Mobile coupon platforms can offer a lot of flexibility
With mobile marketing, to effectively connect messages with your prospective customers, it’s important to ‘throw combos’ – that is to say, in marketing to a targeted individual use a traditional communication or social media tactic and follow-up with a different traditional communication or social media tactic; don’t just use one communication tactic once – or worse, the single tactic over and over again.
As an example, mobile coupon platforms can be used as an integral part of a strategy to build SMS marketing lists. By combining the use of the mobile coupon platform to deliver welcome coupons via a promotional text message, SMS marketing list sign ups can be greatly accelerated. You can also combine SMS marketing programs and email to improve response rates. This is a good example of messaging from one channel being used to promote another. A retailer we worked with conducted a successful experiment with this.
For part one of the experiment, they sent a single e-mail which contained an offer delivered by their mobile coupon marketing platform and measured the results. And this is fairly typical, send out an e-mail, do a promotion, and measure. But, the next thing that they did for part two, was to send out an promotional text message the evening before the e-mail and then use an promotional text message as a reminder after the e-mail. In this case the mobile coupon marketing platform managed the offer across both delivery channels.
Notice the combination of traditional communications (email) and promotional text messages as opposed to the single jab approach?
The results were really significant. The retailer actually increased the redemption rate three times over the e-mail-only campaign. Using multiple communication channels works, and not only for marketing.
MORE USE OF SMS TO REDUCE CUSTOMER SERVICE WORKLOAD
In addition to using using their SMS marketing software to send marketing alerts, many retailers are sending alerts to improve customer satisfaction. They use alerts that provide personalized timely information to reduce the number of calls coming into their call center. Many of our customers have told us that one of the most common calls that comes in is, “Where’s my stuff?”
By incorporating SMS marketing programs into the mix, customers are seeing a really significant improvement in their customer satisfaction ratings. Alerts are not just for order fulfillment status updates; their potential uses touch virtually all B2C markets. Credit cards and banks are sending alerts such as, “balance overdue,” “payment received,” and even loyalty program status updates such as “You’re about to reach gold,” “10 points to gold,” and “Congratulations! You just reached gold!” If you’re not using alerts like these today, you may want to consider adding them as they’ve really proven to have a direct impact on customer satisfaction.