Every customer expecting delivery of an item of furniture is now sent an sms message informing them of the 2 hour time slot in which they can expect delivery.

“Your delivery from Stirling Furniture is between 10am and 2pm tomorrow, the driver will phone you when he is 30mins away.”

If the customer needs to change the delivery time or give further instructions, they can simply reply to the text alert. The text response is then converted into an email and immediately sent to a predefined email address. If further communication is needed, the customer service advisor can simply reply to the email which is then converted back into a text on the customer’s mobile.

It’s a simple system that has radically streamlined the way that Stirling runs its delivery operation.

Operations Manager, Nick Mylands commented:

“We used to spend ages calling our customers to let them know when they could expect deliveries. It was time consuming and very expensive. Now all our customers receive a text with a 2 hour delivery slot. It’s just far more professional and efficient.

When text replies come in, we can simply write a quick email, hit send and that’s it. We’re pleased to be amongst the first companies to use the service and have certainly been impressed with how easy it’s been to set up and use.”

Text Marketer’s TxtUs service helps companies simplify the way they manage customer communications, if you’d like to find out how it might work for you, please call us on 0117 2050202.

Using txtUs dedicated virtual mobile numbers for your business

A txtUs number gives your business a dedicated virtual mobile number which people can text (but cannot call) enquiries to or to reply to messages you send out to them from your system.

You can add as many txtUs numbers to your account as you wish and they can each have bespoke settings which can be a great solution for a small office environment or call centre where each member of staff could have their own txtUs number for their clients.

A quick 2 min Video Demo of the 2 main uses | See more videos

The unique advantage of the txtUs system is that the full conversation between you and each mobile number is sent to you via email and you simply reply via email. In essence, to answer the ‘how does it work?” question …. exactly like your email does. The only difference being of course that your replies are being sent out the customer as text messages.

Step 1 – Adding a txtUs number to your account

Login to your account. If you don’t have an account, you can set one up here.
Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Add a txtUs reply number”. Simply choose the number you want and press Place Order. This will take you through the Google Checkout system to set up the subscription payment for your txtUs number.

NEW! You can also pay for your txtUs number by recurring invoice rather than with a card

Your subscription may be cancelled at any time in your Google account and you have complete control of all payments.

Step 2 – Applying the settings for your txtUs number

Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Change reply settings” then click “Configure” next to your txtUs number. You will be presented with the screen below.

- Auto reply by SMS settings – If you would like to automatically send a text message back when somebody texts your txtUs number, you can set it here. Simply change active to ‘Y’, enter your text message and press submit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The text autoresponse is only sent once to any individual mobile number, the first time they text in. This is to avoid them receiving the same autoresponse message over and over if you get into a conversation with them.

- Reply settings – This is where you set how your system handles the text conversations you have via email;

• Active – set to N if you do not wish to have incoming texts emailed to you
• E-mail – set the email address you wish incoming texts to go to.
• Thread Count – This is the amount of history you want included on each conversation email. For example, if you wanted to see the last 5 messages from a person and the last 5 replies you sent them you would set it to 10.
• Use as Sender default – enable this if you want your txtUs number to be the default reply number for text messages you send out from your system

- Advanced (API) settings – only used for programmers to deliver incoming message data to a script URL. Please leave this inactive unless you are sure of what you’re doing.

Step 3 – Testing your new txtUs number / Seeing a conversation in action

Send a text message to your new txtUs number then, if enabled, check your email inbox on the email address you have set (if it doesn’t come pretty instantly, check any spam filters or folders you may have enabled). You will see you have a new message from yourself.

Now reply to that email in the normal way (as you would an email). The only difference being you must end the message you send back with ##. This tells our system that it’s the end of the reply and so doesn’t send all the history contained in the email below.

You will then receive the reply on your phone. If you reply back again, check your email again you will now see the conversation thread developing.

Below is a conversation thread email for example from a company confirming a meeting:

You can also see the name of the person texting in if they are in your Address Book.

Step 4 – Promoting your new txtUs number

Congratulations! Now you are a text enabled business and you can promote your number as you would your telephone number, fax number or email address. See how we do on our enquiries page. As a customer, you are free to use the txtUs logo next to your number which adds impact and encourages use.

Other Common Questions

Getting replies from text campaigns
To enable people to reply to you, you simply have to set the Sender ID as your txtUs number. When you have a txtUs number your account will automatically do this as the default, which you can change if you wish.

You will see a new setting on your send screens, “Use Reply Number”. Simply tick this to use your txtUs number:

Charges
You are only charged for messages you send out, not for incoming messages. The cost of this is just 1 credit per 160 characters as per normal charges.

Cancellation
You can cancel your number at any time. There are no fixed contract lengths. To do this simply log in to your Google Checkout Account and cancel your subscription payments.

Logs
All of your conversations are stored in a log. Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Reply Data” to download your full log for your txtUs number.

If you don’t like reading, simply try our demo to see how this works;

Text INFO and your email address to 88802 and see what happens (no charges of course!)

