How text messaging helps drive sales growth

Before engaging with texts, Semrush chief sales officer Channing Ferrer said salespeople should learn how to navigate data to their advantage.

When driving up sales in business, Channing Ferrer, chief sales officer at Semrush, said text messaging with customers is becoming more common.

Taking the stage at HubSpot’s INBOUND 2023 forum in Boston, Massachusetts, recently, Ferrer said closing deals through emails does not seem to resonate well with customers. What may be a bit of a surprise is that texting is what he called “one of the better ways to sell right now.”

“We’re closing a good chunk of our deals through text right now, many of our deals or small value deals that is, but a lot of our customers want to buy, engage with us with text,” Ferrer said.

But closing deals through text is the process that follows a salesperson’s introduction to a client. First, they talk over social media and communicate through e-mail. After that, the salesperson will ask the customer’s phone number for calling access and later end up closing the deal via simple text message.

“We’ll send them back and forth, debate a few things, ask a few questions, send off a payment link over text and walk away without ever actually talking to them,” said Ferrer.

Data automation

But text messaging is just a part of how marketers can leverage data automation, which is one of the drivers of sales in a company, said Ferrer. 

One way to leverage data automation is customer insights, he said. “There’s a lot of information out there. There are a lot of third-party tools that can help facilitate [customer insights],” said Ferrer.

“As we’ve learned more and more about our customers, we can drive automated engagement for those customers. We can begin to profile them in a variety of ways and engage again, from email, through social engagement, providing funds, and then sales can follow up on that,” he added.

However, he said it is still important to humanise engagement with consumers despite using automated tools. He cited chat as an example, which blends natural human interaction with technology.

“Amazon has one of the better chats out there,” said Ferrer, who explained that if a customer asks questions about a product that is hard to find, the bot is able to provide good feedback. Still, at some point, the chat tool provides the customer with an actual person on the other end.

In-app experience

When customers access a brand’s app, Ferrer said in-app automation plays an “extremely powerful” role. To achieve this, marketing campaigns can be aligned with the customer’s app experience.

“If we’re going to send out a campaign to try to launch, we’re going to give maybe a 20% discount on some new idea. We need to make sure that the in-app experience reflects what that email marketing campaign shows,” said Ferrer.

“What shows up on social and shows up in our ads, all that needs to be very well coordinated,” he said.