Running a business involves maintaining each aspect of it efficiently. After all, ensuring that every element of your business is running smoothly will contribute to achieving your short-term and long-term business goals. Since there are a myriad of business elements to work on, businesses tend to pick a handful of essential aspects to prioritize, which can vary from company to company.
One of the most important elements of running your business is to have connections with people who are interested in supporting your business in different ways, such as customers, employees, investors, partners, and more. Among these people, your customers should be your top priority because you’ll never achieve progress within your organization without supportive and loyal customers.
A seller-to-customer relationship is a two-way connection. As you provide the needs and wants of your customers in the form of goods and services, these customers have the choice to keep coming back to your business, and even recommend your brand to other people.
Establishing Connection with Customers Through Marketing
Undoubtedly, every business should put their customers and their positive experiences first. From inquiry to aftersales, your customers should always leave your business smiling. Business success is about treating the customers you have in a manner that satisfies them and encourages them to keep coming back.
To give your customers an excellent experience while transacting with your business, you must establish clear and effective communication with them. There are various communication channels and options that you can choose from, which involve face-to-face and digital communication.
In order to communicate with your customers, you need to find and reach out to them first through building a healthy client list. This process includes making an ideal buyer persona that you wish to attract into your business, then locate these people with the help of marketing. Through marketing, you can bring your products, services, and solutions to the market, and potentially garner leads and prospects from this activity.
Marketing serves as the heart of your business, which primarily deals with engaging customers to try out what your company has to offer, thus increasing the sales, profit, and presence of your brand. Marketing can be a significant driver to predict your business outcomes.
While marketing is an essential aspect of your business, it shouldn’t be an excuse to focus only on your marketing efforts; also ensure that you’re giving the same attention to the quality of your goods, products, and services.
Moreover, your choice of campaigns and strategies will be extremely valuable to the results of your marketing. Therefore, choose a marketing strategy that’s significantly relevant to your undertaking. Case in point: telemarketing and mobile marketing, which both encompass the use of mobile technology.
Telemarketing and Mobile Marketing: Effective Marketing Via Phone
In today’s time, mobile phones are a necessity for many people, as it assists them in fulfilling personal, academic, social, physical, and other types of endeavors. Without a cellphone, individuals will struggle to keep in touch with their loved ones, particularly those separated by distance. Mobile phones also help people in taking quick photos and videos in daily life. Even after many years, phones will remain relevant to society.
Aside from its personal and individual uses, did you know that you can also take advantage of your phone to help in running your business? Since phones are also a device that have technological and internet access, they can be used in a variety of ways that can benefit your venture.
In telemarketing, you’re bringing products and services to clients using a telephone setup. As a business planning to engage in telemarketing, it’s important to think about your customer’s condition rather than shoving your products and services intrusively. Because of unethical practices that many businesses engage in, telemarketing has had a fair share of its bad impressions. Thus, you should know how to utilize telemarketing appropriately with respect to consumers.
On the other hand, mobile marketing encompasses a wider range of channels for marketing a brand to its target audience, including smartphones, tablets, and other devices. They deliver all types of content across these channels, such as a short message service (SMS), multimedia message service (MMS), email, websites, and social media platforms.
With these in mind, here are eight strategies to use your phone efficiently for business to satisfy the principles of telemarketing and mobile marketing:
- Incorporate Auto Dialer Systems
An auto dialer is an excellent option for marketing your business through mobile phones. A good auto dialer can allow you to reach a large number of potential customers within a short period of time with one call. An auto dialing system helps your business save time, enhance its cost-effectiveness, increase its customer base, and enhance its brand image by creating a high level of familiarity with your customers.
Auto dialers are software or platforms that automatically dial the telephone numbers of customers, which help businesses broaden their outbound campaigns. With an auto dialer, you can connect to a customer and deliver them an automated message, or connect the customer to your live operator.
Compared to traditional dialing where agents have to dial client numbers one by one, auto dialers are undoubtedly better due to the following reasons:
- Increased customer communication
- Maximum agent productivity
- Lessened agent idle time
- Reduced operational costs
- Enhanced contact center performance
- Enabled compliance and quality assurance
Since auto dialers can also be integrated in mobile phones, these services are perfect for entrepreneurs who only have one existing telephone, but want to separate their work from personal activities.
- Utilize Mass Texting Applications
In addition to auto dialing, SMS marketing is another tried-and-tested method in business marketing. While many people argue that it will not be as effective as before, it’s actually still effective and applicable today because of its high open rate. When a person receives a text message, they tend to view it immediately because it can be something important or urgent, compared to when they open their email.
However, it’s difficult and time-consuming to send your messages to potential customers one at a time, and it’s not just ideal for business operations. Fortunately, you can make use of a platform like Mass Text App, which, as its name suggests, allows you to send text messages to a large number of people simultaneously.
