accelerate your time-to-messaging, improve your results from messaging, increase conversions and improve your customer success.

Our global customers rely on text message templates to profile new prospects, quickly launch marketing campaigns, enable rapid responses for sales and service reps, and to enhance their overall messaging effectiveness.

Text message templates for business also ensure that your message structures, sizes, and content are compliant with your carrier’s requirements, significantly increasing the delivery success of your messages.

Even though the underlying use cases and message campaigns are similar across all industries, every industry has unique content requirements for their messages. That’s why industry-specific SMS templates are important.

Target audiences, and your offers to them, vary significantly by industry:

• Sales, Financial Services and Contact Centers are generally focused on prospects and customers. Their offerings include products and services.
• Higher Education organizations focus on prospective students, students and graduates. Their offerings include undergraduate and graduate degrees, financial aid and work study programs and student success coaching.
• Wellness businesses serve prospective patients and patients with services, supplements, testing and more.
• Staffing agencies serve passive and active candidates, as well as their own customers. Their offerings include jobs, interview support, resume mentoring, scheduling and candidate surveys.

The differences described alone demonstrate why you need specific templates for your industry. That’s why SMS-Magic offers industry-specific content templates, to accelerate your messaging deployments.

To optimize your messaging strategy’s success, you need to be sure to leverage SMS solutions designed specifically for your industry. SMS templates are a key aspect of these solutions.

Our customers find that SMS templates are very powerful. We’ve put together this simple Insider’s Guide to Using Text Message Templates in Business to share some of our most popular uses cases and their related templates. It’s a must have for anyone using business text messaging.

In this text message template for business guide you’ll learn:

• Why text message templates should be a core facet of your messaging strategy.
• How to use text message templates in Marketing, Sales and Service.
• How text message templates apply to popular use cases in Product and Technology Sales, Financial Services, Higher Education, Staffing, Contact Centers and Wellness.
• You’ll get 12 different use cases, each with multiple text message template examples to show you how you can use business text messaging to increase your results.

Just click below to download this insightful guide.

Text message templates can be used to both accelerate and improve the quality of your sales and support conversations. You’ll also onboard new reps and empower them to immediately begin to create relevant, compelling conversations as they select proven, powerful responses.

How to Use Text Message Templates to Accelerate Sales and Service

We all know that the reps who close more business  and resolve issues faster are the reps with the most  knowledge and experience.

Text message templates empower you to share the expertise of your best reps with all of your sales teams, easily and effectively.

Here’s how:

• Research the most common buying questions asked by prospects, and/or the most common customer issues faced by support reps.
• Then, gather the information/resolutions that your highly successful reps use to respond to these questions. Identify the answers that successful overcome the objection and move the deal forward, or quickly resolve the customer issue. Quite often there is more than one answer, so collect all the potential answers and resolutions.
• Take all of these answers/resolutions and categorize them into groups, by the question or issue being asked.
• Then, create text message templates for each of the categories and individual answers. Be sure to group  them based on the question or issue. You may need to use the same answer in multiple categories.
• Share these rapid response/resolution templates with all of your reps as part of your text messaging interface. Your vendor should support the easy addition of such templates as part of the interactive Desk or Inbox reps use to send and receive messaging conversations.
• Be sure you train the reps on how to search for and find, then use, the most appropriate templates to accelerate responses that  are relevant and right on the nose.

The graphics below share examples of Sales Rapid Response and Service Rapid Resolution templates.

Sales Rapid Response Template Example.

Support Rapid Resolution Template Example.

The Bottom Line

Today’s digital buyers expect increasingly faster and more relevant responses to their inquiries and issues. We live in an immediate gratification world, and they expect immediate results from you and your business.

Text message templates guide your sales and service reps to create and send the most relevant responses to your audience’s questions and customers’ issues.

• You get to easily leverage the best and brightest in your rep teams to increase the productivity of all your reps.
• New reps quickly come up to speed to be effective in their initial messaging conversations.
• Current reps get better and better at responding with relevant and compelling answers to questions and issues.
• The productivity and results of your sales and service organization increases again and again as you continue to enhance templates to win business and serve customers.

Last week we talked about how to use SMS templates to increase marketing responses, create compelling nurtures and accelerate buyer profiling. Marketing uses templates to quickly create campaigns, assuring the content is the most compelling to individual buyer intents. If you missed that post, check it out here.

If you’d like to experience how SMS business text messaging and SMS templates can help your business, we’d love to share a Free Trial with you. No strings attached! Click here now to register for your Trial and get ready to experience the best in business text messaging.

Using Text Message Templates to Personalize Marketing

Text message templates are predefined content templates that you can select to use in your message marketing. Your messaging vendor should provide a range of customer-proven templates to get you started. At SMS-Magic, we offer both general and industry-specific templates for our customers.

Begin by tuning these templates with content that history has shown previously to be compelling to your audience. Then, track your message responses to assure that your content is indeed relevant.

