Small businesses across Australia are embracing mobile devices to transform how they engage with their customers. This adoption of mobile engagement is being driven by the increase in mobile devices, allowing customers and businesses to have conversations across multiple channels — whether it’s through SMS, voice call, rich media messages, email, social networking or app-push notifications. And SMS accelerates the speed of notification; while half of all emails aren’t opened for at least six hours, the average text message is accessed within a few minutes, and responded to within 30 minutes.
Right customer, right message
Mobile devices enable small businesses to connect with customers via the most appropriate and responsive channels. SMEs across the country are using mobile devices to send personalised content that offers tangible, immediate value to their customers.
As mobile functionality becomes increasingly sophisticated so, too, are conversations between small businesses and their customers, enabling them to become even more relevant and highly personalised and, thereby, giving them the edge against larger competitors.
What’s fundamentally empowering about mobile devices is that once users have received a communication on their device, they can then respond on their terms, continuing the conversation in the channel they prefer.
Communicating effectively via mobile requires providing a combination of engaging content, the means to interact in a multitude of ways, and the capability to embed workflows into your communications that allows for response, escalation and continued engagement on a mass scale.
Mobile engagement for SMEs
So how does mobile engagement work for small businesses? Take, for example, a grocery store owner who needs to send out a promotional offer to her local customers. Sending across multiple channels to suit each recipient, she includes plain text as well as images and interactive offers. The message is sent as an SMS rich message and push notification, as well as via social media and email. It is received ahead of the promotion and creates an action for customers.
The growth of always-on, connected mobile devices has led to a surge of opportunities for small businesses to share high-volume, low-cost tactical messaging blasts.
However, this overwhelming deluge of information makes it increasingly difficult for important messages to cut through the noise. Real engagement relies on contextual, relevant two-way message flows, and the use of unified messaging strategies for customer notifications, service, support and promotional engagement which add real value to both the customer and the small business.
Six tips for mobile engagement
- Communications planning – Having a clearly defined plan in place for communicating in different scenarios cuts down response time, improves accuracy of contact, and ensures customers are able to be reached in a timely manner.
- Multi-channel message streams – Messages should be sent on the appropriate channels needed to make sure that customers are contacted in the way that suits them best, including SMS, voice, rich messages, social media or email.
- Centralised tracking and analytics – Message tracking dashboards ensure that accurate records are kept of the status of all message sent, and responses.
- Message templates – Message templates should be prepared with specifics which can be quickly altered according to the situation, allowing appropriate messages to be sent, including real-time offers, notifications, reminders and support services.
- Message automation and integration – Where possible, communications platforms should be integrated with customer relationship management, marketing automation and related systems, allowing details to be auto-populated into message templates, reducing the need for human intervention and resulting in lower costs and improved efficiency.
- Two-way communication flows – It’s not enough to just send messages. There needs to be a system in place to track receipt, allow the receiver to respond as needed, and take further action when required. When centralised and combined with appropriate analytics and tracking, these messages become a powerful source of intelligence about customer needs and preferences, and the basis for long-term relationship building conversations.
Jeromy Wells, Founder and CEO, Whispir