For existing customers, this facility is now available in your account & the instructions and screenshots have been updated.

For new customers wishing to trial the service for free, sign up for a Text Marketer account and add a free week’s trial of a keyword when you’re signing up.

The marketing applications for this unique service are endless. Imagine you can automatically send any email you like including offers, vouchers, job information, etc. to people who text to you. You also capture their mobile number and email address for future use.

Have you tried the demo’ yet? We think you’ll be impressed!

A bold claim. But, this is not one of those over-complicated articles on efficiency, structure or cost effectiveness. This comes down to cold, hard pounds, shillings and pence ….. and has a strong, environmentally positive message too.

The Financial Services industry sends billions of pieces of mail every year in the UK. Some of the time this is unavoidable. For example, certain contracts, policy documents and alike have to be posted by law. The vast majority though are information mailings, reminders, offers or simply follow ups. These do not all need to be sent by post. Most of these types of communication can easily be handled by sending a text message.

Insurance Renewal Reminder – A typical example

Let’s take this as a typical example in the insurance industry. All Company A needs to do is remind a customer that they need to renew their insurance and to please call them. Why spend 50p or more on a letter, stationery, time, postage costs etc. (not to mention valuable wood resources for the paper, fuel costs for the delivery, etc. etc.) when a simple 3.8p text message would suffice. Also, with the text message, you can track it has been delivered and it gets straight to the customer’s phone who can use that exact same device to call!

Why not E-mail? 3 Main reasons as a starter … 

Mostly when a company sends a communication to a customer, they are trying to get a response. E-mails, broadly speaking, just don’t get an acceptable level of response any more.

• Excessive spam has crippled trust in e-mail deliverability and companies are looking for a good response rate to their communications.
• Excessive ‘phishing’ or ‘scam’ e-mails from bogus financial services (and other) companies often means those who do receive emails will not click on them.
• On top of this, those people that do receive documentation by E-mail tend to print it and therefore you end up with the same environmental paper cost.

Forgetting the environmental benefits for a moment, how much money can you save using SMS Text Messaging in your business?

Hardly any business could stop using mail altogether but by using SMS where possible you can boost your response rates, save huge amounts of money and be a more environmentally conscious company.

To put this into context with some numbers, here is the typical cost of sending a 1 page mailing. Also, it shows the cost per response at a typical rate of 2.5%:

And the costs using SMS showing large savings, coupled with a typical response rate of 10%, bringing the cost per response down by some £19.62!:

Using a conservative cost figure of 50p per item of post (most business federations estimate this more toward the 70p range as an average including time, stationery, stamp, etc.) the savings using SMS are incredible. When you factor in that you are likely to get a 4-10 times higher response rate and that it promotes a positive environmental message for your company, it is an extremely compelling argument.

How ‘Green’ is it using SMS instead of mailing?

It is actually quite staggering how many trees it takes to make our beloved paper. The exact number depends on quality of the paper in question, to what extent it is recycled and so on. But, a generally accepted figure from the trusted source Conservatree is that around 8,000 pieces of average office paper takes 1 x 40 feet tall tree of about 6-8 inches in diameter – an ‘average’ tree.

The figures below show the ‘tree cost’ of a 1, 5 & 10 page letter including an A5 envelope (even before the additional environmental cost of transporting the items):

How many trees could your business save?

Notes to calculations above:
1. Based on approximate calculation of 8000 average weight paper sheets of A4 costing 1 tree. Higher quality paper would cost more trees and vice versa. Source: Conservatree
2. Includes an envelope in each mailing, equivalent to 1 x A4 sheet.
3. Does not include additional environmental cost of transporting the mail items.

Conclusion

The information raises the inevitable question- “why isn’t my business using SMS”?

If your answer to the following questions is yes, then maybe it’s time to have a talk with us;

• Would you like to save a lot of money on your mailing/postage costs?
• Would you like to get a better response to your communications?
• Would you like be able to boost your environmental credentials?
• Would you like to communicate with your customers in a way they want to be communicated with?

Text Marketer was one of the first agencies in the UK to bring bulk text messaging to businesses small and large. We have built our reputation on quality of service, using only the best UK routing for timely delivery of text messages at the lowest price in the UK. Our client list runs into the thousands, but, notable organisations that have enjoyed the stability and reliability of our service over the last decade include Her Majesty’s Governement, Thames Valley Police, Ministry of Defence, Virgin, Dominos Pizza, VW, Mercedes, NSPCC and BMW.

Simple really, study after study has shown that you if you give people the opportunity to respond by text message, they do! In fact, on average, around half of people will respond by text who otherwise wouldn’t – resulting in a 100% uplift in advertising response! That’s why all the big companies do it.

Isn’t it expensive?

Traditionally, yes. But, here’s the good news – we offer this text response service to any UK company 100% Free.

Why would you do that!? Surely there’s a catch?

For over a decade we’ve been helping businesses benefit by adding text message marketing into their mix and we’ve found that once companies find out how effective it is they increase their activity and volumes of Bulk SMS.

