Customer expectations and behaviours constantly evolve, meaning tried-and-tested marketing tactics can stop cutting through the noise. To maintain results and drive ROI, teams need to embrace new technologies, channels and platforms that help you achieve the Goldilocks of marketing effectiveness – which is the right message, delivered in just the right way, at just the right time.
In this blog, we’ll explore an up-and-coming channel that can supercharge your marketing and customer nurturing this year: Rich Communication Services (RCS), and its sibling RCS Business Messaging (RBM).
What is RCS and RBM?
RCS is still seen as the next generation of messaging, combining the best of SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage in a single, native protocol.
Unlike SMS, RCS and RBM let you truly personalise your communications. For instance, you can give customers automated reply and action buttons. You can craft messages with not only extended character counts, but also much richer content such as high res images and video – compared to SMS and MMS, achieving an impact beyond what you can achieve with other channels.
A must for modern messaging channels, only registered and verified brands can send messages through RCS Business Messaging. In a time when new smishing attacks continue to rise, in-built features like this aim to instantly develop that trust between companies and their customers.
In short, RCS and RBM give you an easy way to deliver engaging, rich messaging to a broad audience – providing new opportunities to nurture customer relationships and boost campaign ROI.
How do you start using RCS and RBM?
Because RCS is new, older devices don’t support it. And that means you can’t yet use it as your sole messaging channel. The best way to get started is by using waterfall technology to drive your campaigns.
As a result, messages aren’t lost in the ether if a customer’s device can’t receive RSC. If the message isn’t delivered, the technology re-sends it using the next best channel, likely MMS. If that doesn’t work, it moves automatically to SMS.
Engage Hub clients have seen great success with this approach. For example, TIM, one of Brazil’s largest telecom and mobile services providers, achieved a 70% increase in campaign effectiveness thanks to our waterfall technology.
How else can you use RCS and RBM?
Marketing campaigns aren’t the only RCS use case: you can also use it to deliver an enhanced customer service experience. By integrating AI-powered Chatbots, RCS and RBM become next-gen digital self-service channels.
This gives customers yet another way to get fast answers and resolve issues. And the rich content capabilities mean you can use video and imagery to provide even more helpful support.
How do you measure the ROI of RCS/RBM?
You can get the same type of campaign data from other mobile messaging channels – and it’s important you build testing and optimisation into your RCS approach. But you can really supercharge the insight when you take a more macro approach to measurement, looking at analytics within the context of the wider customer journey.
For example, Engage Hub’s Customer Journey Tracker gives you a real-time, holistic view of how prospects and customers are engaging with different touchpoints and communication channels. That way, you can see which offers on which channels are most effective at nurturing. You can use that as a foundation for automating personalised journeys – so that Goldilocks marketing becomes a reality.
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Want to start experimenting with RSC? Get in touch today to learn how we can help you supercharge your messaging strategy.
