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Your customers are texting why aren’t you?

It’s a fact that more people read their text messages today than they do their email. With text messaging being the number one way to reach your customers, why aren’t you using it? Textingly is a service that makes it easy for merchants to reach their customers by text message.

Why text messaging?

• It’s easy – A great text message is easy to create because it’s only 140 characters of text. It’s easier than writing an email, updating your website, or creating flyers.
• It’s immediate – Within minutes of sending your message your customer will have received it.
• It’s private and personal –  While social media is very public – text messages are a great way for your customers to reach you immediately, but in private.

With Textingly you can manage your contacts, send and receive text messages from your computer, view reports of all of your text message  correspondence to customers.

Here are just a few ways you could use Textingly to reach your customers:

Text message receipts – When a customer purchases a product, they can opt to receive a receipt by text message.

Customer support & Feedback – Customers can text in their feedback in your store. Your staff can send and recieive text messages from them in realtime, or simply.

Deals and Discounts – Send exclusive deals and discounts to your most loyal customers by text message. All they have to do is show their cell phone to redeem.

Sometimes customers need an incentive to refer their friends to your business.  Perkville accomplishes this with their customer reward service.  What’s cool about Perkville is that it’s online (no cards), it’s easy to set up, and it rewards your customers for loyalty as well as for referring friends and promoting you on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  Also, it’s free

Rewards

Perkville makes it easy to set up a custom reward program for your business.  Here is an example for Saffron Rare Threads, a high-end boutique clothing store in San Francisco:

See more examples on Perkville.

Referrals

Perkville provides an online form so your customers can easily refer their friends to your business.  Referrals are automatically tracked and rewarded:

Social Media

You can reward customers for social media activity such as promoting your business on Facebook and following it on Twitter.

Get Started

We’re looking for 10 businesses to participate in our first release with Perkville. Contact us if you’re interested.

We are considering adding in a mobile payment platform to our system soon and wanted to get your feedback. After reading the article. please use the form at the bottom of the page to let us know what you think.

Mobile payments allows customers to pay with their phone instead of their credit card. This can have several advantages over the old plastic card depending on how the payment platform is setup.

1. Less Fraud: When a consumer is making a large purchase, they can “prime” their phone with additional security checks like a password. Retailers (with an enhanced point of sale) can access additional info about the potential customer including an image of the customer before allowing the sale to process.
2. More Secure: No actual account information passes into the point of sale system or the computer running the sale. This makes Payment Card Industry Security requirements unnecessary.
3. No more carrying a credit card: Most people are already carrying around a phone and would appreciate the lighter load.
4. A marketing opportunity: Customers can receive coupons, have their purchases tracked for a loyalty program, receive reminders, and many more possibilities on their mobile phone just from one purchase with your shop. They can also receive their receipt automatically rather than having to print one.

Two companies we are considering

MobilePayUSA has users enter their payment methods into their account then they can use their phone to start purchasing at your shop. They work with your existing processor as a gateway and take a percentage of all sales.

Dwolla allows users to pay from their checking account with their mobile phone. The major advantage for retailers is dramatically reduced transaction costs (flat fee of $0.25/transaction no matter the size).

Turning the payments industry upside down?

The shift to a new way to pay also brings in the opportunity for entirely new payment networks. Already there are a bunch of companies fighting to get some of the mobile payments pie. The reality though is more payment networks means more competition. The old guard of major players will be required to innovate and charge lower prices (If they can’t use their monopoly and powerful lobby to hold their position). Hopefully the retailer and their customers will be major winners in the end.

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