Reasons to Use Video in Your Business Text Messaging

All successful business owners do one thing right: building relationships. They don’t compromise on this. They do everything possible to strengthen the relationship with their stakeholders starting with building a strong communication channel. A well-thought out communication channel almost guarantees good results with time.

However, to reach your audience, one communication channel is just not enough. Emails are great for product updates, newsletter, and targeting prospective customers too. Phone calls are more personal and can be highly effective for relationship building. Video communication is more engaging, and easy for users to retain product information.

In this blog, we will be discussing one more highly effective communication channel, and how it can be even more impactful when it’s used with videos. And, that communication channel is text messaging.

What Is Business Text Messaging

Business text messaging is using SMS and Rich Media Messages to communicate with customers. It’s a convenient way of keeping in touch with them. Often, people are not very enthusiastic about reading emails. Phone calls can be intrusive as it’s unwelcomed a lot of times.

Text messaging is more convenient because it’s more straightforward, it’s a type of communication where users opt-in to receive messages from businesses, and it can be customized to the customer’s liking with the help of rich media text messaging.

Moreover, text messaging can have a powerful positive impact on your business. Here are a few areas where they can be extremely effective.

Competitive advantage

Using text messages for communicating with the customers is not new, but it’s still an unexplored area. Only 39% of businesses are using text messages to reach their customers. This is a great opportunity for growing businesses to include text messages in their communication strategy, and offer a better service to their target audience that their competitors might be missing out on.

Customer reach

Customers prefer receiving SMS text messages from businesses. 54% of customers admitted that they want to receive promotional text messages. But, as per the same source, only 11% of businesses actually do it. This narrows the gap between your business and your customers. When they want to be contacted, informed and updated via text messages, there’s no reason to keep holding back from reaching them.

High responsive rate

Text messages have an open rate of 98% with almost 97% reading it within the first 15 minutes. That’s just a part of the whole story. Consumers are 134% more likely to respond to an SMS than an email. There, the comparison here clearly shows the upper hand SMS have over emails. This way you can distribute your content between SMS and emails, curate it for each channel, and improve your chances of getting replies from your customers.

Better conversion

Text messages also create more chances of conversion. 50% of US customers make a purchase or redeem a coupon when they are sent a branded text message. This can be very useful when you plan to run a promotion like an end of the year sale or account upgrade at a lower cost.

Reasons for using videos in text messaging

So far, this blog has just scratched the surface when it comes to text messaging. Text messages are great, but do you know you can also include video in your text messages? Videos add a special advantage to messages by making them more engaging. But, that’s not about it. Here are a few points to why you should add videos to your text messages

Create a better communication experience

The duo of text messaging and videos can help you design a better and more immersive communication experience for your customers. With Rich Media Messaging (RMM), you can add videos to your messages for onboarding new customers, sharing demo videos or promoting your new feature.

Instead of just typing lines of text, with RMM you can make the communication more engaging and interactive. They don’t have to visit your website to check your video library. You can bring it to them right on their smartphones.

Offer a personal touch

The scope of personalization is limited in SMS. However, with rich messaging you can add videos to share more personalized messages with your customer. You can create customized landing pages with multiple videos, images, specific background colour and CTA. This will give a strong impression to your customer about how willing you’re to delight them with your service. This will also make them stick for a long time because as per a survey by Adobe, organizations see the highest improvement in customer loyalty due to personalization.

Run better promotional campaigns

A lot of customers abhor promotional messages. This is because they’re not relevant to them or close to their interests. With video messages, you can run curated RMM campaigns to send promotional messages. So, instead of dumping your messages in every customer’s mobile device, you send specific promotional videos catering to the audience’s interests.

For example, if you want to give a 20% discount on account upgrade to only those customers who had logged in to their account every day in the past 90 days, then you can do that with rich media messages. You can record a video to share the benefits of the promotion, and how the upgraded features will help them in their work.

Engage in better storytelling

You can tell a much better story to your audience with video messages. Firstly, there is a lot of scope of sharing educational, interactive and engaging content with them. With videos, you can keep a mix of product specific content, and brand specific too.

For example, you can share videos on new feature releases, and share testimonial videos to show your customers how others trust your brand.

So, the next time they get a text message from you, they can expect something new and informative from your end. This form of visual storytelling will keep your audience engaged, and keep coming for more.

Generate more traffic to your website

Generating traffic to your website is tough. However, you can leverage text messages to build more traffic to your website. With a tool like VoiceSage, you can send video carousels in your business text messages.

It’s a proactive way of reaching your customers, and encouraging them to visit your website.

Here’s how: if you have created thought leadership content which includes interviews from experts, then you can include a video carousel which gives a sneak-peek of the content. These videos can be linked to your specific website landing page, so that when they click on it, they will be navigated to your website.

Improve conversion rate

With text messages, you can spike your conversion rate quite impressively. Rich media messaging can improve your conversion rate by 39%. The biggest reason behind this is that you can have complete control over what you share with your audience.

Moreover, you can customize the content and track how many watched the video and took action on it. So, when you’re sending promotional video messages you’re already sending it to users who are interested in watching such content.

Therefore, they’re more likely to respond or react to your content. As you will know who is responding to your message, you can do a more effective follow-up to close the loop.

More cost-effective

A 1-minute video commercial can cost you up to $5000. And, that’s just the cost, if you factor in the reach and return on investment, it might look even less impressive. On the other hand, the cost of sending videos in text messages is as low as 2cents/message. This cost, and when you factor in all the benefits from customizing video content, you will have a straight answer as to what communication channel has the higher potential of using money effectively.

Types of videos you can send in text messages

It’s important to know the reasons behind using videos in text messages. However, when you know what types of videos you can send to your customers, your plan is more clear and sorted. So, here are a few examples of types of videos.

Before you start reading, remember, this is not an exhaustive list.

1. Demo videos

Whether you’re launching a new product or want to advertise your existing product, demo videos can be a great choice. A quick 2-6 minute video of how the product works, what are its main features, and how they can be useful to the customer can do wonders

2. Feature videos

Very similar to demo videos are feature videos. These are more specific, and go into the depth of a single or a bunch of features. This works great when you’re launching a new feature which is also one of its kind in the industry.

3. Testimonial videos

92% of customers read online reviews and testimonials before buying a product. This builds more trust and acts as a social proof. But, you can make it easy for your prospects to find out about customer reviews by sending them testimonial videos. This approach is more proactive, and shows the confidence you have in your branding.

4. Branding videos

Nowadays, people are more conservative while associating with a new brand. They like buying products from brands that have strong values and ethics. Here’s where you can take advantage by making videos that tell the story of your brand. Who are the leaders behind the brand, what does the company believe in, how it aims to transform the society and so on.

Summarizing It

Videos are very effective in communicating with customers. It’s also a very favourable time to use it as a tool for marketing. People are enjoying watching videos, and they’re spending a considerable amount of time glued to their screen. Text messaging is an easy way of reaching a wide target audience, but at an economical cost. No special arrangements are required and there are no technological challenges either.

The combination of text messaging and videos is a pair made in heaven. For ambitious companies, who are planning to grow their roots, should definitely consider using videos in text messaging. They can use videos to map their text message marketing efforts to the customer journey, and instead of bombarding irrelevant messages, they can be more specific to the customer’s requirements.

This will help to put themselves in the lead position in the market, get better conversions and overall build a healthy relationship with their customers which is much-needed for building a successful business.

Author: Tanoy Chowdhury heads Content Marketing at Vmaker (A product of Animaker). He enjoys writing about marketing and spends a lot of time getting better at it. In his spare time he reads, listens to music, and adds new travel destinations to his bucket list.