In this SMS platform, you can alert your customers and subscribers particularly with anything about your business, from new product releases to website maintenance. Thanks to this platform, you can stay connected with your text subscribers and update them anytime.
To enhance your mass texting experience, you’re not limited to just typing plain text then sending them to your potential clients. You can integrate call-to-action (CTA) buttons, links, images, and keywords to make the marketing more effective across different campaigns. For instance, you can text your subscribers about getting discounts if they refer three friends to buy your product, then you can send a referral link that they can use.
- Look Into Ringless Voicemail Services
As highlighted earlier, the unethical, intrusive way that businesses used to fulfill telemarketing gave a bad impression to its entire concept. But what these entrepreneurs don’t know is that they can still utilize telemarketing in a non-intrusive and non-demanding way by sending ringless voicemails to potential clients.
A ringless voicemail system, as suggested by its name, is a form of marketing that delivers pre-recorded voice messages to customers without having to ring their phones. A ringless voicemail software enables you to create different contact lists where you can send the messages immediately with a few clicks. Since people tend to respond to voicemails than text messages, you can expect a higher conversion rate of 5% to 20%.
Furthermore, you can integrate this ringless voicemail system into your customer relationship management (CRM) system seamlessly. Whenever you interact with a certain prospect on the ringless voicemail system, they’ll automatically be recorded by the CRM system for better data management.
- Encourage Employees to Collaborate Through Mobile Devices
Cooperation and teamwork are essential to your project success. However, factors that cause some projects to fail are misunderstanding and lack of efficient communication. To establish better communication within your team, you can opt to give business cell phones to each of your employees, especially those who are frequently on-call, are travelling, or had to make adjustments to work from home. Because of the situation brought about by the current pandemic, companies are giving out devices to their employees who are working from home.
Through giving out compatible devices with the same units and models, you can boost efficient collaboration and communication within your team, and hopefully have no misunderstandings anymore. Additionally, make sure that every device has the same operating system, mobile network carriers, software, applications, and other essential platforms that they’ll be collaborating on.
- Monitor and Maintain Your Business Expenses
Sorting out various aspects of your finances manually can be fun yet overwhelming, but it’s entirely inconvenient and a waste of time as there are specific apps that can do the work for you. Budget tracking apps and platforms can also be installed and used in your phone wherever you are. Small businesses in particular can benefit the most in daily budget expense tracking.
If you’re going to start tracking your business finances, it would be best to choose an app with the best compatibility with other devices that you use, so you can switch up and use the platform conveniently whenever you’d like.
- Respond to Potential Customers On-the-Go
This part is self-explanatory. Having a mobile phone within your reach is important when attending to customers. If you’ve hired voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or phone services connected to your personal phone, it would even be more necessary to keep your phone with you everywhere you go. In this way, you can respond to potential customers about their inquiries and provide updates about current purchases and transactions.
Whether you’re negotiating through chat or call, make sure to demonstrate professionalism through the following ways:
- Be warm and enthusiastic, and avoid a hostile interaction.
- Speak clearly and slowly with the right volume.
- Never forget to identify your organization and introduce yourself courteously.
- Don’t leave the caller on hold without notice. Ask them first if they’d like to be on hold or be called back later.
- Use formal language when speaking and refrain from using slang.
- Don’t let the caller wait until the third ring.
- Dial Calls and Send Messages to Your Company Quickly
Since you’ve considered handing out phones to your employees, then you can also use it to your advantage to send messages and dial calls to your staff whenever you need something. During this ongoing pandemic, it’s important to maintain strong and effective communication with your employees to ensure that your operations are flowing smoothly, as well as to check up on their condition during remote work.
Also, your company can sign up for a collaboration platform with tools and functions specifically curated for businesses. Through these platforms, you can stay in touch with one another despite working from home.
- Practice Better Time Management and Task Scheduling
Last but not least is something that most people have trouble managing both in their work and personal lives: scheduling tasks and managing time. With the help of a fully operational phone, you can use different apps for time management and scheduling. You can also make a to-do list for your day and it’ll remind you of things you have to accomplish in case you forget them. Lastly, there are helpful apps out there that can assist you in reducing your distractions and enhancing your attention and focus while working.
Final Thoughts
Despite their small and compact sizes, phones have proven that they have limitless capabilities and shouldn’t be underestimated. Surprisingly, mobile devices aren’t only suitable for personal use, as businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, can benefit greatly from utilizing a phone system into their operations. In addition, ordinary people are with their phones 24/7, thus businesses have a higher chance of attracting them through mobile phone interactions. If you’re planning to use a phone for your business, consider the tips and strategies indicated in this article.
