, this is a key strategy for lead nurturing; a Lyric Inc. study provided to eMarketer found that 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% experienced better deliverability and increased revenue.

Now, businesses can use SMS integrations to create automated drip text message campaigns. These can be used in two key lead-nurturing situations:

Nurturing a New Contact

When a curious consumer signs up for your texting program, your team already knows that they’re interested in your product. With an SMS drip campaign, you can set up regular touchpoints with these contacts, letting them know that you’re there to help if they have questions. Like with email drip campaigns, SMS drip campaigns can send templated, customizable messages on the schedule you choose. They draw on your Salesforce CRM data to add personal information from custom fields.

Nurturing a Loyal Customer

Drip campaigns can also help nurture a loyal customer who you’d like to sell an extended service or just let them know about free updates to their existing product or service. For example, your business could segment check-ins based on product usage:

Hey {{first name}}, {{agent name}} here. It looks like you’ve been using our product a lot and we’re so happy you’re our customer! Let us know if you’re interested in any advanced features. Reply with STOP to unsubscribe. 

Sync Your Systems with a Salesforce SMS Integration

Perhaps most importantly, a Salesforce SMS integration allows your business SMS platform and Salesforce platform to share data. This enables the two systems to sync; in other words, the new information you put in one system automatically updates in the other.

With up-to-date customer information, teams can:

• Easily include accurate, personalized information, like names and nearest business location, to outreach messages
• Use prior interaction data to choose the tone of the current conversation
• Review customer history to craft tailored content

Updated data through SMS integrations ultimately empowers businesses to offer the best customer service possible and successfully nurture contacts.

Ready to set up your Salesforce SMS integration? We’re happy to help.