3 Amazing New Platform Features For Next-Level Texting — Switchboard

New platform features have been added to help you continue to build deeper relationships with customers through the power of texting. Ready to use them?

Capturing the attention of customers and keeping them informed on everything your business has to offer is the goal for any good outreach strategy. With texting, you can send this essential information directly to your customer’s phones and achieve visibility that blows other outreach channels out of the water (96% of texts are read on average!)

Texting is the best way to reach customers, and we want to make sure your experience with texting is the best it can possibly be. Check out these three new features that will help your business achieve more effective and personalized digital outreach: 

RumbleUp Integration

While opt-in texting is a very popular option for reaching customers in a time and cost effective manner, it can be hard to utilize if you do not already have an opt-in audience. Peer-to-peer texting has the advantage of being able to potentially reach more people, so we wanted to provide an easy way to allow you to have the best of both worlds with this integration to RumbleUp.

This new integration allows you to use the reach of RumbleUp peer-to-peer texting to ask contacts for their opt-in to receive texts from your Switchboard account.

This integration with RumbleUp will allow for targeted outreach like never before. It will help you reach past, present and future customers with ease and then enable you to personally connect with them in a more efficient and affordable way.

So how does it work? It’s simple — just send a message through RumbleUp asking contacts to reply with the appropriate keyword, and they will be automatically added into your Switchboard account to the group you select. To get started, go to the Tools tab in your portal, then press Integrations under the Tools subsection.

Geotargeted Contact Segmentation

Smart contact segmentation for targeted outreach is key to any successful texting program, and Switchboard has the tools to make this as easy and intuitive as possible. The latest in segmentation technology is our one of a kind Geotargeted Contact Segmentation tool!

If you have ever wanted to create a texting list of your contacts within a certain geographical radius of a location, like an event location or a store location, now you can.

Your contact list will need to include the latitude & longitude of each contact's address and of the location you want to base the segmentation around. If you don't already have this in your database, you can run your file for free in Geocodio or many other free geocoding services. A specific location’s latitude & longitude is listed on Google Maps under address details or by right-clicking on a pin drop.

To utilize this feature, simply include a latitude & longitude column in your .csv file while uploading your audience’s contact information into your portal. After the upload is complete, create a new group using the Group creation tool and fill out the information to filter for contacts within a certain radius of a location!

Shareable Contact Cards

A Shareable Contact Card is an electronic business card file called a .vfc file that smartphones use to identify a contact in your contact list. So, when you share a contact from your phone with a friend, you're sending a .vcf file to them. 

Why do you want to share a .vcf file as part of your opt-in texting program? We saw this capability and knew we wanted to allow businesses to have the ability to do this at scale to add an additional level of personalization to outreach. This means your customers or subscribers aren't going to associate your company/organization with the random phone number in their texts anymore. 

Your SWB account has a toll-free texting number that all the messages you send to your opt-ins will come from. Sending a Sharable Contact Card allows your audience to save your information to their contacts with just two clicks! So next time you text them, they'll recognize the message is coming from you.

Bottom Line

Now that you are up to speed on our new features, it is time to start using them! If you have not already considered texting but are now interested after seeing the capabilities of texting, you can sign up and start sending texts today at myswitchboard.com. 

Have additional questions? Reach out to our sales team at sales@myswitchboard.com or text us at 833-245-2534 to discuss how these new features can work for you.