More and more consumers are growing comfortable with the idea of texting businesses to make their voices heard. The savviest of businesses understand the importance of this trend and is choosing to engage numerous customers using bulk SMS. Bulk SMS is changing the way businesses communicate and nurture relationships with consumers by empowering businesses to send messages at scale, without sacrificing the personal touch of their messages. For those interested in dabbling with bulk SMS, did you know you can take your current phone landline and convert it into a platform that enables 2-way bulk text messaging? You don't even need to change your landline phone number. All it takes is a quick call to your service provider. It’s so quick and easy In fact, you could easily text-enable your landline within the day. WIth flexible pricing plans depending on your needs all without disrupting your current business workflow. Soon you’ll be able to send tens of thousands of messages efficiently and effortlessly.

Texting with prospects and customers is a new marketing channel for most businesses, but the benefits are staggering.

As you’re learning more about conversational commerce, you may start to feel defensive about your current email communication strategy. It seems to be working for you and you're comfortable with the system in place. Why put time, energy, and resources into implementing a new process, like using SMS texting and instant messaging, that may not work for your needs? It’s a natural way to react to any type of change—probably more so in business where you’re not just risking your personal reputation and money, but your business’ as well. It’s the responsible reaction to question anything that claims to be “better for you.” So to all of you cautious decision makers—we say bravo and applaud your thoughtful judgment. We are not here to convince you that you need to completely change your communication plan. Rather, we are here to provide insights into how you may augment your arsenal to enhance what you’ve got and make it even better. We’ve got nothing against email. On the contrary, we’ll show you how to improve your email strategy while adding SMS texting and instant messaging capabilities as options for your audience. Before we do that, we will first address some common concerns about using SMS and/or IM for business purposes. Then, we’ll outline when to use instant communication with your audience and when to use email. Common Concerns about SMS and IM Concern #1: They’re intrusive. Some people may find getting a text or chat message from a business on their personal phone as an invasion of a sacred space that should only be designated for trading emojis and gifs with your nearest and dearest. That’s a fair point if the customer did not opt in to receive SMS or IM from the company. However, standard practice for most organizations is to request permission before contacting a consumer. By doing this, businesses know whether the consumer wants to hear from them or not. In addition, companies usually offer a way to opt out if consumers change their mind or were contacted by mistake. So, ultimately this choice of communication style is left with the consumer. Those people who find it intrusive can opt out—they would be among the minority anyway. When Facebook surveyed daily messaging app users, 61% of those surveyed in the US told them “they had messaged a business in the past three months.” The same statistic from other countries was either the same or higher. It’s clear most people around the world don’t find SMS or IM from companies intrusive at all. Concern #2: No access or limited access. There may be a cost barrier that limits or prevents people from receiving text or instant chat messages. Those consumers have the same choice as above—they can opt out of receiving these types of instant communication altogether or choose the chat platform that’s most accessible to them whether that be SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or the like. Businesses can access all of these mediums through a unified platform, like Chatfully, that will keep the conversations organized and open for teams to view and collaborate on the best solutions. If the targeted recipients do opt out of any instant communication, hopefully, they have the option to be reached by email, phone, or postal mail instead should they have questions about your product or service or want to be alerted about sales promotions. Concern #3: No records. For everyday personal use, it may not be possible to keep a history of your texts or DMs, and if one did, it would take up precious space on your device. For businesses, however, there are services, like Chatfully, that can help you maintain records of all your conversations (no matter the platform) for however long you want to keep them. So if you’re looking for that complaint sent over Twitter or that billing question sent via WhatsApp, you can easily find it through a unified platform like Chatfully’s. But which tool is best? Now that we have addressed the common concerns about using SMS texting or web-based instant messaging, for the rest of this article, we will refer to both of these mediums as “instant chat” and compare “instant chat” to email. The other pros and cons in certain situations for both SMS and IM are the same so both will be grouped as “instant chat.” This guide will help you choose the best tool for each of the following areas: Scheduling Customer success Sales Marketing Use Cases for Instant Chat