As the UK’s lowest cost, dependable Bulk SMS supplier (we even produce a Bulk SMS competitor price comparison chart to show price differences) we therefore hope that if you choose to have a free text response keyword and it works for you, you’ll naturally use us for Bulk SMS (although there’s no commitment to do so).

What could I use a free text response service for?

There’s the obvious for advertising purposes to gather responses but once you have the free platform you’ll discover a whole host of other uses as well as being amazed how much customers enjoy interacting with you by text message.

For example, on a free keyword HOLS for a travel agent one could consider;

• “Text HOLS and your email addres to 88802 and we’ll e-mail you our latest holiday offers”
• “Text HOLS and your favourite country to receive text alerts on holiday deals for that country”
• “Text HOLS OFFERS to receive text alerts on all our holiday deals”
• (From a simple question), “Text HOLS then A, B or C and receive a £50 discount voucher if you get the right answer”
• “Text HOLS and your planned next holiday date and we’ll contact you then to advise of our best deals”
• “Text HOLS WIN to enter our prize draw for a free holiday”
• and so on …..

If you’d like to see how quickly and efficiently the service works, text DEMO to 88802 and you’ll receive on of our standard welcome Text Marketer messages.

How do I get the data from people responding?

You get all the incoming data, their mobile number, date and time of the message and the full content of their message.

There are 3 ways to retrieve that data;

• You login to your free SMS account and download all the data to a spreadsheet
• And/or, you can have each and every response emailed to as many email addresses as you like
• And/or, if you’re a bit more technical, you can integrate into our SMS Gateway to receive the data directly to your web application. This will allow you to do clever things with the responses.

I hope that gives you enough information for now and some ideas.

Why not try a free keyword on our shortcode and see if it works for you, there’s nothing to lose and a huge amount to gain!

Having said that, there is some common ground and also some general advice which will help you get the best response from you SMS campaigns, so here goes;

1. What do you want to achieve?

Think about what you actually want to achieve from your Bulk SMS campaign. Is it a text back response, a phone call, an email, a visit to your website, etc. This will help you in writing your message and selecting your target audience. For example if you were texting older people you might want to have a phone number to call rather than a text back response as in all probability the majority of that target market will prefer using the telephone to talk to someone.

2. Target, target and target again

There’s a rule of thumb in direct mail that has proven itself bullet proof over the decades. The list (target market) you use is seven times more important to the success of a campaign than any other element of the campaign. This is of course true when it comes to SMS Marketing.

If we sent an offer of a buy 1 lipstick get 1 free to our entire list, you’d reasonably expect a close to 0% response rate from the men on the list! A glaringly obvious example of course but it serves to demonstrate the point!

Think about the people on your list. Are there any obvious ‘segments’ you can talk to more specifically? Gender is obvious, but, other things to consider are, age, geography, time since last purchase, product categories (what have they bought in the past), spend levels (how much have they spent with you), transactions (how many times have they transacted with you or indeed have they) and so on.

‘Segments’ will of course be specific to each company but normally in a list of any size there will be some segmentation that can be done so you can target your message and your offer more appropriately to give the best chance of success.

3. The Text Message

Now that you’ve decided on what to achieve and what segments you have, writing the message should be easy enough. Just keep it short, to the point and make sure you get you call to action across clearly, i.e. what you want them to do.

Don’t forget you might want to write several versions of the message which appeal to your various segments.

• A good example of a succinct message is, “Great news! x% of all XYZ products for this weekend only. Only available online @ www.xyz.com. Use XYZ code at the checkout to claim. Hurry, ends 9am Monday!”

4. Test everything!

The biggest joy about SMS Marketing is you have the ability to test everything. Don’t be afraid to, it’s how the companies at the top find out what works best. For example, does a web promotion work best or is it best to invite people to call you or even respond by text? What time of day or night is best to send out your message? Or even a weekend? What offer works best, BOGOF or discounting.

Include redemption codes in your different messages (e.g. “use code XYZ when you call to claim your discount”) and track responses to work out which combination works best for you.

5. Remember, it’s an SMS Marketing ‘Campaign‘

Many companies like to try one SMS broadcast and if it’s successful, they’ll subsequently do another.

In common with other direct marketing channels numerous studies have shown that frequently prospects will not respond until they have seen a text a number of times. This is often simply because they do not know the advertiser, and continued exposure brings reassurance. It may also happen that your prospect is not in the market the first time your text arrives but some weeks later they are ready.

John Caples, one of the world’s great copywriters put the optimum figure at 7 times; David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy and Mather, said 5 times. In any event the principle is clear.
Repeated exposure will bring a better response.

Conclusion

Using SMS in your company’s marketing mix is essential. I don’t know of anyone who does not use text messaging, including my 73 year old father. Using these 5 top starter tips you should be able to achieve excellent response rates to your SMS Campaigns and because SMS Marketing is so cost effective, it won’t even cost much to give it a go!

Get a Free Bulk SMS account with us and get testing today – once you’ve tried it, you won’t look back!