On The Whole "Texting At Night" Thing

We send a lot of text messages.

If you think your teenager has a texting problem, just be happy he / she doesn’t work at FranFunnel.

Over the course of the last few months, it’s easy to say that our technology has powered the delivery of tens of thousands of text messages. And every month that goes by, we send more and more.

Because of this, most of the time our clients trust us when we provide guidance about the optimal way to communicate with leads via text. That is, except for one thing…

Texting At Night

About one out of every three demos we do, we’ll get the question about why we send text messages at night.

“I wouldn’t think anyone would actually respond to a text at night”

And honestly, it’s a good question. Does it make sense to send texts overnight?

The easy answer has always been yes! As long as the leads are requesting information at that time of evening, why wouldn’t you want to begin the conversation immediately? And we stand by that logic pretty staunchly.

But we have to ask ourselves whether or not there are opportunities to challenge this logic. And today we began the process to do just that.

Let’s start with this chart:

(Note that we’ve elected to use a bit of a smoothing algorithm in order to demonstrate the overall trend)

While there are many fascinating nuggets from this analysis, I’ll focus on the two most important

• Text back rates range as high as 29% in the 1PM — 2PM hours to as low as 18% from 4AM — 6AM
  
• Response rates are relatively stable from around 10AM to Midnight, while late night to early morning sees a significant dropoff

And keep in mind that the outbound lead in this instance are dominated by autoresponder texts that are sent immediately after a lead is generated.

So this begs the question: Are leads generated overnight simply of lower value perhaps by as 50% compared to leads generated in the afternoon?

And no matter what the answer is, this has major implications for us in the lead nurturing business.

If the answer for your franchise is yes, then that’s incredibly valuable knowledge from a lead generation perspective. Perhaps your Adwords and Facebook bids need to be lower overnight. Whatever it is, it’s this type of analysis that helps you make better choices.

But what if the answer is no and that leads generated overnight are just as valuable as leads generated during the day?

“But Eli! You’re crazy! That graphs proves exactly the opposite!”

Yes, but that graph is a product of decisions that we’re making about the proper way to market to leads. What if we marketed to overnight leads different? For example, for leads between 1AM — 8AM, we could:

1. Send a text message immediately, and the automatically follow up with the lead again via text at 9AM
   
2. Bypass the late-night text all together and only follow up with the leads in the morning
   

Could we increase the response rate that way? We don’t know, but we’re going to find out!

We know you don’t have time to figure out the answers to these questions. We barely do! But it’s these exact marketing decisions which can be make or break on whether or not your franchise’s development is successful or not.

It’s time for you to partner with a team that eats, sleeps, and breathes franchise lead nurturing.

Demo FranFunnel today.

This article was written by Eli Robinson, General Manager of FranFunnel.