What is Conversational Text Marketing and How Can It Help Any Business Grow?

Texting is the favorite pastime of, well, just about everyone. Messaging apps are the most used apps on any mobile device; 97% of Americans use them at least once a day. From gossipy teens to business professionals—the world’s preferred mode of communication has become text. And now, it’s become a critical channel that brands must leverage to actively engage their most important audiences.

Brands have discovered that customers are more easily engaged through text messaging than email, the current standby for direct marketing.  Not only do texts have an open rate of 98%, but 90%  of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of being received.

Needless to say, it’s a tool that can make marketers much more sophisticated and effective.  But as they say (perhaps too often) – with great power comes great responsibility. For example, because texting is such a high-volume channel, opt-out rates can be very high. It’s critical for marketers to think strategically about how they use texting to ensure they get the best results.

With the certainty of having every message read, brands are tempted to send promotional blasts with increasing frequency. After all, every text message campaign directly increases revenue – sometimes by as much as 30x of the cost of the entire campaign.

But these brands soon see diminishing returns on subsequent sends, and rapidly increasing opt-outs. They discover that over time, one-way blasts are actually turning their audience away – and once they lose a subscriber, it is almost impossible to win them back.

At Voxie, we’ve built a truly unique approach to using text to engage with any audience. The kind that actually strengthens relationships with customers and prospects with each use. The kind that lets you learn more about every individual to provide them with relevant, meaningful information.The kind that lets you talk to people, and not at them.  We call it automated conversational texting.

Two-way, automated conversational is the new way to dtext marketing**

Conversational texting is a form of text marketing designed to elicit a response and ongoing interaction. Where traditional text marketing blasts send out a link and hope for a click, conversational texting builds genuine two-way relationships. It creates a dialogue that opens the door for a robust range of interactions:

• In-chat sales and product referrals
• Solicitations for feedback or reviews
• Collecting information about your audience
• Delivering personalized product alerts
• Providing customer service and troubleshooting

The ability for recipients to respond to a prompt elevates the text from a promotional message to a meaningful conversation. It’s the difference between sending a mass blast and a tailored, personalized message.

Recipients don’t need to click a link or navigate away from the conversation, either. All they need to do is respond with text or emojis to generate a desired action—whether that’s reviewing a purchase, buying a product, confirming an appointment, or answering a question.

Only Voxie does true two-way conversational texting ascale**

Almost all text marketing providers deliver only one-way blasts. A few have the ability to let the customers reply to messages. But Voxie is the only solution using automation and artificial intelligence to automatically respond to up to 95% of all messages. Because the system, not humans, can manage so many of the interactions, conversational texting can be done at a scale through Voxie that no other system can maintain.

Voxie’s automation and AI doesn’t just send personalized texts: it carries out meaningful conversations. Consider an example:

Hi Sally! 👋 It’s Sue from Sue’s Shoes. How are you liking the Black Pumps you purchased last week? If you love them, reply 1 to 5 to rate them. Thanks again for shopping with us! 💛

It all starts with a high level of personalization. Sally doesn’t just get a text message addressed to her—she also gets one that specifically asks about the pair of black pumps she bought last week – timed perfectly. More importantly, it’s from a person, which brings instant authenticity to the interaction.

The text is conversational—it prompts a reply, not just an action. More importantly, it makes replying simple – with a single character, phrase, or emoji.

One star can easily prompt a conversation about how the purchase could’ve been better; five stars could end with a request for a review, sent with the relevant link.

Behind the scenes, Voxie provides the infrastructure to make these interactions authentic, no matter the messaging. CRM and POS integrations pull relevant customer data, so every text is personalized. Machine learning recognizes cues such as customer sentiment, questions and prompts, and delivers a suitable reply, with no human interaction required. Voxie even has information capture capabilities, allowing brands to save new information shared through text to create a unified buyer profile.

Ultimately, customers end up having a real, meaningful conversation that ends in action—all completely automated, occurring in-text. Automated conversational texting serves as an all-in-one salesperson, customer service rep, and marketing agent.

The importance of text marketing conversations

The ability to talk with customers instead of at them is something both sides of the conversation can appreciate. And, in fact, they’re measurable.

Consumers respond to Voxie’s text marketing at a much higher rate than that of other text providers. It equates to a 98% open rate, 50% response rate, and a 30% CTR.

One of Voxie’s biggest KPIs for customers today is the quality of their overall experience, and there’s quantifiable evidence to support a preference for conversational text marketing.

Voxie’s automated conversational texting strategy drives 3x more engagement from customers, equating to 4.2x higher ROI!

There’s a long list of qualified benefits to accompany these stats, as well. It’s these intangibles that pave the way for texting success.

Automated conversational texting for acquisitionretention, and advocacy**

While SMS marketing is still gaining traction, conversational texting is quickly becoming the de-facto strategy for growing brands. Moreover, it’s quickly finding use cases beyond direct sales. With Voxie, brands are finding text conversations to be viable components of all phases of the customer life cycle: from acquisition to retention, to advocacy.

The ability to have a conversation with customers at every stage of the buyer journey is, at its core, buyer-first selling. It’s about asking questions to provide answers in the form of action or recommendations. This attentiveness nurtures customers. It encourages them to buy and gives them confidence in doing so. It shows them that a brand is paying attention.

People like to talk! At the end of the day, they just want to have a conversation. When brands give them the opportunity to respond and take the time to listen, the effects are immediate—and the results speak for themselves. Want to explore the powerful potential of conversational texting, to grow your business and strengthen your brand? Chat with a Voxie conversational text expert today to schedule a demo.