Have you ever had that feeling that you struggle to connect with your customers and team members?
Are you looking for a practical, easy, and affordable (or rather, FREE) solution to engage your people?
Well, I have a solution for you: texting – specifically permission-based text marketing from your phone using a personalizing group-texting app.
Purpose
How to use your current unlimited text plan to send personalized individual texts to groups apps to engage your customers
Keep customers engaged, informed, and drip education regarding product, etc…
Who Is This Information For?
Who is this for? Small businesses, like with under a hundred or at least in the hundreds current customers you are working with. When you have a personal relationship with each customer and need to maintain those relationships and continually re-engage customers, this will be great information for you.
Simple and free solution.
The Problem
It’s hard to engage certain people with email, social media, Facebook, etc.
- Email – people are not reading your emails and you get little or no engagement
- Social Media – when you post things, it is not shown to everyone on your list (only about 10% of so)
- Local events – there are many people who don’t want to come out to your
- Online classes – some people just don’t want to connect by logging in online
TOO MUCH TIME:
Texting is great, but it takes so much time to text everyone on your list – even with copy and pasting. Also, texting is sometimes limited to ten people per group. At least that’s my experience with my mobile provider AT&T. The work around the 10 number limit is to make a numbered list of the numbers you need to text and then split it into groups of 10, then copy and paste for each group of 10. This can be easily done in the notes app on your phone.
But, there is a much better way. Keep reading…
TOO IMPERSONAL:
Another problem with text groups is that it is not a conversation between two people. People don’t want to be in a big and noisy text group. It’s annoying to receive a whole ton of messages from everyone in the group, especially when it doesn’t concern you.
There is no personal connection and relationship building with individuals in the group like you have with. When you text a group, you do get a community feeling. But you don’t have the intimate one-on-one relationship building banter. When you communicate one-on-one, you can build that relationship and that trust that can help them make the decision to purchase from you.
Texting From Your Phone vs. Profession Text Marketing Platforms
ALRADY PAID FOR: You are most likely already paying for unlimited texts. Now days, most mobile plans include unlimited texting, which means that you have already paid for the ability to text hundreds of your people. The only limitation is software (or time if you want to copy and paste using the method above).
USE YOUR NUMBER: When you subscribe to a professional text service, your people get texts from a new number, not you. If you have thousands and thousands of customers, that might be an okay tradeoff because you most likely have automated your sales and are already a step removed from personally interacting with your customers. However, if you are in a person-to-person business like network marketing, you will need that personal connection, and telling them that you have a different phone number for texting is okay, but better if you can avoid it.
KEEP IT SIMPLE: It’s pretty simple to just text your tribe from your phone and then respond individually to them as they reply. That’s it.
On the other hand, the text marketing message systems can be quite cumbersome to set up and maintain, and for most of them, you have to be at a computer. You need to set up campaigns, ket words, details about you, your billing, log in details, and much more. And you usually need to be logged in to reply to the texts (they don’t come to your native phone text app).
UNNECESSARY EXPENSE: When you are just starting out or for that matter, when you are growing your business at any stage, you want to trim your expenses as much as possible, so you can allocate those funds to growth in other areas. It’s true that there are many services out there that can text your people, but if your groups are small and intimate, you might be paying for something that you can’t get as good of results as you can with the free version.
Solution Group Text App
By using an smartphone app, you can text all your people from your own number and stimulate those one-on-one conversations. This is also great for getting the word out for the monthly promotion, sending series of educational texts to educate customers, let people know when something is going on.
Engagement is personalized and replies come strait to your phone (to you). That means relationship building.
- There are may group texts out there. You are looking for:
- Personalization
- Send to individuals (not group chat)
- Add images
Just search group text in your app store.
The App I’ve chosen to use is A2Z Contacts.
Here are the steps to text using the app (see the video for a walkthrough of the details):
- Find and install
- Set up groups
- Compose text, personalize, add image, add video link
- Send
TIPS for sending non-personalized texts
- Adjust your phone settings to turn off group messaging (a must when you don’t personalize the message)
- Set Up a Text Series: Draft all your texts in a document, so you can just copy and paste from each day
- Make sure to ask permission and respect their wishes
- Every once in a while thin the crowd ask your recipients if they would like continue
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