SMS Marketing | Text Promotions: Best Practices

Written by: Sue LeClaire

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are history. The countdown begins and serious holiday shopping begins. All of your holiday promotions are in the can and you’re planning promotions for 2016. To give you a leg up on your competition, we’re dedicating the month of December to delivering SMS marketing programs best practices. Ideas you can implement now to deliver offers guaranteed to drive more customers to your stores and increased redemptions.

Standard practice is to send promotional text message to all customers who have subscribed to an SMS list. The message invariably looks similar to the following.

one-time-use mobile coupon

 

Pros:

  • Effectiveness measured in redemptions between 3-8%.

Cons:

  • Offer code appears as a mobile device number.
  • Same promotion text message is sent to everyone on the SMS marketing list.
  • Not a compelling customer experience.
  • Inability to track offer engagement.

As opposed to the SMS best practice of announcing great savings in a text message and include a link the consumer clicks on to view the offer in a mobile web browser. The customer experience will mirror the following.

one-time-use mobile coupon

Pros:

  • Create a sense of mystery encouraging the customer to click on the link to view the mobile offer. Click-thru rates can be as high as 50%.
  • Customer can save the offer in a centralized location such as Apple Wallet making it easy to locate during checkout.
  • Scanning a mobile coupon significantly reduces checkout time.
  • Increase redemption rates for both in-store and online to 5-13%.
  • Improve behavioral tracking. Understand who has viewed the offer, who has clicked-thru to the eComm site, who has redeemed the offer including when and in which store, etc.)
  • Great customer experience for both in-store and online.
  • The ability to use analytics to improve offer segmentation and re-targeting.

Stay tuned for more SMS marketing best practices or, you can click on mobile coupon software to learn how mobile offers help retailers improve their bottom line.