Transactional SMS: The Complete Guide for Automated Business Messaging

Gone are the days when sales messages would drive in customers for a business. With changing customer behavior and business landscape, it is important for every business to understand how to make the best use of SMS communication and get customers through transactional SMS.

In this article, we will discuss in detail how to send transactional SMS and how to make the best use of transactional SMS for your business.

How to Send Transactional SMS?

To set up automated transactional SMS for your company, it is important to have a subscription to any third-party API and integrate it with your CRM. You can also make use of the open API for this and build your custom system.

Once you have the API setup in place, it is easy to automate your campaigns.

Now that you know how to send transactional SMS, you must also know how it helps the business and provides the best value to your customers.

Transactional SMS Guide for Businesses

Here are a few things you can implement in your business for better Transactional SMS results:

Implement Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication means that the user has to confirm his identity (email or phone number) in order to process the transaction. The user might receive this verification code either on their email or phone number.

Implementing two-factor authentication in your business will help you identify inactive and fake accounts and clean them. Moreover, this process is way cheaper compared to developing your custom solution to weed out fake user accounts.

Also, adding the two-factor authentication and verification methods will add a sense of trust towards your brand in the user's perception. Activating the account through SMS is considered more secure by clients.

Automated SMS Notifications

If you are an e-commerce brand, adding an automated SMS notification campaign will help improve your business. Automated SMS is one of the best ways to keep users informed about the progress of their purchases and other critical aspects related to the product.

In case of any delays in the delivery or if any other problems have occurred, keeping your customers informed about it makes them feel less strained.

Right from order confirmation to delivery time, everything has to be set up in automated SMS campaigns.

Set Custom Triggers

Set action-based custom triggers for your transactional SMS. For example, if you just have a first customer, send them a warm welcome message to keep them engaged.

If you find any repeated purchase patterns or anything of that sort from your customers, try to make templates of these patterns and set custom triggers.

Also, do not forget to keep your customers engaged at regular intervals, this is very important when you are sending scheduled SMS.

Real-Time SMS

Real-time SMS has an advantage compared to other kinds of marketing channels. If you have any stock that needs to be cleared or limited availability of any product, then real-time SMS works to grab your customer's attention and get some quick sales.

Real-time SMS is also a game changer when you are running any limited-time discounts and want to inform the customers about the early-bird discounts that they can avail.

Make the SMS Personalized

It is important to personalize your transactional SMSes to make your message stand out and also to make your customers feel special.

Sending transactional SMS also gets you repeat customers on your website. You can do this by either incentivizing your customers or by designing creative call-to-action content for them to come back.

Have a Branded Tracking Page

Always have a branded tracking page linked to your transactional SMS. This will help your customers get the right information on your landing page. And as a business, you will be able to drive the customers back to your site after the purchase.

The branded order tracking link should navigate to your site, and it must have all the necessary information for your customer to make the purchase. These links can also be used to cross-sell the products.

Make the Transactional SMS More Relational

If you want loyal customers or recurring business, then try to make the transactional SMS more relational. For that, you need to start understanding your customers better.

Before sending out the SMS, you need to ask yourself (as a business):

Who is the recipient?

What is the channel you need to choose for them to reach out to you?

Why do you need to get in touch with your customer?

How should you express yourself to them as a business?

And when should you send them the SMS?

Asking these key questions will help you write a better message and build good relations with your customers.

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you understand how to set up a successful transactional SMS for your business and gain more customers and revenues in the long run. If you have any personal experiences to make transactional SMS campaigns better, do let us know in the comment section below.

(Disclaimer: Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)