One of the commonest mistakes that bulk SMS resellers make is lowering their prices—sometimes ridiculously—in a desperate bid to win customers. Over the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of cases of People getting into the SMS Business, charging ridiculous prices to get droves of customers and going offline in a year or less as a result of not being able to pay for simple things like internet subscription, hosting renewal and salaries.
A lot who adapt this strategy believe that either they would be able to recoup costs through other services they sell on their websites or they would be able to raise prices later after getting clients. While it’s natural for you to expect an influx of customers after adopting the low-price strategy, the truth is that your business cannot thrive with it. Why? Because there’s more to attracting customers than low prices, it has been established that customers who are acquired by the strategy of low price only would always jump to a lower priced provider when they see one, they are never loyal!
Even if you’re able to attract some customers by cutting down your prices, you’ll most likely lose these customers as soon as you try to raise your prices back to market standards. So, this strategy isn’t worth adopting at all.
Have you ever wondered why people stick with highly priced products and services, even when there are much cheaper alternatives? The reason is simple—quality. That’s what customers want—even if they’ll pay extra to get it!
Now that you’re convinced that quality—and not price—is what can make or break your bulk SMS reselling business, let’s now look at how to improve the quality of your business. The following tips will help you:
1. Assess and improve on your SMS deliverability
Deliverability is one of the metrics that separate the excellent bulk SMS reselling services from the crappy ones. Customers hate having only 60-70% of their SMS texts delivered.
So, test the deliverability of your service by sending out messages yourself and keeping count of how many get delivered. If you discover that your SMS deliverability rates are less than 90%, consider switching over to a more reliable SMS sourcing company.
2. Improve your website and user control panel features
We all hate dealing with intricacies. This explains why customers won’t do business with you if your website is damn complicated. A simple, user-friendly website is what customers want.
Don’t screw up your website with excessive design and tweaking. Keep it simple, but professional. And make it very easy for even the beginner to navigate.
Similarly, your user control panel must be easy to use, yet complete with the features necessary for a good user experience—such as number validation, duplicate number checker, SMS scheduler, etc.
Also, integrate a payment system on your website so that customers can easily pay for SMS credits from the comfort of their homes or offices. No one wants to always join long bank queues before they can pay you.
3. Improve your support service
The long-term reputation of any business hinges largely on its support service. Even businesses with mediocre offers have won customers’ hearts with their excellent support. And businesses with excellent offers have gone out of market due to poor customer support.
Offering excellent support for your customers begins with making your contact information readily available. Display your contact details (across various channels) on parts of your website where they can be seen easily. And provide as many options as possible—phone, email, Skype, BBM, Whatsapp, Gtalk, and so on.
Most importantly, always respond quickly to customer queries. Answer their questions promptly, and help them solve any issues they may have with your business in a timely manner.
By implementing these three tips, you will boost the quality of your service, and attract more customers in the long term. And customers will remain with you even if your prices are higher than those of the competition.
So, if you’ve lowered you prices—or are considering doing that—with the aim of attracting customers, you now know what to do, instead.
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