How to use text messaging to surprise and delight your customers

Surprise and delight, the marketing concept

Have you heard about "suprise and delight" as a specific marketing concept? Read about Sprout Social's take here. In short, it's a marketing technique to give customers an unexpedly pleasant experience that leaves them feeling positive about your business.

There's something magical about the unexpected part here. Customers want a good product and/or service and will be happy when you provide that. When you add to that with unanticipated sparks of joy, you have greater odds of leaving a lasting impression on people, leading to better customer conversion and retention.

Word of mouth is another superpower businesses try to garner and one effective way to do that is through the surprise and delight method. For word of mouth, the more interesting or noteworthy a person's experience is, the more likely they are to share that with others through storytelling. You're giving customers the fuel to talk about you while giving them a great experience. Sounds like a win!

People want to text businesses

As we highlighted the points in another article, people would often rather text than call or email. What happens when you don't give a customer what they want? In short, you put them at risk for being a customer in the first place! Is this a dealbreaker? No, but on the flip side, you can surprise customers by supporting texting. They will notice and they will appreciate it. Instead of being a neutral or even negative thing against you from no text support, you fly into the category of customer delight. Rack up as many delightful experiences as you can to increase your odds of closing with customers.

Customers aim to be happy. It's what they want and why they search for the solutions you offer. In this example of matching a customer's preferred communication channel, you're both doing something low effort and trivial and also something that can be highly pleasing to the customer. The happier the customer is with any experience you give them, the better off your business is.

Differentiation is key

In business 101, we all learned that differentiation is a core tenant for operating a business. Why would someone choose your business instead of your competition? This is an important question that you've undoubtedly already considered and strategized around. Supporting text messaging is an easy way to further differentiate you from your competitors, simply because most businesses don't support this at all. From there, you can show your potential customers your superior customer support and service through a channel they want to participate in. It's simple but effective.

As business owners, you are constantly prioritizing what to spend your time on. Things that flow to the top of the list are generally things that provide the highest amount of value for the lowest amount of effort. Enabling text messaging for your business falls into that category, so long as you have proper business text message tooling implemented. That's where services like Rather Text come in.

Use Rather Text to enable two-way text communication

Rather Text is one of the products you can use to enable texting for your organization. It's a website that acts like an enhanced phone to carryout text conversations. For the use case of two-way texting support for customers, sign up for Rather Text and you'll either be able to enable texting on your existing landline or you can grab a new phone number of your choice. After that, just put the phone number and a note about texting in places where you put your contact information (website, business cards, etc.).

If you want to stop there, that's fine! There are more features you could take advantage of, but they aren't required for you to receive texts from customers. Rather Text has a configurable notification system so you won't miss any messages that come in. You could start using Rather Text today.

From here, you continue to provide the excellent customer service you already were, but now you're doing it via texting and the customers who prefer that will be grateful.