Text Messaging Best Practice

Getting consumers to open and read your text messages can be tricky due to the nature of the business. There are many things working against you including 

• Consumers may not recognize the number of your company if you are doing 3rd party collections.
• Your clients or certain laws may require you to have specific verbiage, but those disclosures may have words which are picked up by spam filters.
• The cell phones provided to you by your client may be old or invalid.
• The carriers do not like debt collectors.

Below are some best practices to help you build your text reputation and become successful using text campaigns.

• Use SMS for important and immediate messages. 
• Keep messages short. Texts are broken up into 160 characters whether you see it or not. Messages over the 160 sent repeatedly are more likely to be flagged as spam than shorter ones. 
• Be Concise without sacrificing clarity - Always include a clear message about what the customer needs to do. Make sure the message sounds personalized and does not sound robotic or generic.
• Avoid sending the exact same campaigns repeatedly. Make changes to campaigns that are not working well and try them again.
• Do not continue to send texts to people who are not responding.
• Watch your send frequency - The optimal frequency for most text campaigns is one a week.
• Monitor your volume. Just like emailing there is a warmup period for your number to become known. The more you can get the users to respond the more you can build that reputation.

Successful SMS strategies:

1. Send a text on the consumer's payment date. Sending a text on the consumer's actual due date leads to the majority of payments being made on that day.
2. Send payment reminder texts in advance. Send out the first reminder a week before the consumer's due date, followed by a second reminder a couple days before the due date. Once the date has passed, a third reminder is sent.
3. Informative Updates. Involve the consumer with settlement choices as well as various other information to urge 2 way discussions.
4. Request that the consumer update their payment method. If a payment method has failed or if the expiration date is close, send out a text a week before the payment is due
5. Thank consumers for their prompt payment. A Thank you can go a long way in reoccurring payments.