Imagine being able to update individual community members instantly through text messaging about things that are relevant to them. One of the biggest challenges most people face these days is information overload, so if you are able to break through the clutter, then your messages will stand out. But how can you do this?
If you are a community based organization like a park district then chances are that you have some newsletters segmented into the interests of your community. Did you know that email as a marketing and information sharing channel is dying? Let me back this statement up with facts from the people who know. Most likely you have heard of Mailchimp - they have a 67% market share in the email marketing market. According to Mailchimp's Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks the average open rate for marketing and informational email is a dismal 21%. Think about it - 79% of marketing / informational email never gets opened! But wait - it actually gets worse. Three other things you should know about are read-rates, click-through-rates and time-to-open stats. It is impossible to determine how many of the 21% of people who open the emails actually read them - I personally believe that a significant percentage opens it and closes it immediately which will still count under opened. The only indicator we have is referred to as the click-through-rate and this indicates how many people click on at least one link in the email and according to Mailchimp the average click-through-rate is 2.6% of total delivered emails. Another major issue with the 21% of emails which get opened is that it takes very long for people to open these emails. According to some statistics about 6% of informational / marketing email gets read within the first three hours - the rest is spread out over the following 48 hours or never gets opened. If you are relying on email to get your message out you have a very big and growing problem - but there is a solution!
Imagine if I told you there is a channel where 98% of messages sent get opened and even more amazingly 95% get opened within the first three minutes. If you are serious about getting your message out to your community then you have to consider texting! Texting (also known as SMS) gets your message into the minds of your community almost instantly - this is amazing! Texting is such a powerful communication tool that it can be easily be abused but thankfully the US telephony carriers and US laws have made it all but impossible to abuse texting which is why you are not seeing the amount of spam coming through on texting. Texting is and should remain a very personal form of communication and we at VoyagerNetz love that fact and want to keep it that way. So how can you use texting to communicate better with your community? We built VoyagerNetz Reach to solve this problem while also adhering to carrier best-practices and US laws! I'm happy to say it does an amazing job at solving the problems inherent in email messaging . Let me explain what problems Reach solves and how it does it.
The first major problem that we needed to solve was how a community based organization like a park district would be able to know which messages people are interested in - or otherwise put how the organization will segment the community. Actually the answer to this challenge is simpler than it sounds and starts with the realization that the park and recreation organization will never know exactly what topics their individual community members are interested in but guess what - the community member knows. So the answer is simply this - create a diverse set of topics (we call them interests) and make it easy for the community to find and follow only those interests they are interested in. We make it easy to follow interests by creating easy 'follow' QR Codes for every interest which a community member can scan with their phones and click send to follow. We also make it easy for a member to unfollow later by simply texting in 'unfollow interest' where interest is the specific thing they are interested in. It cannot be simpler. Once people start following an interest they will start receiving new messages sent to followers of that interest. To stop receiving messages they simply unfollow.
Secondly we wanted to empower individual team members to easily be able to send messages to their followers through a simple mobile app. Reach is easy to use and works on your mobile device as well as on desktop computers and it cannot be simpler. Reach is so simple that you can learn how to use Reach in a few minutes.
Last but probably the most important is that we wanted community members to be able to simply reply on a Reach message to ask a question or request support. This is probably the one feature which I love the most about VoyagerNetz Reach because it makes turning a promotion into an engagement and then into a sale so much more easier! I have witnessed many dozens of sales engagements starting and successfully concluding in a sales in this way and it will always leave me amazed at the simplicity.
During our development of VoyagerNetz Reach we stumbled across another problem which Reach can easily and very effectively solve which I will simply refer to as status updates. Imagine if you have a field, facility, class or something similar and you want your participants to be able to check the status of the interest on-demand. In the new version of Reach you can now add a status to an interest and your community can easily get the latest status by texting in 'status interest' . We again make this process easy through a simple Status QR Code.
If you want to personalize your communication through self-segmentation and if you want to deliver promotions and information on a channel with a 98% open rate then I suggest you give VoyagerNetz Reach a try. Starting with Reach is incredibly easy and only takes three simple steps:
It cannot be simpler so I hope you will give it a try! And here's a little special surprise for those of you who have read up to this point - if you are new to VoyagerNetz Reach and would like to try it out we'll turn the 30 day free trial into a 60 day free trial if you mention this blog. Thank for reading!
To get started with a free trial simply text 'free trial' to +1 708-797-9681.
We have an upcoming Park District Webinar - get the latest status by texting 'status parksdistrictwebinar' to +1 708-797-9681
