There’s a good chance you’re considering adopting (or have already adopted) HubSpot’s Flywheel Model. It’s a new, popular alternative to traditional marketing funnel and customer journey stages. But where does business texting fit in? Read on to find out.
What Is the HubSpot Flywheel Model?
If you haven’t been introduced to the Flywheel Model, learn about it straight from HubSpot. If you’re already acquainted, here’s a refresher:
The flywheel puts customers at the center of your company’s efforts. It prioritizes the customer experience, recognizing their role in growing your brand. Where funnels consider customers an outcome, the flywheel aligns your entire business around providing an awesome customer experience.
You can get the flywheel spinning by applying force. Forces can include inbound marketing, conversational marketing, paid advertising, and investing in customer service communication tools. These forces should focus on making customers successful. You keep the flywheel spinning by removing friction. Friction can include slow response times or limited entry points to your website. The more you increase forces and decrease friction, the more customers become brand promoters.
The last important aspect of the flywheel is that it centers around an inbound marketing methodology. The three phases of this methodology—attract, engage, and delight—are critical to keeping customers connected and happy with your brand.
Why the Flywheel Model Works Well with Business Texting
Business text messaging centers around providing a stellar customer experience. The tool itself is already customer-friendly; it’s convenient and popular. In addition, all business text messaging strategies focus on creating genuine connections through one-on-one conversations that show team members’ real personality.
The strategy also emphasizes convenience. That’s why teams often adopt an omnichannel messaging platform, allowing customers to connect through multiple services, including Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messaging, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, and Apple Business Chat.
For example, conversational customer engagement, a popular messaging strategy, focuses on providing authentic, person-to-person messaging interactions that help form long-term customer relationships. The strategy encourages team members to use friendly language with customers—even adding emojis and GIFs when appropriate to achieve a light-hearted tone.
Now, with tools like HubSpot SMS integrations, businesses are leveraging text messaging to build relationships throughout the flywheel by sending them text messages right from HubSpot.
The goals of business texting and the HubSpot Flywheel Model align perfectly. But let’s talk application. How can you use business text messaging in each of the flywheel’s three inbound marketing phases?
Flywheel Phase: Attract
In the attract phase, you want to promote interesting content from your brand that helps solve problems for leads and customers. You also want to eliminate any communication barriers so they can easily connect with you. That’s where business texting comes in.
Business text messaging is automatically a convenient communication tool for your audience. Most people (97%) have some sort of phone, which means that they can text. People with smartphones can also access messaging services like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. In fact, the average consumer uses 3 different apps every week.
A business text messaging service helps leads and customers easily connect with your brand. Add your SMS number along with entry points for your other messaging services to help your audience get in touch without any friction. And when they do, focus on providing value through answering their questions in a conversational way.
Flywheel Phase: Engage
The engage phase is all about simplifying the customer shopping and purchasing process. You can do this by empowering leads and customers to engage with you on their schedule and through their preferred channels. As Hubspot puts it, “focus on opening relationships, not just closing deals.” Connecting with contacts through business text messaging is a big part of this phase.
Your team should prioritize offering expert shopping advice and VIP customer service through business texting during this phase. Conversational customer engagement, which emphasizes person-to-person chats, can help you create close relationships with customers. While your brand can send occasional outbound content, like opinion polls and collaboration experience announcements, focus on responding to inbound messages.
To put the most force into the engage phase, ensure that your lead and customer messages are authentic and interactive. For example, you’ll want to use a friendly and casual tone with leads and customers, and include a signature in each text so customers know they’re texting with a human and not a bot.
Flywheel Phase: Delight
The delight phase focuses on current customers. This is where you support them and help them meet their goals. As HubSpot says, “customer success is your success.”
Continue to use conversational customer engagement tactics to offer authentic one-on-one chats with customers. Prioritize answering customer queries to make it as easy as possible to solve problems over messaging, like returns and exchanges. You can also send outbound content, like product tips and interesting use cases. These are all great tools for enabling customer success.
Adding that extra delightful touch to your customer service is all about the details. Personalize each customer message with custom fields and tailor messages with help from customer history. Finally, always follow up after ticket resolutions and interactions to ensure customers are as satisfied as they can be. Remember, your goal is to thoroughly delight them with your attentiveness.
Want to learn more about texting from HubSpot? Check out our guide to texting throughout the HubSpot customer lifecycle.
