Webinar Recap: Left on Read—How to Turn Responses into Revenue

Almost every brand we talk to tells us their SMS list holds the highest quality, most engaged subscribers. 

But when a subscriber texts back to a brand, more often than not, they get met with silence. 

And the reality is inboxes are being flooded with customer questions—and being met with crickets. 

But beyond the obvious benefit of capturing these sales, paying attention to responses is also just good business. You provide good customer service, build brand loyalty, and get to know your customers and their questions as they shop.

In our latest webinar, we show you how to tap into your Responses and turn them into revenue. Watch the full recap, or check out the timestamps and recap below.

From our SMS Sales data, we know that the faster you respond, the higher conversion rates will be. For example, if you respond to a subscriber within 5 minutes vs over 30 minutes, conversion rates increase by over 30%.

If you’re not currently in a place, due to system or bandwidth limitations, that allows you to respond within 1-2 hours, employ our Subscriber Response trigger to create an auto-responder automation flow letting subscribers know their message is received and give them a sense of when they can expect a reply.

You can still manage incoming subscriber texts wherever you are, whether that’s in an existing help desk, Slack, or your email. Here’s how to do it.

We currently integrate with over ten help desks, including Gorgias, Re:amaze, HelpScout, Zendesk, Kustomer, and Front. 

No matter how you set up your response management, just remember that timeliness is important! Replying quickly and efficiently is the biggest hurdle in finding incremental revenue in that inbox.

The most important touchpoint to engage with your subscribers is going to be your Welcome Series. Here’s what a typical welcome message looks like: you welcome them, tell them a bit about what your brand is all about, and remind them about your welcome offer. Simple and effective.

But with SMS Sales, the Welcome Series is where we really try to engage with customers. So here’s how you can update your welcome series with the goal of driving higher engagement.

The second touchpoint that’s really important is your Abandoned Cart. You can use message tags to personalize it with their name and the product they last viewed. You can add some additional info about the product, and you link them back to their cart. Here’s how we can drive more engagement using this flow. Due to compliance rules, Browse Abandonment flows can only contain one message, so in this case, we are going to modify the message with the goal of engaging in conversation. 

Ralph Martinez is a manager at the ESC, where our SMS Sales reps work on behalf of some of the top DTC brands. He outlines some easy ways to approach helping subscribers, with tips on proactive outreach, objection handling, and more.

Ready to really level up your sales approach over text? Enter SMS Sales. Senior Product Marketing Manager Rally Stanoeva walks us through how SMS Sales works for your brand. 

How does it work? We do this by employing a team of US-based Sales Associates. Your Sales team includes agents who provide coverage seven days a week, 15 hours a day, an SMS Sales manager who coaches them like Ralph, and an SMS Sales Strategist who works with you to refine the strategy.  

They undergo extensive training on your products, the onboarding process here is pretty in depth, here, brand voice, and how to sell over SMS using the techniques that we’ve developed. We also develop a unique persona for the agent that fits your brand. We give them a name, a face, a personality.

And they start selling. Since we operate on a performance-based pricing model, we align your goal to drive incremental revenue with our incentives. 

In addition to driving incremental revenue, SMS Sales offers a lot of other benefits. 

First, you’ll be addressing your customers' common buying objections and helping to educate them so they can make the best purchase decisions and avoid returns/unhappy customers.

You’ll offer a unique and memorable shopping experience with a real human interacting with them.

You’ll be able to offer better service without hiring more people on your team and really with very little effort on your end. In fact, we see a 75% decrease in CX tickets that end up routed to your own team, which can alleviate a ton of busy work for them. 

Most importantly, our team maintains a 5-minute response time, with 2 minutes being the gold standard. This is because we know that if you respond within 5 minutes vs over 30 minutes, conversion rates increase by over 30%. 

And lastly, something that a lot of our customers have been pleasantly surprised by is that they’re getting a lot of customer insights out of SMS Sales that then help inform their marketing strategy.