Automated two-way texting uses software to start and hold real SMS conversations with your leads, reaching out in seconds, answering questions, and qualifying interest without a rep glued to the keyboard. P&C insurance agencies use it to hit every new lead instantly, filter out the folks who aren't ready, re-engage aged leads, and hand ready buyers to a licensed agent. Mav runs that layer over text and voice, then connects qualified leads to your agents through live call transfer.
You're spending real money on leads every month, and a lot of it gets wasted the moment follow-up breaks down. A lead that sits for 20 minutes goes cold. A voicemail from an unknown number rarely earns a callback. Your producers can't dial fast enough to catch everyone, so the leads they miss are the ones you already bought and paid for.
The math is unforgiving. In the 2007 MIT Sloan and InsideSales Lead Response Management Study, Dr. James Oldroyd found the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 21 times when a call slips from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, and the odds of even making contact drop by 100 times. Harvard Business Review reported in its 2011 analysis of online sales leads that firms responding within an hour were roughly 7 times more likely to qualify a lead than those who waited longer.
Text closes that gap. As an industry benchmark, SMS sees open rates near 98%, and 81% of people check texts within five minutes. Automated two-way texting is how you show up in that window every time.
Automated two-way texting reaches out to a new lead the second it lands, holds a real back-and-forth conversation, and figures out who's worth a producer's time. It's the same instinct behind broader business process automation: take the repetitive work off people so they can do the parts that need a human.
For a P&C agency, that repetitive work is the chase. Someone requests an auto or home quote at 9 p.m., and your team can't call until morning, by which point they've already talked to three other agencies. A text lands in seconds, asks the right questions, and keeps the lead warm until a licensed agent can take over. If you're still deciding whether automation belongs in your shop, we broke down an easy way to decide, and we've made the case in more detail across 20 reasons agencies need automated texting.
Consumers already prefer it. People increasingly lean on text to reach businesses, and they'd rather text a business than call it. Your leads would rather text you. Automated two-way texting lets you meet them there while still routing every ready lead to a person who can advise and close.
Mav follows a simple workflow, and each step maps to a job your team is doing by hand today.
The moment a lead comes in, Mav texts them. No queue, no morning callback, no waiting for a rep to free up. That's speed-to-lead delivered every time, at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. Good conversation design matters here, which is why our team thinks hard about how to build better bots that actually sound human.
Mav asks the questions a producer would ask on a first call: what they're shopping for, current coverage, timing, and whether they're a real buyer. Personalized, relevant, two-way. Interested leads move forward, and the rest get filtered out for later follow-up so your producers spend their hours on people who are ready. If you want the strategy behind conversational texting, this SMS chatbot overview is a solid primer.
When a lead is ready, Mav hands them to a licensed agent through a live call transfer, what we call Party Lines. The lead goes from a text conversation straight to a warm phone connection with a real person, while the context travels with them. Mav qualifies and routes. Your agents advise and close.
Every conversation, lead status, and call recording lands in one dashboard, so you can see what's working and where leads stall. Working the leads you already buy gets a lot easier when you can actually watch the pipeline move.
Simply put, automation is the technology by which a process, procedure or task is performed with minimal or no human assistance.
For this guide, we'll be focusing on a few types of automation: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which is a subset of Business Process Automation (BPA). BPA is the technology-enabled automation of complex business processes. Think of RPA as the sibling of BPA, except it leverages Artificial Intelligence and software robots (bots).
There's a lot more out there than texts blasts with website links and discounts from stores and politicians 😜
Like the name suggests, automated texts are SMS messages that are triggered or scheduled to send on their own. The most common kind of automated texting is a one-way alert (coupons, appointment reminders, marketing promotions, confirmations, etc.) where a business sends an automated message, typically containing a link or other CTA outside of the conversation, and the user cannot text back (aside from saying "Y" or STOP). This overview we wrote for ClickZ will give you an even more detailed picture of the difference between the types of automated texting experiences. While many businesses have seen early success with the one-way methods, the future of automated texting we are creating is more purposeful, useful, and valuable for the customer AND the business.Â
We believe that the future of automated texting is conversational. The future is automated two-way texting.
