I was recently chatting with one of our customers about how they use sms marketing within their business. I was interested to hear them talk about how they have managed to dramatically reduce their business phone bill as well as saving significant time by replacing phone calls with text messages. 

The company operates a large, non franchised car dealership, servicing and selling cars. When a car is serviced they used to pick up the phone to let the customer know that their vehicle was ready for collection. In both the service and the parts department, they used to make about 65 outbound calls to customers per day. The vast majority of the numbers they were calling were mobiles as most people tend to leave a mobile as the contact point. 

The average cost of the calls they made was around 21 pence per call. So over the course of the month, they spent around £355.00. 

Significant Cost Savings

The cost of sending a simple text alert to their customers is just 4.9 pence, so the monthly costs of sending the texts is £82.81.  By replacing the phones calls with a simple text they reduced their telecoms costs by an impressive £272.19 a month or 77%. The annual cost saving figure is even more striking at £3266.28. 

Now of course not every customer wants to receive sms text alerts instead of a phone call. It’s all about giving the customer the choice. In the case of our dealership customer, over 90% of people said they’d be happy to receive a text alert instead of a phone call. 

Save Time

Just as impressive as the cost savings, is the amount of time saved. Sending an sms takes seconds but the phone calls used to take a total of around 1.5 hours a day. Over the course of the year this amounted to 468 hours a year, time that can now be spent on other activities. 

Arguably, the calculations above may be slightly crude but the argument for adopting an sms service is pretty compelling. 

Are there any calls that your business makes that could be replaced by a text?

It’s worth considering whether your business could save cost and time by using business sms as way of getting simple alerts to your customer base. Most of your customers are likely to view this as an impressive new service and the cost benefit could be significant.