SKY-ROCKET Your Lead-Generation and Sales Results With Texting

Let me ask you this…

If you were looking for a service business to take care of something around your home, would you rather call them and potentially get stuck on hold (maybe not getting an answer at all) or send them a quick text and move on with your day until they respond?

The vast majority of us would much rather send a text message.

The data reflects this assumption as well.

Over 80% of consumers said they want to communicate with businesses via text rather than by phone or email.

To understand why this is, we must put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Why aren’t phone calls and emails good enough anymore?

Phone Calls: Remember, people (your potential customers) are BUSY! Very few of them will have time to call you on the spot after seeing your website or advertisements. If they can’t quickly contact your business, you dramatically increase the chances of losing that lead entirely.

Emails: Sure, filling out a short form is not too terribly difficult, BUT when you think about what happens after you get that lead via email, that is where issues begin to appear. Think about your typical customer for a second; do they spend much time looking at their email… no. Why would they? Their friends and family are texting them and posting on social media, so you can assume your customer spends most of their time there. The point is, if your customer rarely looks at their email, many of your follow-up or promotional emails will be missed entirely causing you to lose both leads and sales.

People ultimately want to text you. It’s simple, convenient, and removes any hassle they may encounter if they were only able to call or send an email.

Not to mention, from a sales and marketing standpoint, texting still has some incredible things to offer:

• 90% of people read their text messages within the first 3 minutes
• The open rate for text messages is 98% percent (compared to email’s 20%)
• SMS response rates are 295% higher than responses from phone calls
• There are plenty of other things we can highlight, but for the sake of time, we’ll move on.

If you can leverage texting, not only are you going to generate more leads, but you will close more sales.

5 Things You Can Do To Generate More Leads and Close More Sales With Texting

1. Make It Obvious That People Can Text You

At this point, when someone sees a phone number online, most will not assume it’s text-able.

In order to see the benefits of texting, be super clear that people can send you a text – otherwise, people will assume they can only call. This applies to not only your website but any of the marketing campaigns you are running with the intent to have people text you.

For websites specifically, I would personally push texting in more than one place rather than just mentioning this in the header or footer of your website (these can easily be missed). Here’s an example.

We’ve already seen that leads and customers want to text you, your job now is to let them know that it’s possible to do so.

2. Use Texting to Turn Your Social Media Pages Into Lead Machines

Social media platforms, like Facebook, can be great for businesses.

But, like any social platform, the number of distractions and things battling for peoples’ attention makes it really difficult for businesses to turn post/ad viewers into leads.

In order to maximize the results you get from platforms like Facebook, you must make it easy for people to contact you, and texting is the best way to do that.

This is the typical Call-To-Action I see on Facebook and, unfortunately, it isn’t successful:

“Call us today for a free quote @ 972-###-####”

To make it easier on them, let’s introduce the option to text us (the easier the better):

“CALL or TEXT US @ 972-###-#### for a free quote”

If you’re using a product like ScheduleTalk, you can take this one step further with text-able keywords that trigger specific automations. For example, if your set keyword was “HOUSECLEANING,” you can simply say:

“TEXT `HOUSECLEANING` to 972-###-#### for a free quote”

From there, the software would automatically pre-qualify the lead before your team ever needs to get involved. Here’s what that would look like:

https:// youtube.com/shorts/UJ-EHVAI2ww?feature=share

3. How Your Company Vehicles Can Actually Capture Leads

Most people won’t be in a position to call you when they see your company vehicles. In many cases, they’ll be driving when they see your vehicles, so calling is usually off the table entirely.

But, if you can add a phone number that people can text on your vehicles, you’ll dramatically increase the chances of capturing a new lead.

They likely still won’t text you while they’re driving, but if they see you in their neighborhood or at a stoplight, sending you a quick text message is far more doable than giving you a call.

* If you want to get really fancy, you can also add QR codes to your vehicles that, when scanned, open up their texting app with a pre-written message so all they have to do is press “send.”

4. Re-engage Stagnant Leads

If you have leads that aren’t responding to your emails or phone calls, try sending them a short text message, like this:

“Hey Michelle! When we last spoke, you needed someone to get the house cleaned before your party on Friday, do you still need our help with that? – Riley, ABC Cleaning”

As we’ve all learned in sales, a no-response is not always a “No” to your offer. They could very easily be missing your emails or not picking up the phone for a random number, so before you give up on the lead, this short text could get things rolling again.

5. Upsell Clients With a Simple Text Message

One way you can use texting to generate more sales is to craft an upsell. Ideally, we make that upsell so personalized to your client, that it would be hard for them to simply ignore it.

The challenging part is coming up with that upsell.

Fortunately, your cleaning team can be a huge help in creating personal upsells. Since they go in and out of clients’ homes on a regular basis, you can use them to start identifying areas around their homes that need additional work. For example:

During a routine weekly cleaning, if your team notices that the client’s windows are dirty, and you happen to offer window cleaning as an additional service, you can use that to create a short upsell.

Have your team snap a picture of a dirty window so you can use it in the message.

Then, send a text to the client that consists of the picture and a very informal message letting them know what you noticed and that you can help if they’re interested.

This simple message alone will get you more sales.

Let’s Wrap This Up

Now, just to be clear, texting is meant to be an alternative to calling or email, rather than a complete replacement. I don’t want this to sound like you should stop accepting emails and phone calls – definitely not. They still have their place in this world.

Texting presents a massive opportunity for businesses and I’d encourage every Cleaning business to give their leads and clients the ability to start texting.

If you haven’t yet started texting and need a solution to begin doing so, check out ScheduleTalk. I built this software product to help businesses like yours start accepting text messages, without having to use a personal phone number.

Happy texting!

Article Written by Riley Pototschnik