Instead of static alerts, links and spam, automated two-way text conversations allow the recipient to text back and interact with an artificial intelligence (AI) powered digital assistant, and to complete tasks in that conversation. It's a similar experience to a manual SMS conversation between a lead and a sales rep, except that sales rep is an automated digital assistant. This is a much better experience for the user, and much more valuable for the business.
Automated two-way texting adds a communication layer to internal processes and workflows, like activities and triggers in your CRM. By introducing a text conversation to these processes, you create something that more closely resembles a human process that interacts with your leads (like a sales rep would), and they can text back. The result is a "virtual team member," aka an automated digital assistant that acts on your behalf, has text conversations with your leads, and enables them to complete tasks in those conversations.
Automated texting is one of the best ways to incorporate automation into your sales and marketing efforts. With automated conversations, businesses can turn tasks like lead qualifying, nurturing, outreach collecting documents and more, into two-way text conversations - without the added human effort.
Texting is a persistently open channel. This means you can engage with leads later on if they drop off during the qualification process (unlike a website form) and pick up exactly where they left off, in the same conversation. With open rates on SMS as high as 98% and most sales texts being opened within 30 minutes, you can't afford to miss out on the texting opportunity.
You’re already filling your funnel with leads through advertising, social media, SEO and website traffic, why not make this traffic actionable? By replacing your website forms with a text conversation, leads are able to take action and get a personalized outreach right away. Wondering what that might look like? Try texting with Mav directly from our website.
There’s a 10x drop in lead qualification when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to convert inbound traffic and improve your lead-to-contact rate at the same time with automated texting.
In sales and marketing, your CRM is your home base. Like the automated workflows you've already built in your process, Mav allows you to configure automated conversations to kick off based on activities in your CRM 😱 Plus, all of the conversation details collected from a prospect or customer during their conversation will be routed back to your CRM, so you know exactly where your lead is in the process.
This one is simple. Using automated texting to communicate with leads means you'll spend less productive time nurturing and wondering where a lead stands, and less time working unqualified leads. With the efficiency automated texting can give you, you'll have more time to spend with qualified leads, clients and referral partners, and growing the business in new ways.
Every human is unique and does things a bit differently. For sales and marketing, communicating quickly with the same messages and nurturing consistently is crucial. 44% of sales reps give up after one follow up, and even less run their playbooks the same every time. Automated texting ensures your leads will get the message you want every time (fast!), and nurture for as long as it takes.
Reach out and introduce sales reps to leads quickly, increasing lead-to-contact rates
Use data to offer new and timely offers to customers and cold leads
Qualify your leads via text, so you only spend time closing ready leads
Nurture and direct your inbound traffic with personalized recommendations
Re-engage leads who have missed calls and find the best time for you to speak again
Stop getting ghosted 👻 and finally find out if they're still interested
Texting for sales and marketers is a no brainer. Using automated texting to have actionable conversations, nurture prospects and convert leads is a game changer.
Let's look at a few examples of how automated texting can convert leads and benefit your customers at the same time.
When a lead falls through the cracks when they're *this* close to qualifying or converting, it can be frustrating. Those common dark spots in an acquisition funnel, like the gap between quotes and applications completed, free trials and paid accounts, interest and consultation, are important to solve, but also really expensive to solve. Automated texting can bridge these gaps.
SMS is a persistent messaging channel. Persistent channels create users. This means, when a lead texts your digital assistant, they are now a user that you can nurture and re-engage strategically at a later time. You can also recall conversational details like their name or any previous quotes and rates, which is essential for customer retention. This is the key difference between automated texting experiences and website forms or chatbots. When a lead leaves your website, even if they interacted with your website bot, they are gone, and you cannot engage them again.
If someone drops off at any point during your conversation, you can re-engage them and remind them to continue. Many times, a lead is chatting with you and something pulls them away, or they need more time to make their decision. Maybe they had to go into a meeting, hop in the car, or just got distracted, and forgot to come back to your conversation. Automated texting is smart. The nurturing texts are taken care of automatically, and the conversation with your customer will continue at the exact point they dropped off.
