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Businesses have widely adopted SMS as a straightforward way to initiate contact with leads and maintain communication. With minimal effort, SMS offers a direct, concise, and instant method of communication, resulting in exceptionally high open and response rates. It has become one of the most reliable and cost-effective means for sales engagement. Sending the right message to the right lead not only captures their attention but also lays the foundation for trust in the business, significantly boosting conversions as the sales journey progresses.
How businesses can incorporate SMS throughout their sales cycle
● Initiate contact: Send an SMS message to introduce the product and share relevant links, giving leads quick access to product information.
● Re-engage with inactive leads: Reach out to leads who didn’t respond earlier with additional or refined information that may prompt a response, ensuring no potentially interested lead is missed.
● Schedule demos and appointments: If the product requires a demo, use SMS to schedule and share the demo call details. As the sales journey progresses, use it to coordinate additional appointments.
● Send appointment reminders: Remind leads of upcoming appointments—include the meeting time and link (for virtual meetings) or venue and time (for in-person meetings). This ensures availability and a smooth experience.
● Follow up: After a demo or appointment, follow up via SMS to check if the prospect has all the information needed to make an informed decision.
● Promote flash sales or exclusive offers: Attract prospects with time-sensitive deals or exclusive discounts to nudge them toward a purchase.
● Drive purchase decisions: Provide additional product or pricing information, important links, and assistance to support the decision-making process.
● Confirm purchase: Once the lead converts, send a purchase confirmation via SMS along with the invoice.
● Collect customer feedback: Send a quick feedback form to understand the customer’s experience and identify areas to improve the sales process.
Businesses must ensure that messages are sent from a legitimate number, are not spammy in nature, and are delivered only to leads or prospects who have consented to continue with sales conversations.
Efficiently managing leads and prospects
For sales, businesses must have an efficient system in place to manage leads, prospects, and customers, such as a CRM. A CRM is a platform that has centralized customer data, enabling sales teams to effortlessly manage their sales process through automation.
Zoho CRM, a popular, customer-centric CRM platform, helps businesses increase sales conversion rates, improve retention, and drive growth. Built with features to support lead management, deal and process management, workflow automation, sales enablement, and more, Zoho CRM helps businesses maximize sales productivity.
Zoho CRM for SMS
Automated follow-ups after lead capture
As soon as a lead is captured in Zoho CRM, the company can send an SMS message to share the sales agent's contact information, appointment reminders, and more. This can be achieved by setting up a workflow automation that triggers an action to send out a message when a lead is captured. The text can be configured with the help of a predefined, personalized SMS template.
Personalized outreach
Personalized outreach can be accomplished by building templates for different modules and personalizing them with merge fields. Companies can send out specific messages—such as birthday wishes, details about select discount offers, and more—adding value to their conversations.
Automatic credit purchase
In Zoho CRM, businesses can set the minimum credit balance for SMS and how much to automatically purchase once this minimum balance is reached. This ensures that insufficient credits never stop businesses from sending important messages to leads or customers.
The features available in Zoho CRM are suitable for sending transactional SMS or other uni-directional messages. However, when a business needs to engage in bi-directional conversations, such as providing support or sharing product-related information and links, they need something more.
To do this, businesses must choose the right platform based on their needs and prospective usage. To stand out, text messaging platforms must offer features that not only simplify the communication process but also enhance the user experience.
ClickSend SMS
ClickSend is one such easy-to-use text messaging platform for contextual business communications. ClickSend helps you send transactional messages, multichannel marketing campaigns, product updates, and more using SMS.
A business using Zoho CRM to manage their sales stores all customer or lead information that's necessary for messaging, such as contact details, in the CRM. If the business uses ClickSend for SMS, sales agents often find themselves switching between Zoho CRM and ClickSend to access that information, which not only hinders productivity but is prone to human error.
Introducing the Zoho CRM-ClickSend SMS integration
Thanks to Zoho CRM's extensibility, it now seamlessly integrates with ClickSend, allowing users to send and receive messages right from Zoho CRM. This bi-directional service simplifies outreach and streamlines communication by eliminating the need to log in to ClickSend.
Key features
Bi-directional SMS communication with full message history
Engage in real-time, two-way SMS conversations with leads and customers directly in Zoho CRM. Every exchange is automatically recorded in the contact’s CRM record, giving sales teams full visibility into past interactions. This ensures contextual communication that helps build stronger customer relationships.
Real-time notifications for inbound SMS messages
Receive instant alerts when a customer replies to a message. This helps the sales team reduce response time—especially in the case of time-sensitive inquiries or support scenarios—and improve customer satisfaction.
Bulk messaging
Send SMS messages to a large group of leads simultaneously, making it easy to run promotions, share announcements, or deliver updates at scale. Bulk messaging saves time and ensures consistent communication.
SMS templates with dynamic fields for personalized messaging
Take personalization to the next level by building templates for lead groups that include dynamic fields such as name, product, or appointment time. This not only saves time but also increases engagement by delivering relevant, tailored messages that truly resonate.
By working together, ClickSend and Zoho CRM make SMS communication effortless, enhancing overall sales. New to Zoho CRM? Sign up and start your free trial today.