It’s not just your advisors who are getting younger, it’s also your clients and investors. This shift has pushed new communication channels into preference. It’s time for financial firms to take on modern communication channels, such as SMS text messaging, without concerns about compliance risk. And considering that 39% of financial firm employees are asking for SMS/text messaging, it’s likely because their clients are asking for this channel to be used.

The problems with compliance begin when you rely on a policy prohibiting your advisors from using their personal smartphones for firm communications. Recent research found that 56% of finance compliance professionals lack the confidence that they can prove their prohibition policy is working.

Instead, consider what an Intelligent Text Messaging Platform brings to help you painlessly evolve your communications channels. After all, mobile device usage in the workplace will only continue to grow. Financial firms need to rise to the challenge to address retention and oversight challenges.

Archival: Know what’s been sent and received

An Intelligent Text Messaging Platform automatically records all messaging conversations – including incoming and outgoing text messages. These messages are archived to your lead or contact record in your Salesforce CRM, providing a complete audit trail should you ever need to retrieve and present a message during an examination.

According to the 2018 Electronic Communications Compliance Survey, 48% of firms that allow text messaging lack an archiving system. Don’t just think “archival,” think about a complete conversational messaging platform with native integration with your Salesforce CRM.

Incorporating a comprehensive messaging platform mitigates risk and empowers internal and external communications by providing the following:

Context: Know what’s been said

Because all messages are archived, the context of the conversation is clear to the examiner or to your supervisory personnel, ensuring appropriate oversight. For the 29% of financial firms that have no written policy in place to govern text messaging, access to context can help you develop one.

Mobile: Know you’re in compliance

With a mobile app and automated alerts that let an advisor or broker know when a client has reached out, they can respond no matter where they are through the messaging platform by using the mobile app. This relieves both your concern that messaging is happening on personal devices that’s untracked, as well as to provide protection to your advisors by helping them follow policy.

The same survey found that 50% of finance compliance professionals expressed concern about non-email communications, including social media and text messaging. And 42% expressed concern about managing the use of mobile devices. Intelligent Text Messaging Platforms can help to close this gap between compliance and risk.

Oversight: Know how messaging is used

Dashboards enable easier oversight by showing compliance professionals the volume of messaging, the types of messages sent and the number of conversations that take place within your firm. If you see the volume of messaging escalate for an advisor, you can easily step in to apply oversight to ensure that the conversations follow policy.

The Bottom Line

Your clients and investors want to use text messaging to converse with your brokers and advisors. Your brokers and advisors are adept at using text messaging to communicate and prefer it for efficiency and matching communication preferences for conducting business.

Text messaging is growing as a preferred channel. Clients and investors want questions answered quickly and to exchange information in the way they prefer. There’s no reason that your firm can’t adopt text messaging to satisfy both internal and external needs. Just make sure you choose an Intelligent Messaging Platform like SMS-Magic Converse to give you a leg up on addressing compliance risks.

Emails can sit in the inbox until a convenient time arises to respond. Social media is often something scanned, liked, and perhaps shared, rather than directly responded to. Text messaging is intuitive and immediate with the ability to drive responses quickly and easily.

SMS Messages for Business is About Getting Things Done

Think about your experience with texting. When that ping sounds on your smartphone, what do you do? If you’re like most people, you look within a few seconds. Because we’re so used to texting, we’ll often respond just as quickly. Texting is easy. It’s the most used function on our smartphones—more than calling or accessing email or the internet.

When it comes to using SMS messages for business, advanced messaging platforms help marketers to show their companies are more responsive and attuned to customers. From personalized messaging conversations to automated conversational flows, SMS messages that help get things done can help you to better engage and retain customers through an interactive approach.

Take a look at three use cases that play to immediacy:

Surveys

Asking for feedback can happen at any time during the customer relationship. You can use a simple survey to monitor your Net Promoter Score (NPS) after a service call. But you can also ask for feedback about products, what your customers like, need, and want, as well as their impression of an event they attended.

Once you know the scenarios you’d like to use for surveys or gathering feedback, it’s simple to automate them to trigger based on your customer’s behavior and activity.

A few industry use cases include:

• Real Estate: Characteristics about the home a buyer is looking for and subsequent feedback about a home you’ve showed them
• Restaurant: Opinions about new options your chef is considering putting on your menu and feedback about the food, service, and experience during their last meal with you
• Products: Gather satisfaction and adoption feedback from customers at timed intervals, after a week, after a month, after three months, as well as asking them about their interest in complementary products
• Education: Ask students about their impression of their campus tour, attending an event, the curriculum available in their area of focus

The possibilities are endless for these and other industries, and it’s been found that surveys presented through text messages receive response rates 2X higher than surveys conducted by phone and 5X higher than online surveys.

