Why SMS Engagement is Your Most Underrated Strategy

Engagement is everything, no matter what industry your business is in. If your customers aren’t engaged, they’re not connecting with your brand or buying your products. But earning engagement isn’t what it used to be. Customers are now overwhelmed by countless email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and ads - they’re blind to the same old tactics.

That’s why forward-thinking brands are shifting their focus to SMS engagement strategies - reaching customers directly where they already are - on their phones. Remember, 80% of consumers check their phone notifications within five minutes - you can’t say the same for email. SMS isn’t just great for fast-paced, immediate engagement either.

Innovative companies use business texting solutions to strengthen customer relationships throughout the entire lifecycle.

Interactive text messages, in particular, offer an incredible opportunity to bring your target audience into an ongoing, conversational strategy that guides them through the buyer funnel, increases conversion rates, and paves the way for long-term loyalty.

Here’s how you can use strategic, interactive SMS to turbocharge customer lifetime value.

Why SMS Wins for Effective Customer Engagement

First, let’s examine why SMS is the ultimate channel for customer engagement, even if it’s regularly overlooked. SMS engagement works because it targets customers where they live: on their smartphones. We use SMS every day to connect with family and friends, and most of us are happy to chat with companies through text messaging as well. More than half of shoppers say they actually want to get text messages from companies.

At a time when customers are sick and tired of overloaded email inboxes and social media alerts, SMS gives you a chance to stand out from the crowd. It delivers universal reach (almost everyone has a phone that can receive texts, even if it’s not connected to the internet). It also delivers instant impact.

90% of SMS messages are opened within three minutes, and more often than not, they lead to positive action. A well-crafted interactive SMS increases engagement by an average of 139% and delivers an ROI of around $21 to $40 for every dollar spent.

Most importantly, SMS feels personal. Because messages live right alongside notifications from friends and family, companies can build relationships through text that they can’t achieve with any other marketing channel.

It can even turbocharge the impact of your other platforms, filling in the gaps with direct one-to-one communication, without the need for Wi-Fi or third-party app downloads.

Key Strategies for SMS Engagement

One of the great things about interactive text messaging is that it can be used to drive engagement at every stage of the customer journey. You’re not limited to just sending mass text messages whenever a new product launches.

You can build multi-stage strategies that include:

Welcome Messages with Incentives

As soon as a customer responds to your SMS lead generation efforts and hands over their contact details, a welcome message is a great way to set the stage for a positive relationship. It sets the tone for your entire relationship and allows you to encourage an instant purchase with an offer or introduction to your top-selling products.

In fact, promising rewards with welcome messages is a fantastic way to build your contact list, as 59% of customers are more likely to share their contact details for a discount.

Promotional Campaigns

SMS is ideal for time-sensitive promotions. Effective SMS marketing messages are typically read within minutes. You can easily create a sense of urgency and drive immediate action with flash discounts or limited-time deals. You can even create personalized campaigns specific to your audience based on their location or potential preferences.

Alternatively, you can notify your customers when an item they might be interested in is about to launch, go on sale, or become available again.

Abandoned Cart Reminders

One of the top ways ecommerce companies use SMS engagement strategies is to pull customers back to an abandoned cart. Today’s customers are easily distracted, but with ecommerce texting software, you can easily regain their attention, reminding them of a product they were looking at or incentivizing them with a great deal. That way, you miss out on fewer opportunities to convert.

Order Updates & Shipping Notifications

Interactive SMS doesn’t have to be entirely promotional. Transactional SMS messages are powerful, too. Keeping customers updated about their orders, where they are in transit, when they’re likely to be delivered, and so on, builds trust. It keeps buyers connected to your brand after they’ve made a purchase, and can even open the door to opportunities for upselling and cross-selling pre-converted customers.

Appointment Reminders

Missed appointments aren’t just problematic in the healthcare industry - they also cause issues for service providers and B2B businesses. SMS appointment reminders help reduce no-shows by ensuring your customers receive a quick notification when they need to update their calendars. You could even include a link customers can use to reschedule an appointment, if they suddenly discover they have a conflict.

Customer Feedback and Surveys

Interactive text messaging also gives you a great chance to capture insights from your audience. A customer might ignore a survey you send out via email or direct mail, but they’re often happy to share quick feedback over text. You could ask for a Google review via text, or simply ask them to respond to a message with a rating of your service on a scale of one to five. Every piece of information you gather is valuable.

