Tag : Digital advertising in Lexington

SMS messaging business texting graphic

5 Benefits of Business Texting

With crowded mailboxes and inboxes, it can be hard to get a customer’s attention. Customer preference has changed over the years, but most still want to stay in the loop of current events. That’s why thousands of companies across the world use business texting to reach their audiences.
A recent study showed that up to 98% of SMS messages are opened, compared to just 20% of emails. Plus, 75% of people suggested that they’d be happy to receive a promotional offer via SMS.

Here are our top 5 ways to use business texting

1. Reminders and Scheduling.

One of the most useful startup business text links is allowing folks to schedule something and set reminders through text messages. Some folks rely on their staff to manually make phone calls to remind customers of upcoming appointments, or to ask if they’re going to be late. With an automatic text-based scheduling, you can remind customers of an upcoming appointment and allow them to confirm upcoming appointments automatically.
Your contacts would probably prefer to text than pick up a phone call anyway.

2. Payment and Billing

People are switching to online and mobile payment methods for everything from their bank accounts, car payments, insurance, and even daily shopping. If you offer financing where a customer can set up a regular payment to come in, an automatic text reminder can help them avoid late payments.

Time sensitive text alert icon

3. Time Sensitive Alerts

Event planners have been wildly successful using SMS messaging to engage and entertain their attendees. You can send reminders before the event, last-minute updates, and even request feedback after all your guests go home.
In the case of promotions, it’s better to wait for the biggest, hottest deals of the season to reach out in a text. Making that text shoutout is still a valuable attention-grabber.
You can even send out job alerts!

4. Text-based Customer Service.

Since so many are on mobile these days, and so many prefer texting to calling, there’s a good chance people are already trying to text your landline for customer service questions. With a good text-to-landline service, you can have those texts forwarded to a web browser. You’ll catch questions that were previously lost, and invite possible customers to reach out with SMS instead of by calling directly.
You can also just offer customer service via text message. Instead of keeping them on hold on the phone, let them text a question and send an answer as soon as you’ve got the full picture.

5. Order Confirmations and Delivery Updates.

While massive businesses like Amazon have the ‘Order Tracking and Notifications’ thing down pat, small businesses can also do their part in keeping their customers informed. If your inventory shipment schedule is a generally small, this could be a manual process. However, certain inventory systems allow you to integrate with business text messaging services to provide automatic updates to your clients.

Business texting services may take a bit of getting used to, but they’re a valuable asset for any size business. Automating promotional messages, event alerts, and schedule reminders can take some of the burden off your employees, freeing them up to do other things.

Texting is a powerful communication channel. Now, more than ever, people want a more secure and easier way to receive messages from businesses. With nearly 50% of the 269 billion emails sent each day ending up as spam, is it any wonder that SMS messaging is so much more effective?

If you’re interested in checking Business Texting out for your company, give us a call and we can schedule a demo for you, or just explain the services we offer.

 

Like these tips? Read some of our other free resources for local businesses! You can also reach out to us  for other questions or project ideas. Our Lexington-based advertising team would be happy to look at your case and see how we can help.

An Introduction to Digital Advertising Metrics

Choosing the right digital advertising metrics to track and measure is crucial to your campaign’s success. If you aren’t tracking advertising efforts correctly, you’ll never know what’s working and what channels to focus your advertising dollars on.

Determining your core ROI goals means you’ll be able to measure data that tells the story of how your target audience interacted with your ads. 

If you’re watching the right data, you can make informed choices.

Here are a few of the key metrics to track that will help you measure success and determine ROI:

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CPA – Cost Per Acquisition

How much does it cost you to acquire a new lead on any given channel?

Knowing the cost to acquire a client for your business is the basis of your marketing budget, so it’s crucial data to add to your ROI analysis. Combined with other ad data, this will determine whether your business will make a profit.

Ideally, you’ll want to get a sense for which mix of ad channels (Search, Facebook, Display) work best for your business. Then you’ll be able to better optimize your ad budget going forward.

Here’s the formula for CPA:

CPA is a simple but valuable formula. Knowing how much it costs to acquire a new lead is key to understanding your ad ROI.

However, we still don’t know the actual value of your client’s customers. The next thing we’ll discuss is LTV, which is essential for further ROI analysis.

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LTV – Lifetime Value

Do you know the lifetime value of your customers? You should!

Why? Because this will give you a number that represents an approximation of the revenue a new customer brings in, with all associated costs factored in.

If you know your LTV, you’ll be able to compare it directly to the cost of acquiring a new client through your digital ad campaign.

Here’s the formula you can use to determine your LTV.

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CR – Campaign Revenue

Now that we understand how to calculate and analyze the lifetime value of your customers, we’ll be able to track the revenue generated by your digital advertising campaign. As you can see below, you just need to multiply your campaign’s conversions by LTV and closing ratio (50% would be .5).

Why include closing ratio? Obviously, every new lead you generate isn’t going to become a customer, so you’ll need to factor in how often you are able to close new leads to estimate campaign revenue correctly.

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ROAS – Return on Advertising Spend

ROAS is an illuminating metric to use for ad campaigns, and a lot of marketers use it interchangeably with ROI itself. However, there are significant differences between the two. What is the difference between ROI and ROAS?

Tim Mayer, CMO of Trueffect explains:

“ROI measures the profit generated by ads relative to the cost of those ads. It’s a business-centric metric that is most effective at measuring how ads contribute to an organization’s bottom line. In contrast, ROAS measures gross revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It is an advertiser-centric metric that gauges the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns.”

So advertising ROAS is much more focused on the results from specific campaigns, while ROI incorporates the bigger picture relative to the business. This means that it’s much easier for you to be tracking and analyzing advertising efforts with ROAS! You know the cost and you can calculate the revenue.

Setting your own benchmarks and campaign goals based on past performance is the best way to proceed with your advertising efforts.

Want to skip all this confusing jargon and let the experts handle your digital advertising? Contact us today!

You can also read more articles on our resources page.