Getting Started

So, how do you begin message marketing? Here’s what we recommend:

• Decide what buyer problems or opportunities you want to target with your message marketing. For example, staffing companies may want to begin with specific classifications of jobs, e.g., technical support, retail sales, administrative support etc. Product companies may want to target specific buyer profiles, offer discounts on certain product offerings etc.
• Create offers in your marketing materials that direct buyers in these target areas to opt-in to your program by texting a keyword to your text number. We recommend you use different keywords for different campaigns/interest areas so you can track and measure your success.
• For each of your target areas, you’ll need to tune content templates to reflect your specific offer and value.
  • Use vendor recommended templates for capturing consent to be sure you are compliant with local regulatory requirements.
  • Tune a message response for each of your opt-in offers that fulfills that promise.
  • To create a nurture campaign to begin after this message, tune a set of nurture campaign content templates to deliver relevant information based on the specific offer and your buyers’ intent, based on that offer.

Profiling your Audience

After you’ve tackled those main components, add a couple of simple but important profiling questions to any nurture. It’s a great way to let your prospect know you care about their individual needs. You get to know your individual audience members better, so you can provide even more compelling content.

For example, if you have three product lines, ask them which they are interested in learning about. If you offer multiple types of services, jobs or degrees to companies, candidates or students, ask them which they are interested in. Offer a simple keyword to respond that reflects their area of interest. Their response is stored in their record, so you’ll know what information is relevant to send them next.

If you send customer surveys, tune a few survey template questions and send them in a nurture-type campaign, using simple keywords for their responses. Again, use different keywords for different interests. Every individual buyer’s responses will be stored for your review and analysis.

Marketing campaigns using content templates

Once you have the above templates tuned to your specific messaging and value, you can easily save and reuse them in other marketing campaigns.

The graphic below offers a simple flow for marketing campaigns using content templates and a branched nurture campaign.

(Click on image to enlarge)

The Bottom Line

Messaging marketing will drive more prospects into your pipeline and accelerate your ability to engage with them and move them into your sales team.

When you use content templates provided by your messaging vendor, you will jumpstart your message marketing results. Use these baseline templates to simplify and accelerate every additional campaign, survey or buyer engagement program. Be sure to track and measure your results using messaging dashboards and analytics, then update templates as you learn more about what compels your buyers. Always remember, templates should be living, adapting content to match the changing interests of your audience.

If you want to see for yourself how text messaging can impact your business, schedule a demo today and we’d be happy to show you just how our SMS templates will lead you to success.

Research proves that your audience members like texting even better when it’s efficient and relevant for them.

• 76% of US consumers said that speed is the most important feature of service-based messaging to positively impact satisfaction.
• 91% of users who opted in to receive texts from a brand see those messages as “somewhat” or “very useful”.

Here are a few simple ways to use SMS templates in business to make sure you are effective and relevant with every message you send.

How to Use Text Message Templates in Business

MARKETING Content

The first step in using templates successfully is to create a basic set of templates for your marketing opt-ins, nurture campaigns, profiling questions and surveys.

Begin by tuning the basic set of content templates provided by SMS-Magic, or your other text  messaging providers, to match your audience and business.

• Edit templates to match your business and offerings.
• Edit the company name in the templates.
• Tune campaign templates, such as nurtures and questions, to be relevant to your specific focus.
• Now, create a second set of templates with a  different set of messaging/information.

Run these A and B campaigns for a bit of time, tracking the response rates and any trends or profiles you see. See which style of message and content gets the best responses and/or drives prospects forward in  the most effective manner.

If you need, run another set of tests to hone in on the voice and content types that compel the  best responses. Match all of your other marketing content templates to this style and you’ll begin to get the best results from your text campaigns, quickly and effectively.

 Compelling SALES responses

It’s important to research to find the specific answers your sales teams give to prospects, the answers that successfully move them forward in your pipeline.

Use these successful answers to tune the sample templates offered by your messaging provider. Then, offer these templates as proven responses that the reps can quickly select and send in response to similar questions.

Be sure you include the specific content links in your templates that reps have proven drive the highest percentage and fastest time-to-conversions.

Rapid SUPPORT Resolution

We all know that 80% of support issues are quickly resolved by a finite set of specific, accurate responses. Identify the most popular issues and the specific resolutions your support reps use to quickly resolve the majority of your cases.

Tune the sample resolution templates offered by your messaging provider using these rapid resolution answers. Propagate these resolutions templates across your support reps and teams.

And finally, be sure you include the specific content links in your templates that your customers needs to easily resolve the issue.

The Bottom Line

When you use text message templates for business, you can and will increase your marketing, sales and support results, beyond what you’ll receive with basic text messaging. Specifically, you will:

• Personalize your marketing outreach with highly compelling and relevant information.
• Increase sales effectiveness with responses that are proven to close more business.
• Accelerate time-to-resolution by giving support reps the best possible response to customer issues.

Over the next  3 weeks, we’ll be sharing specific template ideas and guidelines for marketing, sales and service, as well as a variety of SMS templates for popular industries. Be sure to check back every Thursday for more details and insights!

If you want to see for yourself how text messaging can impact your business, schedule a demo today and we’ll be happy to show you just how our SMS templates will lead you to success.