If you have any interest in eCommerce, disruptive technologies or customer psychology, Hooked by Nir Eyal will have featured on your radar.

Taking Silicon Valley by storm, this little book – subtitled How to Build Habit-Forming Products – walks you through the steps that can make your customers form new, long-lasting habits around your product / service.

It’s packed full of real-life examples. ‘Disruptive’ businesses such as Instagram and UBER feature, as do product-based businesses – like vitamin and supplement companies.

The author supposes that ensuring your product is ‘sticky’ (meaning your customers are brand loyal and consume your product frequently) can be achieved with a simple four-phase model:

Step 1: Trigger Behavior
Step 2: Perform Action
Step 3: Variable Reward for Action
Step 4: Commitment to Product

Key to implementation of the Hooked model is continuous communication. And communicating with your (potential) customer / client via SMS text message makes optimal business sense.

We’ve already gone over the clutter caused by email (see our earlier blog post: https://www.voodoosms.com/blog/post/fighting-the-clutter-of-uncertainty.html ). Here’s why the unique features of SMS works perfectly:

Step 1: Trigger Behaviour – People often need a gentle nudge to get moving. Brushing your teeth is now automatic to you when you wake, but only because your Mum nagged you to do it when you were a child! To trigger behaviour in your customers, send them a prompt…or a ‘nudge’.

If your product is used at a certain time of day – say, you have a supplement brand that people consume on the way to work – or at a particular time of the month / year, a trigger can be useful. A SMS text message works perfectly here: succinct, noticed and unobtrusive. .

Step 2: Perform Action – You know what you want people to do: buy your product / call your office / sign up to your class. The key to achieving this is Ease of Action. If it’s simple, your clients are much more likely to take your desired action. How can you make things simple? Voodoo SMS offer URL shortcode generation – taking your customer direct to your order page or website. Or you might use a keyword – allowing your customers to book, buy or receive more information simply by texting back a short, memorable word. Effortless.

Step 3: Variable Reward – We’re bored of automation. We enjoy when things excite and delight us. An occasional ‘Thank you’ text or ‘Specially selected offer just for you’ SMS keeps your brand top of mind and interesting.

Step 4: Commitment to Product – The more users invest time and/or effort into your product or service, the more they are committed to it..

A quick SMS can remind your customers of their investment. Perhaps you send an ‘anniversary’ message to thank your customers on the X years of working together. Alternatively, extoll the benefits of sticking with your brand – that which is known, trusted and comfortable – versus switching to a competitor. Subtly emphasise the monetary and time sunk costs your customer has invested in your company.

—

The benefits of using SMS to lock the Hooked model into your customer journey are obvious: 99% of all text messages are read. More than this, 95% are read within 5 minutes of sending. And average response time for SMS? 90 seconds. That’s real time feedback, friction-free – and all from just 2.2p per send.

Looking to supercharge your customer retention levels in 2016? Talk to a Voodoo SMS customer engagement officer today.