SMS Text Marketing Blog

In today’s crowded and competitive healthcare market finding, recruiting, and maintaining qualified medical staff in a timely manner remains a major challenge. It’s also one of the most expensive efforts all healthcare organizations – from hospitals to home care agencies and nursing homes to rehabilitation centers – must address.

Managing a large and dispersed workforce in an ever-changing environment represents still another major challenge.

Fortunately, text messaging has evolved to help forward-thinking administrators, staffers, and recruiters meet both these challenges by streamlining processes while cutting associated costs.

To understand the growing power of text, several facts are helpful:

• 98% of all text messages are read
• 90% within 30 minutes of delivery
• Texts have an engagement rate 138% more than email

And among the 18-34-year-old age group, text is the preferred channel for notifications from businesses. Here are just three ways text messaging can quickly become indispensable to your healthcare staffing and recruiting needs:

Alert Candidates to New Healthcare Positions

Speed up your…

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In times of uncertainty, effective communication with your employees is more important than ever. That goes double for big box stores and other retailers with a higher-than-average number of employees. Whether you need to inform your staff about shift changes, store closings, or important news that may impact store safety, store managers and coordinators need to be able to get the message out fast.

Emails may sit unattended in inboxes and phone calls may go straight to voicemail. Text messages, on the other hand, are fast, reliable, and effective:

• 98% of consumers read all of their incoming text messages
• 90% of all messages are responded to within 30 minutes
• 70% of messages are read within 5 minutes of being delivered

With such effective engagement it’s no surprise more and more retailers are adding text to their communications plans.

Using Text to Improve Big Box Staff Management

Imagine this scenario: a storm hits your city and cuts out the power to one of your biggest stores. The sun isn't up yet, but you have to close for the day. In a situation like this, employee safety is a priority. How do you let your…

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The official start to summer, Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner, and while our new normal may mean this year’s tan will be a few shades lighter, people everywhere are anxious to celebrate the season.

If your industry is one that sees a lift at the start of summer – retail, restaurants, and fitness providers, or even government offices (especially this year) that see an increase in people searching for park, beach, and pool information – Memorial Day is the perfect time for your business to use text marketing.

With a 98% engagement rate there is no easier and more effective way to notify your customers and constituents to everything from operating hours and safety procedures to holiday sales and specials.

Regardless of industry, mobile marketing can help you get in front of your audience wherever they are. Here’s how businesses and organizations can use texting to make this summer sizzle:

How Retailers Can Use Text Marketing

Whether breaking out the shorts or dusting off those “honey-do” lists, higher temps mean people will…

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In times of dramatic change, retailers must innovate to survive, changing the way they do business and investing in tools like text marketing. Whether you’ve been a long time e-comm player or have recently spun up your efforts in response to the lockdown, using text marketing to alert customers to new promotions, exclusive offers, and changes to stock, or just to keep your business top-of-mind with a fun text-to-vote poll or survey, may be a game changer.

Importantly it's how businesses connect with consumers that will be integral to their recovery, says Nick Stickland, founder and executive creative director of Odd, an integrated creative agency specializing in consumer marketing for fashion and lifestyle brands. “Brands that can continue to communicate during these times,” Stickland recently told Vogue, “will likely be the…

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The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled “Texting Customers Is No Longer Taboo When Everyone Is Stuck at Home,” and perhaps to no one’s surprise, it piqued my interest.

While the WSJ article offers a great overview of how a handful of retail businesses have adopted text marketing in response to quarantine protocols, it’s yet another in a trend of glowing stories from media outlets highlighting the undeniable rise of business texting.

Business Insider, Forbes, and Inc. have all recently published articles spotlighting the power of text. It’s a big year for politics, and AdExchanger’s political columnist didn’t bury the lead in his article, “…

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Picture this: A prospective client or customer texts your business landline number. Why? Because texting is how 85% of today’s customers prefer to initiate conversations. If you have a business landline that is not yet enabled to receive text messages, that could prove a lucrative statistic for your business.

