The COVID pandemic was a sobering reminder for many that preparedness should never take shortcuts. The effects on “business as usual” were devastating, with travel restrictions and office closures causing significant problems in communication throughout the country. Yet, these challenges also gave birth to new opportunities.

The recent report by cybersecurity firm FireEye showed that 66% of businesses have admitted they felt the pandemic exposed weaknesses in their digital strategy.

The communication strategy for your business is an essential tool in helping you serve the needs of both current and future customers. With economic recovery taking hold across many regions, it’s more important than ever to have a well-researched plan that can withstand any disruption on par with what happened during The Great Recession – when businesses were left without employees or infrastructure due mainly because they didn’t know how best protect themselves from risk factors like this happening again.

BNS has a unique insight into the many and varied ways that businesses deploy communications technologies to meet their challenges.

Below are some of the more common use cases we’ve observed for communications platforms as a service:

Appointment and reminders

• Appointment confirmations
• Scheduling system communications
• Appointment reminders
• Appointment amendments or alterations

Security and Compliance

• Two-factor authentication
• Secure communication platform
• Sending and receiving sensitive documents
• Maintaining compliance and privacy controls

Urgent notifications

• Crisis management
• Worker safety
• Patient notifications
• Banking security notifications

Marketing and sales communications

• CRM updates
• Promotional marketing messaging
• Lead nurturing
• Sales outreach

Updates and Confirmations

• Dispatch and delivery updates and confirmations
• Booking confirmations
• Contact centre communication
• Billing confirmations

Education and Awareness

• Student engagement
• Charity Outreach
• Government awareness programmes
• Surveys

Internal Communication

• Remote work communication
• Workplace transformation
• Employee satisfaction and wellbeing
• Internal staff communication tools

Cross-channel marketing allows online enterprises and retailers to use multiple communication channels to interact with consumers and build a unified shopping experience. In this post, we’ll look at the importance of SMS in cross-channel marketing and why it’s essential in a complete consumer journey experience.

Consumers today shift from one channel to another to engage with businesses via email inboxes, social media platforms, smartphones, and laptops. Google found that consumers shopping across multiple touchpoints have a 30 percent higher lifetime customer value than those who don’t.

In relation, Aberdeen revealed that 51 percent of marketers use at least eight channels in delivering customer experience. SMS is one of the touchpoints with increasing usage in online cross-channel marketing strategies. The latest data shows that 69 percent of marketers leverage it worldwide.

In 2020, the number of mobile messages sent increased by a whopping 400 percent. This is likely due to the SMS conversion rate experiencing year-over-year growth of 102 percent. When done correctly, SMS provides an easy way for brands to connect with consumers and convert them into customers. Here are some solid reasons why mobile messaging capabilities are now a must for online brands and retailers rather than simply being a nice perk.

Personalisation

Consumers check their phones about 80-150 times daily, making mobile messaging increasingly personal, immediate, and direct. However, this isn’t the only reason to utilise SMS to customise customer journeys. According to a Salesforce poll, consumers expect it, and those who don’t adapt their communications risk losing almost half of their customers.

Relationship Building

For 75 percent of consumers who already care about a brand, receiving text messages is something they’re open to. As a platform for boosting loyalty and retention, brands can keep shoppers in the loop with the latest updates on rewards.

Mobile messaging can be a great way to connect with customers and offer exclusive deals and offers. You can also use it to survey your customers, collect feedback, and get reviews.

SMS is a quickly-growing tool that brands use to improve customer interactions, loyalty, and retention. Not only is it personalised, accessible, and engaging, but it has also been shown increase conversions. With SMS conversations, you’re no longer limited to just emails and social media platforms. As a highly effective communication channel, SMS rounds out a successful cross-channel marketing strategy.

Enterprise SMS Server software security

BNS’s enterprise SMS server software runs in the customer’s cloud tenancy, shielding sensitive SMS data from service providers. The SMS Server software sends the necessary information to the SMS network provider via secure encryption protocols considered industry standards.

Service providers in Australia and a few other nations are obligated to keep the data safe after it has been transmitted to the SMS network. All metadata supplied by the customer’s applications through the SMS Server software is securely stored in customer’s SQL databases in the customer’s cloud tenancy and isn’t accessible to any SMS service provider. The SMS Server software offers comprehensive analytics tools that allow customers to analyse how well their services perform.

Roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day — and that unbelievable number will only continue to increase. 

Every business owner knows that collecting customer data is key to success, regardless of industry, target market demographics, or types of goods/services provided.

Even if you can’t capture all 2.5 quintillion bytes of consumer data, you must ensure that the information you gather is used well.

Companies collect all sorts of data on their users, including information like fitness watch usage data, IP addresses, past search queries, locations, and which ads someone clicks on.

But what are the advantages of gathering this sort of consumer information, and how can it help your clients interact with your company?

Data Provides a Deeper Understanding of Your Market

The fact is that most firms need consumer data to evaluate consumers accurately and improve their experience. For example, it may help them better comprehend how their customers interact online, define their overall demographics, and figure out how to improve the customer experience.

Data provides your company with helpful customer feedback that can guide product development, improve customer service, and inform marketing efforts.

When you know more about your customers, you can enhance every aspect of your business to suit their needs better. You can also improve your communication with them, optimise your website for a better user experience, and much more.

Data Collection Improves Your Consumer Database

Brands are always looking for ways to grow and organise their company databases, and customer data can help make that happen.

You’ll be able to gather the IP addresses, email addresses, and even phone numbers of people who have engaged with your brand in some manner.

This allows you to contact them about potential career openings, increase your lead-generating approach, and assess a customer’s actual level of interest in your business by examining how they react to your site or receive advertisements in another manner.

Quality leads require more time, energy, and marketing money to pursue. With their information, you can send SMS marketing updates, email newsletters, special offers, and much more.

Consumer Data Improves Your Marketing Strategies

Even in today’s environment, your company’s complete digital marketing plan is more crucial than ever.

Let’s assume you want to improve rankings, convert more leads, and build a sense of trust and transparency between your brand and its customers. In that case, you must put up with anything to maximise your marketing campaign.

You can’t do that without capturing data and utilising it to guide all of your marketing efforts.

Data from your marketing campaigns will show you what tactics and strategies work best with your target audience. Use this information to create more targeted and effective advertisements in the future.

You’ll discover much more about your typical buyer persona, their favorite social media platforms, which goods they’re most interested in and much more.

Data not only helps you understand your website’s customer path/journey, but it also allows you to improve the user experience and convince customers to convert.

It Allows For Greater Personalisation 

Roughly 63% of consumers say that they expect personalisation from the companies they work with regarding marketing and product suggestions, order confirmations, and any communication between themselves and your business. 

Collecting data allows you to fulfill consumer expectations for customised communications and ideas.

Furthermore, the more you understand about the goods/services your customers are looking for, the more likely you are to offer them items they’d be most inclined to buy and make a sale.

You may segment your marketing efforts based on customers with similar interests, enable autofill for payment methods and other forms on your website, and even get a better sense of the devices people use to visit your website.

While the BNS msXsms Secure SMS Server allows companies to utilise secure SMS communications to enhance the consumer journey, the insights gathered through data feedback from the software offer the opportunity to improve their databases, improve marketing strategies and provide greater personalisation.

SMS, or text messaging, has been used mostly for personal conversations up until recently. A2P, or application-to-person messaging, is for business purposes to send texts from software directly to mobile users. It allows brands to send many automated business messages at once to customers. Smartphone usage is increasing steadily lately, and businesses have started to notice SMS’s scope and importance in their marketing strategy.

SMS marketing is one of the most straightforward ways to communicate with consumers. However, it has yet to be fully utilised. Furthermore, SMS may not only be used to interact with existing clients but also to target new consumers. The ability of Transactional Messaging to deliver timely information is also useful.

The benefits of text messaging for businesses are too good to be ignored.

The major advantage of text marketing is that it is constantly present in our lives, thanks to the widespread use of mobile phones. As a result, sending a message to the device nearest to the individual is simply a matter of convenience.

The low price of bulk text messaging and the wide reachability of the right audience are two of its advantages. Furthermore, you may employ SMS short codes and long codes for a variety of marketing goals.

• Almost 60% of users reply to a text message within 1-2 minutes
• 45% of prospects choose a brand after getting an SMS.
• 67% of users prefer texting with a business about scheduling an appointment to email or phone communication.

Why use SMS in business?

