Using SMS to Power Customer Loyalty Programs

How do you feel if you received mobile coupon / voucher from restaurant, cafe and you will get discounted price when you dine in?

Customer loyalty clubs are awesome. You get your little punch card or barcode keychain at the time of sale and every time you go back and make another purchase you get points towards a reward. The reward usually comes in the form of a free product, special pricing, or branded merchandise. You know what we’re talking about: Buy 5 sandwiches and get the 6th free! So, how can we use SMS marketing to help drive the success of our loyalty rewards program? Let’s take a look at a three real world examples:

1) Starbucks Offers Mobile Coupons

Back in 2009, Starbucks ran a mobile coupon loyalty program in Mexico. The strategy behind the campaign involved not only rewarding loyal customers but also introduced Starbucks to new customers. Starbucks used a very traditional marketing channel – postcards – to encourage customers to subscribe to Starbucks’ SMS distribution list. By doing this, the customer would get a download link for a ‘buy one get one free’ mobile coupon. That was the part of the campaign to attract new customers. Existing customers were rewarded by an in-store display that prompted customers to text a different keyword to the same short code, which opted the customer in to an SMS list that offered discounts and offers. The cashiers at Starbucks were able to read the mobile coupons directly from the customers’ mobile phones at the time of sale. The current offer could be changed to encourage repeat customers.

The Takeaway:  An SMS campaign can be used to not only generate new customers with a static offer, but also to reward existing customers with coupons and offers that frequently change. The frequently changing offers give the existing customer subsequent reasons to visit the store.

Source: Mobile Marketer

 

2) Taco John’s Drives Participation

A more recent example comes from Taco John’s, which used a text message campaign early last year to drive participation in a customer loyalty program called “My Town Mania.” Customers were able to receive not only coupon offers, but also healthy living tips via SMS during the campaign’s six-week duration. As mentioned, the SMS campaign supported the “My Town Mania” loyalty program, in which customers could earn points by sharing photos and videos of their communities. Points could be redeemed for free food, gift cards, and merchandise.

The Takeaway: Taco John’s strategy ties in directly with another great mobile marketing campaign tip we covered earlier in this blog: tie your SMS marketing message to information that your prospect will want to see on a regular basis (e.g. the weather). In the case of Taco John’s, it was healthy living tips.

Source: Mobile Commerce Daily

3) Vienna Beef Helps its Customers Reach Their Customers

The previous two entries were examples of business-to-consumer marketing via SMS. In this next example, we take a brief look at how a supplier acted as a third party to create an SMS business-to-customer program for its customers. The supplier was Vienna Beef, a hot dog maker based in Chicago. The pass-through businesses were restaurants that carried Vienna Beef products. The customers were hot dog lovers around the country. Vienna Beef offered its customers (restaurants) a ‘pre-packaged’ SMS campaign that the restaurant could in turn use to entice their customers (hot dog lovers) with offers and announcements. The restaurants would use point-of-purchase displays and other forms of marketing to promote the program. After the restaurant’s customers subscribed to the SMS list, the customer would receive coupons that could be redeemed by showing their mobile phone to the restaurant’s cashier. Restaurants owners had a great deal of control over the frequency and content of their store’s messages and offers, but Vienna Beef provided suggestions and support to restaurant owners who were charting new ground with this marketing strategy.

The Takeaway: Suppliers can develop creative customer loyalty SMS campaigns that can benefit each member of the sales chain, from the supplier (e.g. Vienna Beef) to the business (e.g. restaurants) to the customer (e.g. hot dog lovers). It’s a win-win-win for everybody involved.

Source: Chief Marketer

Source: by Todd Jensen on June 8, 2012

Five Tips for Better Text-Message Marketing

Connecting with consumers when they’re on the go is more important than ever, and text message marketing (also referred to as SMS, or short message service marketing) can be a highly effective technique.

But the proliferation of mobile devices doesn’t guarantee marketing success. If your pitches don’t resonate with consumers and motivate them to act, then your efforts are for naught.

Here are five tips for writing marketing texts that get read and produce results:

1. Be brief and focused.
Your text message should be laser focused and succinct. There’s no room for fluff in mobile marketing. Know who your target audience is and speak directly to it. Leave out extraneous details and simply describe how to take advantage of your offer and its benefits.

