Strike While the Iron is Hot: Turn Website Visitors into Customers using Online Text Messaging
Mar0
Text messaging portal LookNoThumbs.com is helping small business website owners to connect instantly with site visitors and transition casual site visits into sales opportunities.
Here’s a typical scenario from a day in the life of a website; perhaps a site not unlike yours.
You drive visitors to your site by publishing your URL at every opportunity and using every means at the disposal of your marketing budget: stationery, signage, press, broadcast media, online advertising, blogging, and word-of-mouth. As visitors click around your site evaluating you and your business, the tyre-kickers lose interest and leave. Others are interested enough to complete your inquiry form, which at some point delivers contact information to you for later collection. Unfortunately, within minutes after completing the form, most visitors will have forgotten who you are and why they were interested. They’ll have moved on - possibly even to a competitor’s website, and you’ve lost your best chance to win a customer whose interest is still fresh.
Here’s the same scenario with integrated site alerts from online texting portal LookNoThumbs.com.
Your visitors arrive at your site as before. Tyre-kickers leave, as they always do. But now when a visitor completes your inquiry form, their experience with your business is only beginning. Within seconds of them submitting the form, you get a text message on your mobile phone containing the contact details they left – usually while the visitor is still looking at your site. You now have your optimal chance of winning that customer: you have their number right on your phone, and you know they’re on your site. Go ahead - PRESS YOUR GREEN BUTTON NOW!
Make no mistake, LookNoThumbs’ website alerts are the online equivalent of your door chime ringing to alert sales staff when a customer enters your shop.
Site integration with LookNoThumbs.com is a simple process. First, you need a LookNoThumbs.com account, which is free and quick to set up at http://www.LookNoThumbs.com. Don’t buy any texts until you’re ready – your free trial will let you try this out just fine. Next, display a special link prominently on your site. The exact link is in the FAQ accessible from your LookNoThumbs.com online texting account. When your visitor clicks the link, a popup form opens, and when they submit the form, you get your text message. It couldn’t be easier, and it’s free to try.
LookNoThumbs.com has brought customer text messaging within the reach of any business. Where LookNoThumbs stands apart is in its simplicity. Site integration is just one example that delivers high value to your business with no fuss and minimal cost. In fact there are no costs other than any text messages you receive after your free trial, and you buy those in small blocks only when you need them.
Remember, in business it’s always best to strike while the iron is hot. Don’t impress your customers with a great website, then lose them to a competitor over something as trivial as not knowing they were ever there.
Hidden Savings for Businesses using Online Texting
Jan0
There are many reasons to embrace online texting if you are involved in running a business. Not all of them are obvious. Here are two that customers of LookNoThumbs.com text messaging portal are finding worth the price of admission:
- When you have a hands-on role in your business, which is usually the case for owners of small enterprises, you can’t afford to spend unnecessary time on the phone with customers, or tracking them down. Take a repair shop as an example, in any industry from cars to cameras. When the service is complete, a quick text message to notify the customer that their item is ready to collect is all that’s needed. Then you can get right back to minding your own business. Of the alternatives, an email may not be read for some time, and a phone call often results in time spent tracking down the customer, a chat that could wait till they actually come in to collect, and an ad-hoc request to check something else they just remembered, at no extra cost! (Could you oil my squeaky brakes too please?).
- If the customer does want to chat, and you have the time for that, why also incur the expense. Calling a customer’s mobile phone can be expensive. Share that expense by notifying the customer by text message, and be prepared to take their call (but at their expense) if they need to talk to you.
Online text messaging is the ideal way to take back control of your time, get short messages out to customers quickly, and reduce your phone bills.
Spread your New Year toast with Online Texting
Dec0
A couple of weeks ago I set up 56 scheduled SMS Christmas greetings at online texting site www.looknothumbs.com. I did this around December 18th. It only took about 10 minutes, and then I completely forgot I’d done it until Christmas morning when, in the space of about an hour I received 34 text messages on my mobile phone - replies from friends and family around the world who’d received my message, scheduled for 8.30am.
I hadn’t anticipated that, but it turned out to be a nice way to include everyone in our family Christmas morning as I watched gifts being unwrapped and my living room being trashed by small children. The replies included comments about similar mayhem in friends homes, which was also fun to share.
So for New Year I’m doing it again. Here are the steps, in case you have a few minutes and want to check this out:
1. Register on www.looknothumbs.com (or register interest first to get your invitation) and buy some text credit.
2. Import or enter some mobile numbers into your LookNoThumbs address book, and create groups if you want to send the same message to lots of people (ideal for holiday greetings!).
3. Send a text message to each group or person, setting the delivery time for 1/1/2008 some time in the morning. I’m sending to 2 groups - one for friends and one for customers - plus a few individual texts where I wanted to personalise the message.
Just for fun, leave your phone on around the time you’ve scheduled your message, and see who’s still up partying and responding to your greeting.
Remember, the great thing is that you can set up your greetings now for delivery on Jan 1st, so you don’t have to fumble with your phone when you should be spreading your toast.
Happy 2008 everyone!
What’s So Great about Online Texting?
Dec0
Texting is just texting, right ? Maybe and maybe not. Online texting portal www.LookNoThumbs.com lists these as some of the things you can do from a computer that you can’t do - or just can’t easily do - when texting straight from your phone.
- Paste text straight from an email message, document or web page into an SMS message. LookNoThumbs business clients find that pasting eliminates errors when communicating detailed information like booking confirmation numbers, flight times, addresses, directions etc.
