By Jeff Koyen at Forbes
For businesses, messaging is set to become the marketing and communications channel of choice.
Especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises, messaging is an affordable, accessible solution for driving new business and serving existing customers.
To learn more about messaging as a revenue driver, we talked with Stefanos Loukakos, cofounder and CEO of Connectly, and Yandong Liu, Connectly's other cofounder and CTO.
1. Messages Are What Customers Want
Research indicates that people prefer messaging to calling. As Loukakos points out, "We still have to call businesses. Wouldn't it be way better if we can message businesses, too?"
Unlike email, messaging apps have had too few tools that measure customer engagement and retention. That's changing. Intelligent messaging platforms are now available that can convert chats into structured data that integrate into more traditional marketing platforms.
"Businesses care only about one thing," Loukakos says. "How can we get more business?"
2. Messages Are Better At Reproducing Real-World Service Experiences
"A website is a one-to-many conversation, whereas messaging is a one-to-one personal conversation," Loukakos explains. "Everybody sees essentially the same website, gets the same products, and you have to search to find your own way there."
Messaging creates meaningful, direct relationships between buyers and sellers—like shopping at a well-run local business where the owners know your tastes.
"This is the experience we want to replicate," says Loukakos. "We want to bring the great stuff that happens in the offline world into the online world."
3. AI Can Personalize Messages For Better Engagement
Using artificial intelligence, conversational messages are converted into machine-readable data. These data sets can be fed into your company's CRM to create highly personalized outbound marketing messages.
Says Liu, "The biggest value is converting those unstructured chat sessions into business drivers."
4. Messages Streamline The Customer Service Experience
For customers, messaging means quicker responses. Messaging also provides a "holistic history"—a single point of contact that eliminates the need to switch between chats, emails and phone calls.
"Unifying everything into one channel, or fewer channels, reduces management overhead," Liu explains.
The Messaging Path To ROI
"Statistics show that email has an open rate of 20% and an under 2% click-through rate. With messaging, you get an open rate of 98%, and at Connectly we're seeing a CTR of around 25%," Liu says.
"I believe it's going to be the de facto communication channel between people and businesses, just as it is between people and people," says Loukakos.
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