Loyalty Program Updates

Rewarding loyal customers is the key to long-term engagement and valuable relationships. You can invite your customers to join a loyalty program via text, then keep them informed about their rewards and achievements over time, with automated updates. If you’re using a CRM integration, such as a Salesforce texting solution, you could even create workflows that automatically reward customers at certain times, like on their birthday or after a certain number of confirmed purchases.

Customer Service and Support

Earning ongoing engagement from customers is about more than just marketing - it’s also about delivering a consistently excellent customer experience. Providing quick access to customer support can enhance your brand reputation and prevent customers from abandoning your brand. SMS can improve customer response times (particularly when combined with AI agents) and make it easier for your buyers to access the assistance they need.

Top Tips for Effective SMS Customer Engagement

SMS engagement strategies really do work. They keep you connected to your customer when it matters most, all the way through their journey with your brand.

But if you want to get the best results, you need the right strategy. There are a few things you’ll need to master to unlock the full power of interactive text messages.

Crafting Messages That Convert

First, for your SMS customer engagement strategy to work, you need to know how to create compelling messages. SMS isn’t the place for long-winded storytelling - you’re limited to 160 characters, so you need to get the point across fast. But that doesn’t mean your messages should be generic or boring.

Develop brand-specific SMS message templates that are:

• Aligned with your personality: Let your brand’s tone of voice shine through, with fun phrasing, emojis, and personalized elements, but avoid jargon.
• Clear and Concise: Skip complicated phrases and wording. Get to the point fast, and always speak in your customer’s language.
• Use strong CTAs: Let customers know what you want them to do next - whether that’s “Book Today”, “Shop Now”, or “Claim your Spot” for a webinar.
• Create Urgency: SMS is all about direct interactions, so urgency counts. Nudge customers to take action now with “limited time” offers.
• Professional: Avoid spammy language or anything that might be misleading - it’s essential for building trust.

Segmentation and Personalization

Sending the exact same message to everyone on your contact list doesn’t work - not unless you’re just sharing generic alerts about service outages. To drive real results from SMS customer engagement, you’ll need to personalize everything.

Use your SMS software to segment customers into specific groups based on their:

• Behavior: Abandoned cart shoppers, past purchasers, and app downloaders.
• Demographics: Age, location, interests.
• Lifecycle stage: New customers, loyal VIPs, lapsed users.

Once you have your segments, create a custom SMS strategy for every group. Don’t just slap a dynamic field into your text so you can include a first name. Reference their interest, where they’re located, and what they might be interested in.

Implementing Two-Way SMS Communication

One of the best ways to boost engagement through SMS is to make it interactive. Customers don’t just want to hear from you - they want to be able to talk about, and interactive text messaging gives them that opportunity.

Invest in conversational SMS strategies that invite customers to share their thoughts through surveys, vote in a poll, or take a quiz. Use two-way SMS to give your customers a direct line to your customer service team if they have any issues.

If you’re struggling to find enough staff to reply to incoming SMS for customer service every day, use a platform like Clerk Chat to create AI agents that can handle FAQs and common troubleshooting tasks automatically.

Just make sure that if your customers are speaking to a bot, they’re aware of it, and that the agent you build still shares your unique brand voice.

Optimizing Deliverability

An incredible approach to SMS engagement isn’t going to do much if your messages don’t actually make it to customers. Choosing the right platform can help you boost your deliverability rates, but you’ll still need to invest in:

• SMS Compliance: Follow laws set by TCPA (U.S.), CASL (Canada), and GDPR (EU). Always get express written consent before texting.
• Time it right: Avoid blasting messages to customers at odd hours. Stick to waking hours in the recipient’s time zone.
• Watch frequency: Too many messages often lead to opt-outs. Find out what really works by experimenting with message cadence and frequency.
• Make opting out easy: “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” should be included in every message.
• Protect data privacy: Only collect what you need, and safeguard it like gold.

Monitor your deliverability rates and look out for any indications that you’re being flagged by carrier spam filters.

