The road to Texter’s Realm and beyond
I was talking to one of my techie friends over coffee the previous week, a startup junkie just like myself and was trying to pick her brain over how we can drive growth at Texter’s Realm, and the conversation went something like this:
“I don’t know how to increase signups for Texter’s Realm, it’s an amazing product but no one even looks at it man.”
“It sucks to be you right now I guess.”
“What a shame, all the advanced architecture and technology that went into it. I don’t know how to just get organizations to look at this awesome piece of technology, try it out before dishing out a fat no!”
“I think that’s where you need to improve bro, everybody knows or can know how advanced the architecture is; however from the way you explain it seems that customers are more frustrated about how they are going to get onto your platform as compared to sticking with their old ways.”
Immediately a bulb went on in my head! In conversations and calls with customers I have always heard that the hustle was contracting and cost, then on-boarding contacts. If only I could simplify this for them in our pitches then it would make sense for them to attempt to look at us.
It is prudent to first know that our customers/potential customers are not dying to have our solution, they already have existing methods that are working be it Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups or emails. So how do we get customers to adopt SMS messaging to complement their communication needs? Well, this blog post is a first attempt to answer some of this questions.
In particular I’d like to share how customers may view migration to Texter’s Realm as the preferred instant communication solution for their organization. This post is divided into 4 sub topics (stages):
Booting up (registration), Ignition (contact on-boarding), Blast off (sending messages) and Altitude (measuring impact).
Stage One: Booting Up — registration
Texter’s Realm is a different kind of SaaS company. It is different in particular because we do not rely on annual subscriptions to drive our revenue, instead we prefer to go for a pay per use approach.
All services around Texter’s Realm including signing up, on-boarding contacts are free. The customer is only billed when they want to send SMS messages and they are charged for only what they send.
Well, what does this mean? It means that it is absolutely easy for an organization today to switch to using Texter’s Realm as the default bulk messaging solution, there is no roadblock! This was baked into Texter’s Realm from inception because we recognize that speed is key, especially when it comes to communication and the more time organizations spend signing contracts equals time organizations are not spending sending their message across.
Signing up for Texter’s Realm is intuitive and fun, customers are presented with a sign up form for which they provide their details and their organization name together with login credentials and that’s it. Immediately, our customers have a place to onboard individual contacts, a link that they can use to on-board their contacts, a place to buy airtime and a place to send messages where they can start texting immediately.
The customer didn’t have to wait for weeks for a salesperson to bring a contact for them to get it signed before they can start playing.
Stage Two: Ignition — contact on-boarding
When it comes to contact on-boarding, a lot of customers have asked us why we don’t support excel right off the box. We have biased opinions on why we think that excel is an “evil” invention for organizations intending to text their audience through bulk SMS solutions.
September 2018 update: Due to demand, we now support uploading of contacts via .csv files. This just the same as excel but better since it does not have limits on record count.
The key reason is stale contacts. If a customer had 10,000 contacts in an excel spreadsheet and intended to on-board them in a bulk SMS solution, research shows that only 59% of these contacts are actually active and are usable and 41% of these contacts are either the unintended audience or blocked numbers, or active but unused phone numbers or even worse, subscribers that just inherited a recycled phone number on a Telco network.
What does this mean? This means that if an organization was to text 10,000 contacts, only 5,900 of these contacts are the intended audience, the rest is just time and money wasted! Given these facts, we decided early on that we can provide a better way and did not support excel contact uploading from day one.
We encourage our customers to think about the process of on-boarding contacts into our platform as an ongoing process, one that they get to do every day. They do this either by keying in their contact’s details one by one when they encounter their customer when they visit their office, or for organizations with thousands of potential audience members, they can share a unique link which their audience members can click and automatically be added to the organization’s contact list.
Do these links matter? Well, think about universities intending to get their students on Texter’s Realm, instead of struggling with excel, they can put the Texter’s Realm link on their website or Facebook page and get current or future students to click it and start receiving messages. Painless migration.
Step Three: Blast off — sending messages
Sending messages is intuitive and fun in Texter’s Realm. We provide a generous text box for the users to type their all-important messages.
Then below the message we show the all-important cost information. This empowers users to know exactly how many of their audience members will be affected and what are the cost implications of messaging those people.
Step Four: Altitude — measuring impact
Finally, we have registered our accounts, on-boarded contacts and even sent messages. What next? Well, with delivery reports built in Texter’s Realm, we can show you a quick dashboard of what items are being delivered in your contact list and what items are unsuccessful. We even show you the individual items in the sent messages tab so you can drill down to whatever depth possible.
That’s it. That’s the entire road to Texter’s Realm, and the beauty of it is that it’s the same whether you are dealing with one hundred audience sizes or thousands of audience sizes. Enjoyed this article? Let’s get you started here.
