Text Message Marketing

Text Message Lead Follow Up For Sales Teams

Matt Morfopoulos


If your in sales- developing a strategy to convert your leads into customers faster should always be on the top of your mind.


It’s not always easy to get a response from leads let alone keeping up a routine follow-up schedule. You might be tempted to use email and cold calling to follow up with your leads because - EVERYONE is doing it.

Today consumers are fed up with old channels of communication. Email is not fast enough to meet your consumers' needs for immediate feedback.  Cold calling is disruptive and relies on customers being ready to have the conversation in that moment.

Today customers want immediate conversations when they are ready to have them.

That leaves us with text messages.

Text messages are direct and opened 98% of the time by customers. They  allow your customers to sit back, wait, and have a conversation with your business when they are ready.

How do you use text messages to follow up with your leads?

“Great! People love to text. How do I use that in my lead follow up strategy?”

1.Connect your lead capture forms to a software solution

If you want to follow up with leads at scale, you should look for a software solution that allows you to send an automated welcome message to contacts that give you their numbers.

That way you have a pre-scripted message that sends to each lead, preferably personalized with their name and what product or service they were interested in.

2.Create a text message lead follow up sequence

Although texts performs better than Email, you still need to follow up with your leads. More often than not, the first text message will not elicit a response from every lead. If you follow up with these unresponsive leads, there is a higher chance they’ll respond as well as convert into a customer.

I recommend looking for a software solution that lets you deploy smart campaigns. Automatically send sales follow up texts until the lead responds. Why make lead follow up harder than it is? Let software do it for you so that you can focus on giving your leads a great customer experience.

3.Make sure your customers can call the number you text them with

There is nothing worse than a customer experience riddled with friction. While there are times to introduce friction into your sales process, this is not one of them.

Cold calling is disruptive. Receiving an inbound call from leads  shows high buying intent . This is why enabling your customers to call the same number to have a conversation with your reps is paramount to creating a smooth buying experience.

I recommend that your welcome message as well as your follow up drips have some sort of CTA to call you. 

Here’s an example:

Hey Martin, this is Matt from the startup CatNip. I saw you were interested in our smart catnip technology. Feel free to text or call me at this number if you have any questions.

TL;DR

Texting is how consumers prefer to communicate with businesses.

Find a text message software solution to automate lead follow up.

Make sure your customers can call the number you text them with for a seamless customer experience.

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