High open rates

Bulk SMS messaging is greatly beneficial because text messages have higher open rates in comparison to phone calls or emails. For example, 98% of the messages sent are opened, making SMS services a fantastic asset to any enterprise needing quick and effective customer service.

Better conversion rate

Many people think that SMS is outdated because of the high usage of instant messaging apps, but there are plenty of advantages to using SMS in business. For example, SMS has a better conversion rate than all its new-age counterparts. People are more likely to visit your business and take action on promotions or offers shared through SMS than any other marketing service.

Enterprise SMS Server software security

BNS’s enterprise SMS server software runs in the customer’s cloud tenancy, protecting sensitive SMS data from exposure to service providers. The SMS Server software only sends the minimum amount of information to the SMS network service provider using secure encryption industry standards protocols. Once the data is sent to the SMS network,  service providers in Australia and some other countries are required to keep the data secure.  All other metadata provided by the customer’s applications to the SMS Server software is securely stored in the customer’s SQL databases in the customer’s cloud tenancy and not exposed to any SMS service provider.  The SMS Server software comes with rich analytics capabilities allowing the customer to examine SMS delivery performance to their customers.

Greater audience reach

Many businesses are moving to SMS as a method of communication because it does not require the internet, and nearly everybody has a working phone. With the high usage of phones, SMS is nothing less of a goldmine. As a result, businesses can use this opportunity to reach customers right where they are by email, giving them the advantage of getting more people involved.

Instant delivery

In order to see the advantages of text messaging for businesses, you must make sure you are associated with a good Cloud telephony provider that has strong network operator connections all over the world. This network-operator relationship can come in handy when businesses need to deliver time-sensitive OTPs.

Campaign success visibility

When analysing the success of bulk SMS campaigns, businesses need insights into how they’re performing. After that, they may use this data to develop their text advertising plans and target the correct audience to gain more attention.

Cloud telephony providers offer real-time data and detailed graphical analytics, including the number of messages delivered, timestamps, message status, whether the customer has read it, which browser was used to visit the site, geolocation data, and much more. Such insights help businesses better understand their target audience, assess a campaign’s success, and plan future campaigns for greater reach.

Easy Opt-in/Opt-out

The major advantage of SMS compared to email marketing is that messages may be stopped if clients don’t want to hear from the business. Shortcode and long-code numbers allow consumers to choose whether they wish to Opt-in or Opt-out of communications. Customers may respond instantly, and businesses can set simple keywords that allow customers to reply quickly. This simplicity enhances customer pleasure and loyalty since they have a way out if they decide they no longer want to receive messages.

Flexible and reliable

SMS services are helpful for businesses- they can announce sales, provide coupons and discounts, remind customers of appointments, share online order status, and more. However, because SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, businesses need to be mindful of how best to utilise this restricted space to most effectively reach their customer base.

msXsms Enterprise SMS Server for Office 365 & Microsoft Exchange

With the rapid growth of email use for interagency communications within the Australian government, a strong case was made for a standardised and machine-readable marking scheme for security purposes. Initially introduced in 2005, the Email Protective Marking Standard (EPMS) was created as part of the Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF) to meet this need. At their core, EPMS and PSPF require each entity to identify information asset holdings, assess the sensitivity and security classification of these assets, and implement operational controls for them proportional to their value, importance, and sensitivity.

This framework enables individuals to identify whether any information requires special handling measures. As all Australian federal government agencies are affected by changes to the framework and standards, so are organisations contracting with government entities.

As all Australian federal government agencies are affected by changes to the framework and standards, so are organisations contracting with government entities.

Your organisation should keep several considerations in mind:

1. Acceptance of both old and new standards: Does your organisation require users to be able to mark in both new and old versions of the standards at the same time?
2. Updating schema for new fields and adjusted policies: Is your organisation prepared to update schema for new areas and adjusted policies, such as recipient validation, for example?
3. Addition of optional elements: With this transition, do you require the addition of optional details?
4. Sensitivity level changes: Does your organisation now need to mark material at a higher sensitivity level?
5. Although all these questions are essential, the biggest question to ask internally is, “Are our users ready for the change?” Without buy-in from users, your organisation’s ability to comply with changes to EPMS becomes increasingly tricky.

BNS has made this process somewhat more accessible by ensuring that msXsms is 100% Email Protective Marking Standards compliant. So reach out today to learn more about packages, pricing, and how msXsms can assist your organisation.