Employ these texting best practices when using Belly Mobile Messaging to keep customers informed during the coronavirus recovery phases

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 business restrictions, companies have been scrambling to keep their customers informed when business ops are constantly in flux, including changes in business days or hours, available services, products, or menu items procedures, permissible methods for providing your service or products, etc. If you have the Belly Mobile Messaging add-on service, adapting fast and getting the word out to customers nearly instantaneously becomes a slam-dunk.

Mobile messaging is by far the best way to reach the bulk of your guests. In near real time, you can keep customers in the loop as you modify operations, hours, store access, or offers in response to these changing situations.

Let’s look at the strategies others are employing to succeed at this. 

Strategy #1: Instant texting is the key

While you’ve likely used Belly to create standard/routine messages, such as a weekly offer, Belly Mobile Messaging adds a power tool to your customer communications for performing ad hoc and near-instantaneous messaging  — critical when you need to instantly change store hours, store availability (such as becoming open for delivery or pick up only), or when you need to close some stores completely.

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Strategy #2: Target the right message to the right guests

Belly Mobile Messaging excels at identifying who a particular message needs to reach. The operational changes you enact might affect all your stores or just certain stores (based on state, county, or city regulation changes, for instance, or a situation involving just a single location).

No problem: Belly Mobile Messaging lets you easily specify recipients based on location or other parameters — perfect for sending a message to customers within an impacted area.

Strategy #3: Use multiple channels for greater reach

You might be tempted to focus all of your communications on just mobile messaging since the open rate for text messages is at 95 percent — far ahead of the open rate of an app message or an email message.

But here’s the thing; based on data analyzed across millions of redemptions at our client’s 40,000+ stores, we’ve learned that there is little overlap regarding which channel a customer will use as their preferred method for ingesting communications from businesses. Some will see your messages or offers that you put on the Belly app, while others respond to only an email or an SMS message.

In the end, we found less than a 10-percent (and, in most cases, less than five-percent!) overlap between people responding to offers delivered via mobile messaging, app and loyalty, email, and even FSI’s. The point: don’t put all your customer communications eggs in one basket — nor do you need to if you have Belly, since you can use email, the Belly app, or texting (with the Belly Mobile Messaging upgrade) to make sure you reach all your customers by engaging them on the channel they prefer.

In the coming days, we will be posting more articles for Belly business owners, introducing tips and strategies for business survival during the coronavirus challenges. Stay tuned!