Picture this—you’re thinking about conversational commerce and what it can do for your organization. You’re sitting through a demo to learn how easy it is to add texting to your current phone line when it hits you … AHA! This is a lot easier than I thought!! So what do I do next? First, you’ll want to get buy-in from your team. If your employees don’t believe in this new strategy, it will be more difficult to get your customers to trust it. To tackle this, consider this two-pronged approach: Explain how adding SMS texting and instant messaging will help your team. Explain how it will help your business. How Texting and Instant Messaging Will Help Your Team The first approach to get your team behind your new SMS and IM plan is to show them how it will make their work simpler and more efficient. Are your employees being stood up too often by no-show customers not making their appointments? Are their processes held up by waiting for important customer information? Through the use of automated appointment reminders and faster responses via text or chat, your workers’ pain points with customers can be reduced considerably. An instant message platform can also make collaboration within the team and the organization effortless by allowing other workers to see the status of a conversation and, if needed, jump into it to bridge a knowledge gap and seamlessly facilitate service to the customer.

If you’re still figuring out this conversational commerce trend and what all the fuss is about, it may help to know who’s using it and how they are using it. Well, it’s your lucky day! That’s exactly what this article will tell you. Below are the top industries that have jumped on the messaging bandwagon and how they are staying ahead of the curve. Who’s Using It Various brands have discovered the benefits of conversational messaging. On Facebook Messenger alone, “ people and businesses exchange 20 billion messages ” each month. While use cases can be found from such diverse sources as health care to aerospace defense, the following industries are standouts among the messaging breed: Professional services Retail Local entertainment Public good Media How They Are Using It Conversational commerce strategies for each business can vary greatly. However, messaging experiences can be boiled down to these 3 basic categories: Proactive Example: sending a targeted message to a current or potential customer) Reactive Example: responding to questions or comments about your product or service) Broadcast Example: promoting your company by mass messaging an entire audience or a specific group of people) There you go — the 3 basic categories of conversational commerce. Would seeing specific examples of each category further support your understanding of these concepts? Keep pressing your luck because just ahead are some of the most popular use cases featuring a few of the industries mentioned above. Scheduling tops the list of subjects that organizations communicate through instant messaging. Here’s a scenario involving the professional services industry using a proactive messaging experience: Jane Smith wants to speak with a financial planner about her retirement strategy. She makes an appointment with Jorge Sanchez, a representative of Invest With Us Financial Services, her employer’s retirement plan administrator. Two days before the appointment, Jane gets a text from Invest With Us that looks like this:

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular for businesses to incorporate into their conversational commerce strategy. You could use them for sales, customer care, marketing, and so on. The advantages of using chatbots include faster customer service, increased customer satisfaction, and lower labor costs. Yet, with every new technological innovation, there are usually downsides. Chatbots are no different. Yes, the technology is still developing and advancing. However, until those improvements are in place, there are 4 significant cons to keep in mind when considering chatbots instead of a people-powered messaging system. 1. Cannot Compute The technology is undeniably cool. At any time of the day, your customers may ask your agents a question. Considering how important customers are to your business, they should get a quick answer. “Should” is the key word here. What if your customers’ questions are too complex for your chatbot? What if your chatbot doesn’t understand your customers’ slang? Most likely, the back and forth between the customer and the chatbot becomes a long infuriating thread of volleys that lead nowhere.

In the Chatfully post titled " How Conversational Commerce Leads to True Customer Focus ", we discussed how embracing the conversational messaging/texting trend can improve your rep as a customer-focused brand. In this article, we look more at how this communication shift reflects modern times. We’ll also explore what the benefits are to your business if you hop aboard the conversational commerce bullet train. Why use it? Because everyone else is. Sure, when kids say it, it sounds immature. It’s likely inaccurate at best, and a flimsy argument at worst. But when respected research firms and business publications use numbers in the billions, it’s not as big a stretch to round up. According to recent surveys and reports, “Messaging apps have over 5 billion monthly active users.”, and they are “ now bigger than social networks. ” Furthermore, the average consumer sends around 25% more text messages than emails a day.