- Send a text message when you’re not there. Online texting allows you to enter a text message now, but schedule delivery for later - possibly when you’re asleep, travelling or too busy to send the text when you really want it delivered. Some users set up reminders for themselves or others; important ToDo items, deadlines, meetings, greetings, appointments, or insurance renewal dates. Others use it to remind business clients of scheduled maintenance due dates. You may not always be at your desk to receive an email or calendar reminder, but you’ll usually not be too far from your mobile.
- Start a message with a template to reduce typing. Set up templates in your online texting account at www.looknothuumbs.com, and use them next time to avoid re-keying similar messages.
- Send an alert to interested subscribers. Set up alerts, invite subscribers, then text all of them at once without having to manage their contact information in your addressbook.
- Share your text credits with others. Send someone in your team or family some of your prepaid text balance as a Voucher.
- Send yourself an email or text copy of every message. Useful as a permanent reminder of what you sent, to whom and when.
- Text from any Internet device without re-learning how to text. Most phones have their own unique way of entering text or getting to the screen for texting.
- Safeguard your address book with password protection and automatic backup. Ever lost a mobile and realised there were numbers on it you don’t have anywhere else? Access to your online texting account is password-protected and SSL encrypted; your account data including your addressbook is automatically backed up for you by the service.
- Text from abroad without roaming charges. Going on holiday? Use online texting from your hotel and avoid the inflated cost of sending a text when you’re connected to a foreign network. This alone is reason enough to have an online texting account to supplement your mobile.
- Text when your mobile battery is dead. Or, save your weak battery for real emergencies by texting from a PC instead.
- Text when you forgot to bring your phone. Send your messages from any online computer; replies will still go to your phone so you can log out and walk away knowing you won’t lose touch.
- Text when you have no mobile signal. The mobile network simply can’t reach every location; you can still text out from any Internet-connected computer with your online texting solution.
- Send loooong messages. SMS was really designed for short messages, but online texting allows you to send a message as long as you like, by breaking it into parts. This can be done automatically by the service or easily by you.
That’s not a short list, or even a complete one, but one thing is clear; online texting has earned its rightful place in today’s mobile toolbox, right alongside your phone. Using the right tool for the job is the key to getting your business and personal messages out easily! When you’re truly on the go, maybe that’s your phone. But when you’re near a computer it’s increasingly more likely to be an online texting solution like www.looknothumbs.com !
Life, Fatherhood and Online Texting
Dec0
Three seemingly unrelated topics - life, fatherhood and online texting -have never been far from my thoughts this week; in fact dealing with life and fatherhood just reminded me of the incident that got me interested in creative applicatons for online texting (like www.looknothumbs.com) in the first place.
Not many Februaries ago, five men in their late thirties to early forties got together in the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow, Scotland for a quiet drink. This group grew up together not far from here, and some 18 years ago a gathering like this would have been an unremarkable, often twice-weekly occurrence. But life took its course, fatherhood consumed all our time for a while, people moved and regular meetings became impractical.
Such was this group’s dynamic that although we had all changed in appearance and had all been both treated and bitten by life’s experiences, this reunion was easy, natural, comfortable and thoroughly enjoyable – almost as if only weeks, not decades, had passed.
And so the witty banter and gentle teasing began after a few sips from the first pint, as it always will among male friends in Glasgow.
One of our group had stayed local, been extremely successful at work, and only thinning and receding hair qualified for comment among the other four. One had lived overseas and acclimatised to another lifestyle in various ways, including an expanded waistline – so the others claimed anyway – and loss of his Glasgow accent. But it was the oldest of the group who took the brunt of the fabled Glasgow ‘slagging’ that evening.
Here was a guy in his mid forties, with teenage children, who was completely phobic about sending mobile text messages. His children were texting constantly, including texts to him (he beamed as he proudly related this part). But he still protested that he didn’t see the point of texting because he could always phone someone.
I mulled this over for a while. My friend wasn’t the first person I’d come across who loves to receive a text message but refuses to send one. Fear of technology and specifically of ‘doing it wrong’ seems to crippling vast numbers of people over 40. (Scary – that includes me!) What is it about texting that makes people who are quite comfortable with email lash out against text messaging?
It dawned on me that what makes texting different, and unappealing, is that the method of entering a message requires special skill, with a steep learning curve to acquire it and constant practice to maintain it. What’s truly demoralising is that your learning investment investment is thrown away almost annually with every phone upgrade.
More than a decade into the text revolution, there is no universal set of instructions to cover every phone’s menus, multi-tap sequences and predictive text methods.
Is physically entering messages the only reason some people don’t like to text? Of course not, but it does seem to be the main one. Fortunately, with an online texting solution like www.looknothumbs.com, textphobia is a highly treatable condition.
LookNoThumbs (www.looknothumbs.com) is an easy to use website for business and personal online texting. It’s designed to compliment - not replace - your mobile phone and it makea texting MUCH easier. How? Simple – first, they replace the unfamiliar (mobile phone keypad and text entry systems) with the familiar – your computer’s keyboard and an email-like interface. Next, they present you with simple, flat-rate prepaid texts that can be shared with others and don’t expire. Finally, they’ve loaded the site with useful messaging features for all users that you’d normally expect to see only on a business or premium service.
LookNoThumbs is currently in Pilot as of December 2007, with registration by invitation only. But do register your interest to be sure of getting in early, because they’re currently sending out invitations every day. Check it out: www.looknothumbs.com
You’re probably wondering about my friend with the teenagers. Has he dropped the grudge against texting now? I honestly don’t know for sure, and I haven’t received a text from him yet. But being a true friend, I’ll be sending him an online texting voucher for www.looknothumbs.com this Christmas! Ho, Ho, Ho (LoL).
Happy Christmas!