Using AI and Automation

We’ve already mentioned AI and automation, but these are really incredible tools for upgrading your interactive SMS strategy. Automation allows you to send messages at the exact perfect moment, whether it’s just before a product launch, or when a customer does something specific, like sends an SMS opt-in message.

You can use an intelligent interactive SMS service to automate all kinds of workflows, from welcome flows to abandoned cart campaigns, post-purchase thank-yous, re-engagement and winback campaigns, or subscription renewal nudges.

Add AI into the mix, and you introduce that interactive special sauce, allowing customers to constantly connect with a bot that can answer FAQs, route them to a sales rep, gather feedback, or just deliver personalized recommendations. AI-enhanced SMS engagement software can turbocharge your results, without you needing to hire extra staff.

Measuring Success and Iterative Improvement

Customer preferences and trends are constantly evolving, and you should adapt accordingly. The only way to make sure you’re really getting the most value out of your SMS strategy, is to measure the results.

Pay attention to basic SMS engagement metrics, like delivery, open, click-through, conversion, and response rates. But remember to define the KPIs that matter most to your specific goals, too. For instance, if you’re using SMS in business communication to improve customer service and loyalty, track customer satisfaction scores and retention rates.

If you’re trying to reduce customer acquisition costs, look at your average cost per conversion and how many customers join your referral program.

Based on your discoveries, experiment. Run A/B tests to see whether changes to your messaging frequency, style, or approach drive better results.

Adding SMS to Your Omnichannel Strategy

If you’re still comparing SMS and email marketing and wondering which one to use - stop. SMS doesn’t have to replace other marketing channels. It can actually elevate every strategy you already use. Connect SMS with your wider strategy.

Use it to bridge the gaps between your in-app messaging, social media, and push notification strategies. You could even integrate SMS with Microsoft Teams to bring video conferencing and calling into the mix.

Great moments to use SMS in an omnichannel strategy include:

• To follow up on emails: First, an email goes out, then an SMS nudges the customer to act, or reminds them of an offer.
• Boosting social engagement: Got a follower? Offer exclusive SMS perks as a reward for their loyalty.
• Encouraging In-app behavior: If someone hasn’t used a feature, text them a reminder, or share a video tutorial via RCS.
• Enhancing customer service: Started a chat on the web? Continue via SMS.

Just ensure that you use integrations to make the journey seamless from one channel to the next. Don’t force customers to repeat themselves.

The Future of Interactive Text Messaging and Engagement

Around the world, countless companies are discovering that SMS engagement strategies yield better results at lower costs. But we’re still only at the starting line. There’s plenty of room for growth in the arena of interactive text messaging.

For instance, RCS (Rich Communication Services) is quickly emerging as a fantastic next-gen upgrade to traditional SMS. It offers a new opportunity to bring rich media, carousels, read receipts, and in-message purchasing into phone-based conversations.

With RCS, you can go beyond the basics of SMS in retail to send customers product images, videos, maps, calendars, and more, increasing conversions.

Then there’s the rise of more flexible SMS platforms - one that integrates with countless other communication channels for omnichannel campaigns, and aligns crucial data. SMS CRM integrations, for instance, make it easier than ever to personalize discussions and keep your customer profiles up-to-date.

On top of that, new innovations in AI are emerging all the time. First, we had basic chatbots; now we have conversational AI agents that can actually understand customer intent, sentiment, and complex queries. They can run multi-stage campaigns automatically, simplify customer service, and deliver 24/7 personalized support while your human agents sleep.

The future of SMS engagement will be faster, smarter, more interactive, and more exciting than ever, unlocking unstoppable growth for savvy brands.

Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value with SMS

In an environment where customers are overwhelmed by endless noise, both offline and online, SMS engagement strategies stand out as the perfect opportunity to take a direct, personal, and high-impact approach to growth.

From lightning-fast open rates and real-time updates to personalized offers, support, and loyalty nudges, SMS reaches customers where they’re most active: their phones. All you need to get started is the right platform, and that’s where Clerk Chat comes in.

Our conversational messaging platform is perfect for creating automated campaigns, enabling two-way messaging, and personalizing every customer interaction. Plus, with built-in conversational AI agents, you can take your sales, marketing, and customer service strategy to the next level in an instant.

If you’re looking for the easiest and most effective way to increase the lifetime value of every customer you convert, SMS engagement is the answer.