Here's how it works:
Less than 5% of voicemails are responded to. That means you might have to leave 20 voicemails to follow up before you get a response. Lead follow up and nurturing is frustrating, time-consuming and repetitive. So frustrating, that 44% of sales reps give up after one follow up. Stop spending valuable time leaving voicemails, sending manual texts and automated emails that go unopened. Use automated nurturing texts to bring them back to the conversation.
Automated nurturing with Mav is simple. Enter a prospect's name and phone number, or trigger a workflow based on an action in your CRM, and send an automated text to find out if they're still interested. Right away, you increase your open rates over 20x. Your nurturing texts will be scheduled to send in smart timing intervals so you can convert more leads, Day 1 or Day 58. Leads can also request follow ups on specific days, and Mav will remember to reach out. No need to add it to your to do list, Mav handles the entire process. Â Turn your traditional lead nurturing process into a fresh, new experience with automated texting that you AND your prospects prefer.Â
Here's what we mean:
When a lead comes in to your form or website, there's a crucial window of time to reach out to them before they move on to someone else. It's also very likely they're being bombarded with phone calls and voicemails from other sales reps.
By kicking off an automated conversation as soon as that lead expresses interest, introducing your sales rep and sharing their contact card, you’ll boost the lead-to-contact rate and personalize the first point of contact. You'll also be reaching out in a way that your leads actually want.
As an added bonus, on iOS and Android the sales reps name will show up when they contact the lead directly, and the lead knows who to except. Leads can also request an earlier call back time, so a rep can prioritize them as a hotter lead. While most of your competitors will waste their time with robo-dialers and automated emails that go unopened, you'll cut through the noise with an actionable text. It's speed to lead with the convenience and value of texting your customers will love.
This Could Be You:
Now that you know a few of the benefits of automated texting for sales and marketing, you probably have several ideas of how your business can benefit from running automated sales playbooks and automating your repetitive tasks with text conversations.
Automated texting is SMS messages that are scheduled or triggered send on their own. By adding an interface (like a text conversation) to your internal automated workflows, you can create a two-way conversation between your process and your prospects. This would resemble a human process that interacts, or texts, with leads on your behalf, and the lead can respond. It's like hiring an AI assistant for your sales team.
Reach out to leads with automated texting to convert faster and better than a traditional web form or phone call. Ask prospects qualifying questions to find out if they meet your criteria, tell them if they're qualified and take the next steps right away with automated outreach.
Re-Engage leads who have dropped off at any point in the conversation with SMS, a persistent messaging channel that allows them to pick up right where they left off. Your website can't do that.Â
Nurture leads who ignore your voicemails (because 95% do) and drip emails (80% ignore those) with automated texting and bring them back to life. Continue to nurture in smart timing intervals so you can find a time to talk again, Day 1 or Day 58.
Improve lead-to-contact rates with automated lead outreach and introduction via text. As soon as a lead expresses interest, introduce your sales rep, share their contact and start building the relationship during the crucial decision period where competitors sacrifice the lead's experience the most.
And let's not forget, people love to text! It’s important to interact with leads and customers the way that they want. It means more conversions, happier customers, and more referrals. Automation is the easiest way to improve efficiency, eliminate repetitive and time consuming tasks, and when your business starts texting, it gives prospects the convenience they want by making you available 24/7.Â
Mav is the AI-powered digital assistant for insurance agencies. Mav has fully autonomous two-way text conversations with your leads. Reach out and introduce your sales reps, re-engage existing customers with new offers and nurture leads who drop off at any point in the sales funnel - all on autopilot.🔥 With our integrations and automated workflows, Mav knows when to start texting and when and where to deliver your lead data.Â
Our plug and play, stackable playbooks turn time-consuming sales tasks into automated, two-way text conversations, and they're ready to run on day one.
A few examples of our texting playbooks:
For Outreach: Introduce your sales reps, improve your lead to contact rate and convert leads faster.
For Nurturing: Send personalized, timely follow ups so you can convert more leads, find out if they're still interested and schedule more appointments.
For Qualification: Qualify prospects, grow and protect your qualified lead pipeline.
