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Beauty is the eye of the beholder.
Or in FranFunnel’s case, the hand of the phone owner.
Truth is, there is no such thing as an ideal text message. Rather, there are a variety of different types of text messages that can help your sales team accomplish its growth goals.
That’s why we decided to make it official with our inaugural Text Message Beauty Pageant.
Here’s how the competition works:
With these use cases, you’ll get a n idea for what the various types of good texts look like and which will make you better at sales.
This is our meat and potatoes message, but we use it a lot because it works. There’s no real flair, but it gets the job done right. Ultimately we love it because it does the three things that we want all introductory text messages to do: 1) Introduce yourself 2) Allude to why you’re texting them to begin with 3) Leave them with a relevant and easy question to answer. It’s simple, but it’s exactly where we recommend people start.
Taking the three sentence structure we typically recommend, and boiling it down to two sentences! I love this. How tight can we get it? Shorter is always sweeter in texting. This person finds a way to accomplish all three of the aforementioned goals while cutting out words. Kudos!
It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that this is a bird company! We believe that customizing texts to reflect your brand is brilliant when done tactfully. By adding the three simple emojis at the end of the intro text, you can really begin the process of relating to the person on the other end of the line. People use emojis a lot, so there’s no reason that businesses shouldn’t.
Not every franchise is considered equal. Ultimately if you’re one of those fortunate brands that’s trying to use text messaging to qualify leads, then something easy like this works well. Look how simple the first question is. “Where are you?” Brilliant way to get people in the fold early.
I’m torn on this one. They’re getting good results, but it’s a strong brand, and I can’t help but feel they’re leaving some value on the table with the clunky wording of “I’m spending time…” I’m also not sure about the thank you sentence. Feels like empty characters to me. But research shows that people do like being thanked. Hard to say.
Clearly, they’re just trying to move people through a pipeline, and they’re not interested in improving their process. This is a big company text. This is not a text that works if you don’t have a known brand. But, as far as putting as little effort in as possible, it does the trick.
On the upside, I actually like the multiple choice nature of the question at the end. It makes it easier to respond to without the lead having to use cognitive energy. People tend to know what time of day is best for them, roughly. I just wish they’d work on condensing the whole thing. 40 words, and over 200 characters is just too much.
This unsurprisingly prompts a lot of, “Huh? Who are you? What business are you talking about?” FranFunnel lets you customize your messages based on anything you know about the lead. Even if you’re working leads for multiple brands, you can send different messages to those different leads! Why not take advantage of that? In our professional opinion, this message is lucky when they even get the “Who are you?” question. We’d probably just ignore them.
Sigh. I’m not sure about this one. On the one hand the salesperson is streamlining the process for themselves. They save themselves from having to have any dynamic conversations.
On the other hand: Why would you do this? FranFunnel is designed to save you the work of texting manually, but allows you to treat each lead as if they’re getting the personal touch. Why not take advantage of that? Maybe they think their leads are also conversation averse?
Too long. Too much. Too many options.
This is the only old text, because the user stopped using FranFunnel. Even the best car in the world isn’t much good if you insist on driving it into a brick wall. The intro text message isn’t the time or place for your gimmicky sales copy. This person has already submitted! They’ve taken the bait, they’re on the hook. Reeling them in should not be a job for your copywriting interns. FranFunnel offers the personal touch… why not use it?
In many ways, it is our responsibility to educate our users on how to text well (or even vaguely competently).
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That concludes this year’s Text Message Beauty Pageant! Thanks to all of our contestants, the good, the not so good, and the bad.
And in case you’re wondering, the real winner in this competition is your customers.
That is, as long as you remember these texting best practices:
Remember, there is no such thing as an ideal text message. Rather, there are a variety of different types of text messages that can help your sales team accomplish its growth goals.
Contact us today to schedule and demo, and maybe next year your text message will be a winning contestant!
Eli Robinson, Eli Rosenthal, and Scott Ginsberg make up the content team at FranFunnel. Only one of them wear a tiara regularly.
