Seven reasons customers texting your business will increase revenue

There's many facets to running a successful business. There's nuance and specialization that arise from the nature of your market and niche. However, one thing is true for all businesses - they exist to add customer value and leave them with a positive impression of the company. By achieving these underlying goals, it's only natural that increased revenue will follow. You can leave this impression by responding to text messages from customers.

Customers will like it

Customers who would rather text over other methods of communication will really appreciate the fact you allow them to do that. As we have previously written, you should aim to maximize customer surprise and delight.

We have heard first-hand from our customers' customers how they REALLY enjoy the simplicity and effectiveness of being able to send and receive texts as opposed to missing calls and emails, listening to voicemails, and generally wasting time for messages that “could have just been a short text.”

Initial communication is critical for new customers

Getting new customers is hard. There are likely many steps and/or touchpoints you will have with people before they decide to buy for the first time and customer attention is fleeting. You are trying to be as efficient as possible to lower the customer time to purchase.

The initial customer communication is a critical one. People will make snap judgements on your whole business based on this. If you allow people to text your business, maybe just by listing your text-supported phone number on your website, you have a great opportunity to influence the customer in a positive way. By responding to a text in a timely manner (literally as quickly as you're able), you're able to capitalize on that customer attention while you have it.

You are missing out on certain customers

There is a growing “anti-phone call” sentiment in society, especially in the younger generations. When these types of people have questions on what your business offers and you only support having them call or email you, they just won't do it. They will either go to a competitor where they can find the answer to their question without asking, like looking at their website, or just will pass altogether.

Whatever your feelings on the topic, this is a reality. You can increase your revenue by reaching these people through text messaging, where they prefer to have these conversations.

Happy customers come back and refer other customers

If you successfully gain a new customer, their experience is paramount for how likely they are to come back and also how likely they are to tell others about a good experience. Because text message support is still not ubiquitous for businesses, just having this support is a thing on its own to drive good customer experiences.

It's also really easy to tell someone you know “oh yeah just text them.” It's very low effort for customers and increases their odds of reaching out to you.

Customers will actually see and respond to your message

Did you know, 90% of people read a text message within the first 3 minutes (source). No other method of communication carries statistics of effectiveness like this.

Have you ever had a potential sale fall flat due to a customer just losing all contact with you in the middle of the process somewhere? Texting doesn't totally solve this because there's a million reasons why this could happen, but texting does make it less likely to happen due to customers not actually seeing and reading whatever you sent to them.

You could be lost in a sea of emails, whether in a junk folder or not. You could be 15 voicemails deep in a customer's inbox. Don't get lost in customer communications and get to the point where the sale actually happens. Enjoy the revenue!

You'll stand out from competition

Differentiation is something that all businesses look to do. Customers have so many choices in today's world and you are trying to break through that noise to show customers why they should choose you.

One low effort way to differentiate is to support text messaging from customers. Eventually, this will no longer be true because most businesses will end up supporting texting. By then, it'll be more like table stakes but in either case, you want to do it.

“81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.” (source).

Customer experience consists of many things, one of which being the channel by which the experience happens (in-person, email, text, etc.). The more you can differentiate, the more revenue you can drive to your business.

Tools like Rather Text exist and make it easy

If you have read this and generally agree that businesses should support texting, but have the concern of how to manage this as a business, don't worry - Rather Text has you covered! We provide a website that acts like an enhanced phone. Customers send and receive texts like they do normally from anyone and you use our website to read and send the messages. Your organization can have multiple users so sharing messages internally is easy.

Your business phone number is separate from anyone's personal phone. Either link an existing landline number to our service or create a new phone number for text support. We also have call-forwarding if that's something you need. Check out a 1 minute overview of Rather Text or get demo access now.

Make it easy for customers to be customers

In the end, there are customers who want to text you and will otherwise not reach out to you if you don't support that. You won't ever even know they were interested. There are others who may increase the frequency they interact with you if they could just send a text. With this low-effort improvement to your business, you will gain more revenue from the benefits that flow from it.