Text Request Talks

4 Growth Tips with Outdoor Lighting Perspectives’ Rick Popio

Business texting can help your business level up, you just need the right tactics in place.

Here’s how to use text messaging to improve your client relationships, boost your marketing efforts, and keep in touch with valuable partners.

This article takes insights from our Text Request Talks podcast with Rick Popio and further distills it into advice specific to texting. Popio is the owner of multiple Outdoor Lighting Perspectives and Canopy Lawn Care territories.

The following tips expand on how to add business texting to your existing growth tactics.

Watch the full interview on YouTube.

1. Prioritize the customer experience with text messaging.

Creating great customer experiences from start to finish, and even beyond the service you provide, is what Popio says drives more business. How can you ensure you’re available for customers every step of the way, so they keep coming back for more services and refer their contacts?

Text messaging is one the best channels for communicating with customers before and after services, because:

Customers will actually see your messages
Customers often feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts via text rather a phone call

This means you can answer questions and solve problems faster, in a way that customers actually enjoy. In fact, 77% of people prefer to text for customer service, including:

Back-and-forth conversations about products, services, or accounts
Product ordering and payments
Scheduling trainings or calls for additional help
Sharing feedback

Texting is how most people communicate. Plus it’s more efficient than phone calls, which creates better experiences for everyone.

A well-equipped business texting service like Text Request gives your team the power to handle text conversations in one place, while enabling your customers to effortlessly reach out for any help they need along the way. Seamless communication like that is a must for growing your business.

2. Streamline training to create universal experiences.

Your team needs the tools to create outstanding customer experiences, and that starts with training. Popio says you need to educate your team members continually to get them in the mindset that they’re delivering more than just the service—they’re aiming to create seamless, universal customer experiences every time.

Text Request’s dashboard makes it easy to jump in and give feedback on how your teammates are communicating with customers, so you can give them pointers on how to improve. We even offer a templates feature, so your common communications stay consistent and quick.

Create a template once, save it, and then your team can reuse it forever. These saved messages are useful for anything and everything, including:

Scheduling services and reminders
Frequently asked questions
Scripted sales or customer service follow-ups
Requests for online reviews

All this helps you create stellar, universal customer experiences that ultimately grow your business.

3. Utilize multiple marketing channels.

Popio stresses using the marketing channels that best display the good work you’re doing to customers. To determine what those channels are, he recommends asking yourself:

What audience are you marketing to?
Where do they spend the majority of their time?

Regardless of who your audience is, they most likely text—which is why text messaging is a great tool to utilize alongside your other marketing channels.

For example, cross-pollinating your SMS and email subscriber lists is one of the fastest ways to grow both. You’re also more likely to get a customer to take action when they see a back-to-back text and email about a new offer you have.

Text Request has an integration with Constant Contact and Mailchimp, among others, that lets you automatically pull the phone numbers you collect from those platforms and put them into your Text Request account. Follow up with subscribers on both platforms, and use data from both campaigns to better target your audience.

Text messaging is just like any other marketing channel in that you will see the most growth and returns when you use it in tangent with your other channels.

4. Stay in touch with sister brands.

Sister brands, or companies whose services have a natural overlap with yours, can be valuable partners. For example, irrigation and lawn care go together, so Pipio stays in close contact with other local irrigation companies to swap referrals and run coinciding promotions with them.

You can do the same thing, especially when you use text messaging to stay top of mind with contacts from your local sister brands or complementary businesses.

Send SMS marketing texts to promote: