6 Min Read

Customer opinions can go a long way in your product’s journey.  They can make, break, or shape your product. In today’s age of discerning customers, ignoring a customer’s sentiment at critical points of the buyer journey and beyond could prove to be a very costly mistake for your business.

To really get a sense of how customers feel about your business or brand, you must begin by tracking and understanding your customer sentiments. This exercise helps your business identify the emotions that drive customer engagement and loyalty while providing you timely and critical insights that can guide your business and marketing strategy.

It is clear that mobile phones with their ubiquitous nature, provide a simple and effective way to capture and understand customer sentiment.  

Here’s why we think SMS marketing is your best bet for tracking your customer sentiment across all points of interaction with your business and through all stages of your buyer’s journey

To simply put, text messages work because more people can read them.Five billion people
globally, roughly two-thirds of the world’s population, own a mobile phone connection.

This is a huge number of people with the capability to receive and respond to a text message. SMS allows you to reach anyone with a mobile plan and device.  A text message is simpler to deal with than an email, which requires an email client and an internet connection, making it a preferred choice if access and penetration is what your marketing strategy is aiming for.

2.    Personalized Yet Non-Intrusive

Emails, with their spammy subject lines, always seem like they’re selling you something. SMS places the power in the hands of the customer.  More importantly, SMS text messages don’t try too hard to be clever or make assumptions of your availability.

According to areport from SAP, 76 percent of people said they were more likely to read a message sooner if it was sent via text as opposed to email. This is because people believe the text messages they receive from businesses serve a purpose and are thus more likely to open them.

Customers who receive a SMS message aren’t interrupted or made to feel pressured into responding or buying something. It takes 90 minutes for the average person to respond to an email while it takes 90 seconds for the average person to respond to a text message.

This makes the entire process seem personalized without being pushy and can help foster a positive customer sentiment by showing them that you respect their time and space.

3.     Safe and Effective

SMS messages work because they get where they’re supposed to be simply because mobile phones don’t have spam filters. The advanced filters and settings of email services severely minimize the chances of even the most well-intentioned emails making their way into your users’ inboxes. The security risks associated with emails from unknown sources, make SMS a safer and the preferred choice for a discerning customer.

In fact, more than 90 percent of people read a text message within the first three minutes of receiving it.  People generally do not have the time or the patience to read an email till they reach the end or the link. SMS messages are short and up to the point, and thus far more successful in capturing and holding your customer’s attention. SMS also beats in terms of click-through rates. According to one report, the average click-through rate for a URL included in a text message is 19% while email has a click-through rate of 3.2%.

Now that we’ve established how SMS provide a simple and effective marketing strategy for your business, let us explore how you can use SMS marketing as a strategy at different points in your buyer journey.

1.    Satisfaction

Understanding how your customers feel about the quality of your product or service is the first step in gauging the effectiveness of your product.

Results from arecent Mckinsey study
demonstrate what this means for businesses: After a positive customer experience, more than 85 percent of customers purchased more. After a negative experience, more than 70 percent purchased less. So, getting a timely sense of how satisfied your customers are, can really help define and refine your re targeting strategy. That in turn, can positively impact how your customers engage with your products in the future.

An SMS message sent to the customer post the purchase of your products or after a service has been rendered is a simple way for you to collect data and insights about their post-purchase sentiment. Your customers could respond with a numerical score or even better, provide detailed feedback in their own words.

These insights can also help you design products that your customers really need, helping you build better products, and grow your business.

2.     Engagement

Understanding your customers’ sentiments by studying how they choose to interact with your business post the purchase can provide critical insights into your sales strategy. You could, for instance, understand what supplementary or follow-up services your customers would need. This way, you could continue to delight them with customized offers, add-ons, and even better, help better design your products.

Besides being used as an effective strategy to provide additional offers, services, or make more sales, SMS messages can be used to understand how different customers engage with you as a brand.

3.     Loyalty

This critical metric can help you understand loyalty trends across your customers. Understanding this aspect of the customer sentiment can help your business identify the kind of customers you should place increased focus on, besides identifying those whose loyalties may have changed.

Designing a simple Net Promoter Score based SMS system can help you understand how likely your customers would be to recommend your products and services. With a 98% open-rate, SMS ensures that your data is far more representative and accurate of your customers’ sentiments than in the case of email-based NPS surveys which manage open rates of just 20%.

A comprehensive and seemingly intuitive SMS marketing strategy that covers each of the three aspects of customer sentiment can give you critical business insights that can take your business to the next level.

To wrap things up, customer sentiment and its understanding can no longer be thought of a business afterthought. It’s clear that it is an incredibly influential exercise for you to build and grow your business.

SMS marketing with its cost-effectiveness, ease of use, and scope can be an incredibly powerful tool for you to understand your customer better to do better business.