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If you haven’t heard of text messaging for business, then your business is already behind.
Text messaging for business is the easiest way to communicate with your customers. As we all know, in order for your photography business to be really profitable, you need to be digitally savvy. After all, people expect customer service on par with Amazon, regardless of whether you have thousands of employees or if it’s just you.
One of the easiest ways to keep on top of all of your business’ communications is to employ simple messaging platforms, like texting. Texting takes up less of your time than any other method of communication, which means you can spend less time talking to your clients and more time shooting.
Keep reading for all of the advantages of business text messaging.
They Get People’s Attention
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Unlike email, people actually pay attention to their text messages, meaning text messaging for business is one of the most efficient ways to actually get your client’s attention.
Whereas emails get opened sometimes as infrequently as 10% of the time, text messages are opened 98% of the time. If somebody had come up with an email campaign that received a 98% open rate in the early 2000s, that person would be a millionaire.
Text messaging for business is one of the best ways to ensure that important messages are actually being read.
Plus, if you’ve ever paid attention to the amount of times you jump when your phone goes off each day, then you also likely know that most text messages are read within a few seconds of receiving them. This leads me to my next point about text messaging for business…
There’s No Delay Time
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There’s no delay with texts. If you’ve been using emails as your main form of communication with your clients, then you know there can be huge delay times with this method.
On average, people will take about an hour and a half to respond to an email. Conversely, people will take about 90 seconds to respond to a text message.
This is a huge benefit of text messaging for business, especially if you’re in the business of photography. I could never count the amount of times I’ve sent a timely email about a photoshoot and later found out that my client never received it or didn’t receive it in time.
If I need to let someone know that the location of our photoshoot has changed, 5 minutes before the photoshoot was set to begin, there is no better way to do so than by using text messaging for business.
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They Make You Accessible
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This was the primary benefit of text messaging for business that I outlined in the intro to this article. Being accessible to your clients, through whatever means they find the most convenient, is key to keeping clients in the long term and in finding new clients when you need them.
This is especially true of younger clients. People who grew up being able to receive chat help 24 hours a day on every website they’ve visited sort of demand accessibility.
It’s also a lot easier for people to text for a lot of reasons. For example, if you use text messaging for business then you are automatically making yourself more accessible to people who can’t talk on the phone, for whatever reason, like a hearing impairment.
You Can Use Texts for Everything
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But, perhaps the best thing about text messaging for business is that it is universal. You can use text messaging for everything. You can text your clients to let them know information they need about their photoshoot. You can text them to communicate issues you’re having before or after a shoot. You can text them to let them know you appreciated getting to work with them.
And, depending upon the platform you use, you can even text your clients their invoices. Podium, a messaging platform that pulls all of your communications from your email, phone, and social media accounts, offers this service.
Podium thinks it is especially important to be there for your clients, in a timely manner. That’s also why you can track exactly how long it takes you to respond to your clients on the Podium app. It has helped me vastly improve the time it takes me to get back to my clients and I swear that it has helped me gain new clients just by being accessible.
But, my favorite part of Podium is the fact that its text messaging platform is so intuitive. I can text my clients about anything and they can text me right back.
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Of course, you can use your personal phone to text your clients, but there are a ton of reasons why this isn’t ideal. One of the biggest ones is that it can be a safety concern. Photographers deal with a variety of clients, some of which are not the best. If you’re meeting someone off Craigslist who posted about the fact that they are in need of a photographer, you likely don’t want that person to have your personal phone number.
Another is that your messages with your clients can get lost. Podium keeps track of all of your messages for each of your clients so that nothing slips through the cracks.
Very few photography business tips are as simple to implement as using a text messaging platform for your clients. But, this may just be the best photography business advice you’ll ever receive.
If you want to give Podium a try, for free, you can sign up for their free trial on their website.