Promotion Text Messages and Mobile Coupon Marketing: Getting the Most Out of Campaigns
Written by: Sue LeClaire
In marketing, measuring your promotion results is the be all and end all. Without the data, understanding the impact of all your hard work is like playing Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with a mask in the dark – even when you remove the mask, you still don’t know if you’ve hit the target.
For example, you created an awesome mobile campaign. Sales were up and you’d like to know how much your campaign contributed to the bottom line. It’s easy to determine how many customers received your SMS message, but do you know:
- Which channel your customers prefer to view your promotion (email, SMS, etc.)?
- How compelling was your message?
- When did customers redeem the offer and what else did they buy?
Answers to these questions will let you improve your marketing efforts in a number of ways.
Channel Development.
Understanding which channel your customers prefer is the first step in improved response rates. Are your copywriters creating snappy subject lines for email or captivating SMS messages? Regardless, the content you develop needs to fit on the small screen. According to Gartner, 74% of smartphone owners use their devices to check their email with 22% actually opening and reading messages. Whereas, 98% of SMS messages are opened. There is also a big discrepancy in the click-thru rate between email and SMS, 4.2% versus 19% respectively. But just because the SMS click-thru rate is higher, it doesn’t mean you should hyper-focus on text. The best approach is to ensure you are able to deliver the same message to all of your customers in the channel they prefer.
Click-through Rate.
One way to measure promotion results message effectiveness is click-thru rate – are your customers intrigued enough to want more. In order to derive the biggest impact, you need to capture each instance a customer views your promotion, not just the first time. By measuring all views, you can determine optimal message delivery time. For example, if your target customer is 15 – 25 year old females you may discover that the highest open and view rate is Saturday morning. That means you want to deliver messages first thing Saturday morning to ensure it doesn’t get lost in their inbox. Also, it is beneficial to understand the correlation between the number of promotion views and redemption. Based on our experience, the offer is redeemed sooner as the number of times a customer looks at the offer increases.
Redemption Activity.
From a marketer’s perspective, understanding the revenue dollars driven by a promotion is the Holy Grail when measuring promotion results. Your POS captures items purchased but can you tie it back to a specific promotion easily? You should in order to calculate the promotion’s actual return on investment. In addition, understanding when customers acted on your promotion is a great way to measure the sense of urgency you created with your message – the time between view and redemption. eMarketer expects that by 2016, mobile coupon users will represent nearly 83% of all digital coupon users. This means delivering offers at the right time to the right people will enable you to realize the 10+% redemption rate when delivering mobile offers to customers on a marketing list or up to 50% redemption for offers consumers respond to based on a call-to-action.
Purchase History.
Another key data point to drive sales is customer purchase patterns. The ability to link redemption data from your POS to customer data in your CRM system will provide critical information about your customer’s shopping habits. This information will allow you to deliver targeted promotions further increasing the bottom line. According to a recent Infosys survey , 86% of the respondents said that personalization influenced their purchase to some extent with 25% of the respondents stating that personalization has significantly influenced what they purchased. Personalized coupons (67%) are the most highly favored form of personalization followed by personalized offers and promotions based on previous experiences (62%) and product recommendations based on previous purchases (58%).
At a minimum, you should be able to capture promotion results for the channel your customers are viewing your promotions and offers, when and how they view them as well as when the offer is redeemed. Understanding the complete path to purchase will allow you to calculate your ROI and better target future promotions creating even more value for both you and your customers.