2-way SMS explained

Engage, activate and connect with your customers - wherever they are - with two-way SMS.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

Whether it’s for sales, marketing or support, our true 2-way SMS lets you have back-and-forth conversations with your customers via the Help Desk. You can send real-time promotional offers, transactional messaging, and more using Series to create omni channel campaigns and customer communications, meeting your customers wherever they are.

What can you do with 2-way SMS?

Send promotional messages to your customer base.

With an average open rate of 98%, you can be sure you’re getting your offers in front of your customers and increase the likelihood of driving an increase in revenue.

Send transactional messages to your customers.

Transactional messages are sent in response to a customer’s interaction with your website, app, or business. You can leverage Series in Intercom to set this type of workflow up.

Use SMS to re-engage your customers.

Though email has a time and place in any re-engagement strategy, that channel has become highly congested and there’s a good chance your customers will overlook messages sent via email. SMS marketing has not become as noisy and overwhelmed and has proven to be an effective channel to reach your customers outside of your app, website, or business.

Add SMS to your onboarding workflows.

You should be communicating with your new customers via a mix of in-app and outbound channels. While our in-app messages have a 3-4x higher engagement rate than email, they should be complemented by SMS as a highly effective outbound channel for messages like: welcome texts, reminders on outstanding onboarding actions, and more.

Provide a new support channel.

Allow customers to reach your support team via SMS - Over half of consumers rank at least one form of asynchronous chat (including text or messaging through social media, third-party apps, or a brand’s mobile application) in their top three preferred methods of communication with a brand (Forrester). Either reach out proactively before issues arise to your customers with order delay notifications or provide an inbound support line that your customers can text directly for answers.

Open up a new channel for Sales.

The best time to interact with a lead is when they’re actively exploring your business. With so many options available to the average customer, businesses have a small window of a customer’s attention and speed is critical for converting. Follow-up with leads via SMS or offer SMS as a channel for leads to connect with your sales team to get their questions answered immediately. Or manage messaging your accounts at scale through SMS with our automations and account based marketing features.

Easily manage compliance and consent.

You can manage your customer consent all within Intercom with granular use case Consent/Subscription management and support in API and Messenger. Make use of compliance features to ensure your business is on the right track:

  • Unsubscribe and keyword handling.

  • SMS Quiet Hours.

Measure and report on SMS campaigns.

Measure how well your SMS campaigns are performing with our SMS reporting capabilities - Per Message Send Reporting, Per Message Deliverability Issue Reporting, and Per Message Response Reporting.

And more!

Some other common use cases we see are sending post-purchase or appointment follow-up Surveys to measure the success of your business or service meeting your customers needs or using SMS as a fallback channel for important in-app messages.

Get started with SMS


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