2. Avoid hype, slang and abbreviations.

If your text message looks like spam, consumers will delete it without a second thought. It’s critical that you leave out anything that might seem too slick and promotional. That includes marketing hype like “amazing” offers, slang and text abbreviations, all of which cheapen the perception of your brand and can destroy your campaign.

3. Offer something of immediate value.

No one wants to receive texts from a company unless the messages offer something of immediate value. Because text messaging is an instantaneous medium, you should include real-time offers. Whether you’re providing information about a sale or a new product, the message should describe the benefits of acting now.

4. Identify yourself.

How often have you received a text that doesn’t identify the company or brand? Instead, you often see a phone number you don’t recognize and a vague message that could have come from any number of companies. And how often have you simply deleted those anonymous messages? It’s essential that you clearly identify your business or brand to avoid getting the spam treatment.

5. Make consumers feel special.

Don’t clutter consumers’ text message inboxes with offers and news they could easily get from your website or your brick-and-mortar locations. Instead, make recipients of your texts feel they’re special and have qualified for an exclusive promotion. Otherwise, they will most likely opt out of receiving any future texts from you.

Source: By SUSAN GUNELIUS on 28th March 2012.


Do you want to feel it yourself? Contact us at +603-8996 4780 or sales@moceansms.com

SMS Will Remain More Popular Than Mobile Messaging Apps over Next Five Years

Mobile messaging apps is not a treat to mobile operator anymore. The foretasted figure for SMS traffic by 2016 is 9.4 TRILLION would be amazing and shocking to everyone.

Mobile operators' SMS revenues may be under pressure from mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp, iMessage and others, but Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that mobile operators will still generate a total of US$722.7 billion in revenues from SMS between 2011 and 2016.

"There will not be a uniform decline in mobile operators' SMS traffic and revenues as a result of the adoption and use of over-the-top messaging services," says Pamela Clark-Dickson, senior analyst, Mobile Content & Applications, at Informa Telecoms & Media. "Factors such as the operators' pricing strategies, and the penetration of smartphones and mobile broadband in a market will determine how quickly and to what extent substitution occurs," she adds.

"For example, operators offering integrated tariffs that include a balanced proportion of voice, SMS and mobile data, are continuing to see growth in their SMS traffic and less impact on their SMS revenues," says Clark-Dickson.

While Informa is forecasting either slowing growth or even a small decline in person-to-person SMS revenues in some developed regions and countries, total global SMS revenues will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 3% over the next five years. Western Europe will generate the highest amount of SMS revenues globally between 2011 and 2016, totalling US$174.1 billion, followed by Asia Pacific Developing, where SMS revenues will total US$173.8 billion between 2011 and 2016.

Globally, Informa forecasts that SMS traffic will total 9.4 trillion messages by 2016, up from 5.9 trillion messages in 2011. However, SMS's share of global mobile messaging traffic will fall from 64.1% in 2011, to 42.1% in 2016. At the same time, global mobile instant messaging traffic will increase from 1.6 trillion messages in 2011 to 7.7 trillion messages in 2016, doubling its share of global messaging traffic from 17.1% in 2011 to 34.6% in 2016.

Informa also forecasts that, by 2016, mobile operators globally will still be generating a higher proportion of revenues from mobile IM than the third-party providers of OTT messaging services will, at US$8.7 billion or 54% of total IM service revenues. However, the OTT messaging service providers' share of IM revenues will climb from 37% of total revenues in 2011, to US$7.4 billion or 46% of total revenues in 2016.

MMS remains a lucrative service for mobile operators, punching above its weight in terms of revenues. While global MMS traffic is expected to represent just 1.7% of global messaging traffic in 2016, at 387.5 billion events, global MMS revenues will represent 10.6% of global messaging revenues within the same timeframe, at US$20.7 billion.

However, mobile e-mail will be the second highest-revenue generator for mobile operators by 2016, generating US$32 billion in revenues, or 16.3% of total global messaging revenues. "Mobile e-mail is an important revenue-generating service for mobile operators, largely because they offer it as a service bundled with a mobile data plan," says Clark-Dickson. In addition to Research in Motion's BlackBerry services, mobile operators also generate revenues from their own-brand mobile e-mail services and from offering data plans that are specifically tied to mobile e-mail services that their subscribers can independently access on their devices.

Source: By cellular-news.com on 29th May 2012