Whether you’re a law firm, an accountant, a contractor, real estate agent, or offer some other critical professional service, there are three key areas that, when optimized, can help bring in more business easily.
Those are client acquisition, efficient communications, and availability to clients. These three areas can make or break your business. When done well, they can mean more valuable client relationships and more profit for your business.
Let’s walk through how each of these areas can be improved simply by adding SMS as a comms channel.
Client acquisition
One of the best ways to bring in new clients is to use direct and personal communications to improve the way you communicate with your audience.
SMS can come in handy for this kind of conversation. You can use SMS to schedule consultations with potential clients quickly and keep them engaged with fast, attentive communications—something so many professional firms struggle with.
Alternatively, you can start with a live chat feature on your website that is paired with your text messaging communications. Why? Potential new clients are visiting your website all the time. If they’re interested, they will be looking for a way to contact you. Live chat allows them to do that and ensure they get a person on the other end (as opposed to a bot). After that, your team can use text messaging to engage them further.
When you pair live chat and SMS together, you get a boost in lead generation, and can turn that into more business. The trick is to work with a text messaging software that offers live chat as a feature, so everything is streamlined and easy to use.
It is possible to turn around sagging client numbers with SMS and live chat. One law firm that turned to SMS and live chat saw a 40x return on their investment, plus six figures in additional revenue. Don’t underestimate the power of improving your client acquisition process.
Efficient communications
Phone calls are often the most immediate way to get in touch with a client for quick, urgent matters. But phone calls can’t be automated, which means you and your team may spend hours, sometimes days, playing phone tag with clients just to communicate something minor but critical.
Or, maybe you’re stuck leaving messages for clients and wasting time waiting for them to get back to you. Sometimes, this can lead to delays in projects or important steps forward.
If you choose to communicate by email, you can rely on automation, but it’s not nearly as immediate as text messaging.
On average, it takes 90 minutes for a person to respond to an email whereas it takes only 90 seconds to respond to a text message. Ninety percent of text messages are read within the first three minutes, whereas 80 percent of emails are never read at all.
It’s clear why, especially for professional services, SMS is the stronger, more immediate choice for communicating with clients. It’s faster and more efficient for you and your team.
Availability to clients
Your availability to clients—in terms of communication—matters greatly when it comes to growing or even maintaining your professional services business.
Not only do you need excellent marketing skills for this purpose, but you also need a professional, effective way to field interest from prospects and current clients. You don’t want to miss out on business because you weren’t able to catch a question or receive a message from someone who wants to do business with you.
Take your website, for example. When a potential customer has researched your business and others like it and is perusing your website, they might be ready to reach out and contact you about working together.
However, if you don’t have a convenient and easy-to-use way to connect—one that’s available, obvious, and right on your website—there is a high likelihood that you could lose that business to a competitor that is more available.
If you opt for a live chat widget that connects users of your website right to a live person and can even be switched to SMS when the conversation calls for it, you won’t be missing out on readily available new business.
For existing clients, keeping in touch is essential, and not just for efficiency on your side, but for the convenience of your clients, too. If you use a method of communication that’s immediate and has a quick response time, you can be sure to keep the client satisfied and help build trust and rapport.
Text messaging offers the kind of immediacy that puts clients at ease.
With SMS, you can easily send personalized updates whenever necessary, and even ensure that critical information is relayed. Text messages have an average open rate of 98 percent, which means you can almost guarantee that your message will be read by the recipient.
Client communications that run smoothly and in a timely manner are always going to make a more positive impact on the client-business relationship. They could result in future business with the same client or in more referrals.
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