People are always interested in learning. The constraint that keeps them from doing so is often a lack of time. When’s the last time you had time to study a 20-page lesson or view a few hours of video instruction to learn something new?
Imagine being able to learn a concept or a skill via a series of short, valuable text messages sent to you once or twice per day for a week or two.
Think about what your customers might need to learn to understand the true value of your products and solutions or how they can achieve even more value from the products they’ve already purchased.
At the end, your customers will have the entire course in one thread in their SMS messaging app, so they can review it as they need to. Your customers will love you for becoming a resource that helps them accomplish something they wanted to do, but perhaps hadn’t made time for in the past.
It’s a great way to move beyond transactional messaging to purpose-driven messaging. And you could offer a series of courses that step them through related concepts or to build on skills they’ve just learned in the first course they subscribed to from your company.
Building Your Text Messaging Course
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say your company sells a SaaS email marketing solution. You benefit when your customers improve their email response rates, therefore realizing more value from their investment in your platform.
An email is made up of a variety of components, including:
Subject line
Preview text
Salutation
Body copy
Call to action
Signature
P.S. lines
What if you created two text message lessons for each of these 7 components to help your customers learn how to optimize their emails?
To create the messages, consider a few themes for how you might set them up:
Theme
Text 1 on a component
Text 2 on a component
A
Best practice tip
Mistake not to make
B
Step 1 of a tip for the component
Step 2 of a tip for the component
C
What (purpose of the component)
How (action to take to achieve the purpose)
If we take Theme A, above, your first two lessons could be:
Text 1: #1 Subject Lines: Best performing email subject lines contain 4 words or less. Focus on being clear and crisp but curious enough to click. Don @ ExactEmail
Text 2: #2 Subject Lines: A subject line that’s vague or overly eager will get deleted. Don’t be misleading or use CAPS. Check your personalization. Don @ ExactEmail
These examples are obviously for a beginner level audience, but there are many ways to adjust the lessons to fit the expertise level of your customers. The main questions to answer when constructing your course messaging are:
What will your customers find interesting and helpful?
How will your course convey value once it’s all strung together in a messaging thread? In other words, what’s the total value the course delivers?
Is every lesson usable right away? The more action your customers can take in response to receiving your lessons, the better customer relationships you will build.
Delivering Your Text Messaging Course
When constructing your course based on the above suggested program, you’ll need the following messages:
A confirmation message sent upon receipt of the keyword to subscribe to the course
14 lesson messages sent 2 per day over 7 days
1 survey message to learn how much customers valued the course sent on the 8th day
An advanced text messaging platform will help you automate the delivery of your text messaging course so that you can focus on growing your business while your customers are learning how to get more value from their investment with you.
