Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with briefly valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter. We get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information and will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 30. Can't believe we're up to episode 30 already. For those of you who've been with us for all 30 episodes, appreciate you listening. For those who are new, um, hopefully could go back and listen to the other 29 cuz uh, some good stuff in there. This episode's gonna be about texting customers, how to text them, when to text them, and the best ways and strategies around texting customers.

So we all know that, you know, SMS marketing is getting bigger and bigger by the day. It seems to be almost replacing email marketing. Um, while nothing will ever replace email marketing, it's definitely the new hot, sexy way to reach your customers. Um, so let's talk about why SMS marketing is good and why SMS marketing is a little dangerous. So SMS marketing is great because you really have a direct connection to your customers inbox. Um, everybody checks their text messages. Everybody reads their text messages. Not everybody opens all their emails. You might go to the spam folder, might not get delivered to them. They might just overlook it. Everybody gets 8 billion emails a day, but with a text message much more personal, you're really right in their face. It's very hard for them to just completely ignore you. And also text messages are very easy to implement.

Um, so when you, when you to send an email, you have to set up a design. It's gotta be pretty when you're sending a text message to your customers, it's just like a two liner really quick. It can take a few minutes to set up and you send out that text. One of the bad things about text messages, so there's two main things I wanna focus on. Number one is they're pretty expensive. So to send a text message is around 10 to 20 times more expensive than sending an email. Um, so you gotta be careful not to blow your budget on that. And secondly, they're intrusive. So on the flip side of them being personal and right in the customer's phone, um, they're intrusive. Customers get annoyed when you text them too often. No, nobody wants to get a text from your business often, maybe once a week every two weeks.

But if you're texting your customers every single day with nothing important, they're just gonna reply, stop. You don't have to be able to text them anymore. They're gonna stop shopping with you. They're gonna just be annoyed. Um, you don't wanna know your customers. So let's talk about three different ways you can text your customers and what you should do and how often you should text them. The first one is the most obvious. It's a text message campaign. This is when you're texting all of your customers at once or segment of your customers and you're sending 'em the same thing. So some obvious examples of this are, Hey, we're having a Black Friday sale, come into the store of shop, or Hey, we just got in some fabulous new dresses from these three brands. Come into shop. Um, and you're sending that bulk message to a lot of your customers.

At the same time, types of messages should be used the most sporadically you should be using these, you know, at the most once a week, maybe once a month even. Just the less you use them, the better. Um, again, they're not personal customer is not gonna resonate so much with them. Some of your customers may, but, but not all of your customers kind of fit the same bill. It'll be a little tricky to get all your customers to react positively to these next type. A text message I wanna talk about is automated flows. These can be super, super powerful. So this is when you set up a rule in your system, um, whether it's in your POS system or your text message marketing system. And based on the rule, as long as the customer triggers that rule, a message will get texted to them. Some obvious examples of this are a birthday text message, um, a loyalty award, text message, um, haven't shopped in a while, text message.

So the birthday text message I think is one of my favorites. You have the customer's birthday in your system, you have the customer's phone number in your system and you set up a rule when it's a customer's birthday, send them a text with a $15 gift card or a discount, a special birthday gift, and you make it a personal message. You know, Hey, customer name, happy birthday. We can't wait to see you and celebrate you in in store. Here's a special birthday gift from us to you. You can do the same thing with loyalty programs. So, hey, you have a loyalty award, it's about to expire, or hey, you're 15 points away from getting a loyalty award. And again, these are things that are personal to the customer and it's going one-to-one to each individual customer. These can be set up as aggressively as you want and as long as you use a little bit of intelligence around them and you're not just making up flows just for fun, um, you could get aggressive with these flows and have a bunch set up.

So hopefully a bunch of customers kind of fall into these flows and over time they just bring you more and more money. Um, the third type of texting that I want to talk about, and I think it's the most important, it's the most overlooked. There's just personal one-to-one messaging with customers. Now this one is extremely powerful. Um, reason being is it's the least intrusive, right? When you're sending a personal message to a customer, you're literally taking the time to think about what can I text this customer and what can I text this customer to be relevant? What can I text this customer to get her to come into my store and shop? And you know, you can't just like mess around with this one because if you just send the same text to every customer or a thoughtless message, it's gonna go in one ear, not the other.

But if you actually spend the time and think about who are my best customers? What are those customers like? And you know, what is Peggy from my store? Like, oh, Peggy loves black leggings. I know she loves to work out every day and I just gotten a ton of new leggings from this brand. Take a few minutes, take a few pictures of those leggings, send the pictures to Peggy, and I guarantee you Peggy is very likely to come to the store and check out what you got. And the reason is because you actually spent the time and effort

To put something together for Peggy that you know she'll like. And if you did it right, chances are she will like that message and she'll come to the store and shop and you could get as creative as you want with these. This is literally, it's as if you're texting a friend. Yeah. Another thing I wanna note on that is that the reason why it works the most, cause it takes the most effort. You can't fake it. And anything you can't fake and you requires time ends up working really well because not everybody does it. Very few people spend the time thinking about who their customers are. Who can I text this specific message and who can I get back into my store? So I think if I were to sum up this, this episode in, in 10 seconds, I would say like, don't over text the customers. Don't be lazy about it and be as personal as possible. That's it. Looking forward to episode 30.