If you don’t have text-to-landline service enabled on your business line any text messages sent to that number will go unseen and unresponded to. And what’s that prospect do? They go straight to your competition.

It happens all the time.

But it doesn’t have to.

With text-to-landline service enabled, you’ll get messages from those prospects, even if they’re sent in the middle of the night. Customers expect this capability in 2020, and they’ll expect you to respond promptly. That’s where EZ Texting's 1-on-1 Chat feature comes in.

With 1-on-1 Chat, you can take that initial text message and open a one-to-one dialogue with your customer. This direct line of…

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If your business has a landline and you aren’t using a text-to-landline solution to interact with your customers, you need to be. Why? Because it’s likely your customers are already sending you texts — but you may not be set up to receive them.

Texting makes it faster and easier for customers to connect directly with your business. You’ll be able to respond immediately to customer service requests and sales inquiries, day or night, at your convenience. When you have a text-enabled landline, customers can reach your business at their convenience as well, not just during business hours.

And if you’re worried that perhaps they may not want to receive a text from your business, consider the following numbers:

• 90% of consumers say they would prefer businesses to text them, rather than call.
• 85% of consumers want to initiate conversations with businesses via text message.
• 77% of consumers have a positive perception of a company that offers texting.

The truth is that many people rarely want to call a business anymore and would much rather text for answers to…

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Mother’s Day is one of the most important days for a wide variety of retail businesses and this year, given the uncertain state of things, it's taken on an elevated meaning as our world's shrink and we focus with new clarity on those closest to us, and that certainly includes mom. 

In fact, the National Retail Federation says that 78% of people believe celebrating Mother’s Day has taken on extra importance to given the pandemic, and they plan on putting their money where their hearts are by spending approximately $8 more, individually, for an average of $205 on Mother’s Day gifts and celebrations.

With many non-essential stores closed this April and May those consumers will be looking online to e-commerce outlets and likely also supporting local specialty shops. If you're offering delivery or e-commerce solutions for your customers text marketing for Mother’s Day can help reap a bigger share of this valuable market.

Here are few tips on how you can use text marketing to boost your business this Mother’s Day:

1. Build Your List Pre-Mother’s Day Using Keywords

In the…

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Text messaging can be a bit of a Swiss Army knife: need to promote a sale, set up automatic appointment reminders, or even interface with potential hires? Text messaging can do it. And with a 98% engagement rate and 70% of messages being read within five minutes of delivery, it can do it all with an unmatched efficiency.

It’s just this adaptability and efficacy that has made texting a must-have tool for marketers and advertisers as well as human resource teams, logistics firms, schools, and municipalities. There is no other way to communicate important information as quickly and effectively. Here are some common reasons people have need to send an emergency text notification:

• Office Closings & School Closings
• Severe Weather Alerts
• Safety & Incident Alerts
• IT Network Outages/Status Alerts
• Customer Communications
• HR, Staff & Event Notifications
• Employee Geo Check-in

But each application of texting is a little different. In recent weeks we’ve been thinking a lot about how texting is being used as an effective emergency notifications tool. So, here’s our quick guide of what to…

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As parts of the country begin to reopen and consider their new operating hours and procedures, the EZ Texting team wants to help our customers find the best ways to message their ongoing and evolving plans. 

We’ve created a Guide for Sending COVID-19 Notifications that will quickly walk you through options for communicating your business or organization’s ongoing status, re-opening strategy, and news updates.

We firmly believe in text messaging’s ability to cut through the noise and deliver extraordinarily high engagement, often in conjunction with other forms of communications. In moments like this you can’t risk people not knowing. To that end, we’ve put together some ideas for communicating about COVID-19 operations changes with your audience, whether that audience is made up of customers or employees.

We hear from HR professionals all the time that they’re adopting text messaging into their notifications systems because they actually want their message to be seen by everyone. This immediacy is even more critical in times of change, which is why you may consider…

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