Appointment Scheduling

No shows and last-minute cancellations are expensive for all businesses. Let’s say the average revenue from an appointment is $50. A full schedule is 10 appointments per day. Two appointments per day are no shows. If this trend continues, you’ve lost 20% of your potential revenue.

But no shows can be even more costly when you figure in all the time your staff spends scheduling appointments and the other details involved in preparing to serve customers, plus the cost of having the right inventory in stock to serve them and paying the staff you’ve scheduled to serve your customers.

Industries with a high impact to business from no shows include hair salons, hotels and spas, wellness offices, doctors, dentists, dog grooming, and more. No shows and last-minute cancellations affect all service businesses.

With SMS messages for business, you can invite your customers to schedule appointments via text, send them reminders as the appointment approaches and even offer them the opportunity to reschedule prior to missing their appointment if their schedule has changed.

The ability to automate this process means you’re able to increase the productivity of your staff for other tasks and help them spend more time focusing on serving your customers, rather than scheduling. The immediacy of text messaging means they are more likely to see an appointment reminder than they would an email or a voicemail—and they’re more likely to respond quickly.

Promotional Offers

Many businesses have offers that are immediate by nature. The objective is to increase sell-through from that offer within a specific time.

Examples include:

• This product is on special today only
• Book your room today for a stay before the end of the month and save 25%
• There are only 10 of this product left in stock. Get yours today and save 10%
• Join our Happy Hour today from 5 PM to 7 PM and get two appetizers for the price of one

You get the idea. With the immediacy of text messaging, your promotional offers are more likely to be acted upon swiftly. Sending a text within close proximity to the timing of your offer increases the urgency your customers will feel to respond to take you up on them.

The Bottom Line

Text messaging has many uses for businesses, but one of the most effective uses is to capitalize on the immediacy made possible with a channel that gets such a high read and response rate. This is not to say that other channels aren’t effective, it’s all in the purpose and nature of the communication. Helping your customers get things done will help them be more receptive and responsive to the messages you send them in the future.

Add SMS Messages to Your Marketing Strategy

Do you treat all screens the same way, when you’re planning your marketing? Most marketers surveyed in a Gartner study said that for mobile, they used tactics that were extensions of web marketing, like ads. They ignored technologies unique to mobile, such as texting.

Mobile and web are two different mediums and you should leverage the strengths of both for a complete marketing strategy. At the same time, you need to prioritize the areas in each medium where you should allocate your marketing budget, for maximum ROI.

Should you go the app way?

By 2018, the average number of applications a smartphone owner will install and use regularly will plateau. You can be mobile-centric in other ways. Texting is an app (read functionality) that comes on every phone—smart or dumb. Even those buying the relaunched Nokia 3310 will be able to get your message.

6 SMS/texting tips for an effective mobile marketing strategy

You can decide how mobile-centric your strategy should be depending on your business. The tips below will give you some things to think about that can strengthen your approach to incorporating SMS messages as a marketing channel.

1. For products with a limited shelf life

If you’re selling perishable inventory like hotel rooms or food, a timely text will alert prospective customers to choose your brand. Don’t forget about the timing: texting offers sent on Friday night drives last-minute sales for hospitality businesses.

2. Encourage prospects and customers to text you

You can advertise a discount to entice leads to opt-in for your text marketing messages. This will help you build your database and increase conversions as you build better relationships through real-time engagement.

3. Qualify leads through texting

Confirm information about your prospects through texts, such as verifying email addresses and discovering their interests. Text messaging is an easier action for leads to take. And they’re more likely to respond than they would be if you call them.

4. Automate follow-ups with SMS messages

80% of sales happen after the 4^th follow-up. Persistence pays in marketing, as well as in sales. When you combine the two, you’ve got a winner. Send your prospects a text message to set appointments. Send a follow-up text before the appointment as a reminder and ask them to confirm or reschedule at their convenience.

5. If you have mostly repeat customers

Create a text-based loyalty program that makes it easy for your customers to stay involved with your brand. Their smartphones are always within reach whereas they may forget to bring their loyalty cards with them. Customer satisfaction will soar when it’s so easy to do business with you as they take advantage of what their loyalty has earned them.

6. Products that can offer a self-service option to customers

You can text a menu of service options to your customers so that they can take action themselves rather than waiting for an agent to get back to them. FAQs, installation steps, and troubleshooting tips are all easy to refer to in a text.

Keep Pace with Your Customers’ Preferences 

The world is changing fast. Today’s flavor-of-the-day app could be forgotten tomorrow. Betting on simple technologies that will always be there will help keep pace with your customers. People take in 5x the information they did in the 1980s, according to The Economist. Your 160 character text might take less than a minute of your audience’s time. They know that, so they’re more likely to pay attention to that message than an email or a phone call, which is more interruptive and takes more of their time and attention.

To know how to use texting in your marketing strategy SMS/Text ‘DEMO, FirstName, CompanyEmailID’ to 36343.