Photo by John Fraissinet
It’s Saturday night, you’ve been out with the family all day long shopping and running errands and the last stop is the grocery store. You suddenly remember that you haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast while walking down the aisle, and your stomach just let out a growl loud enough to make the toddler in the cart next to you laugh. You hear your text alert sound and you find out it’s a text from your favorite pizza place giving you a large, any topping pizza for $3 for the next hour. Although pizza wasn’t your mind before, it is now.
Top of mind awareness is what makes text marketing so powerful. Once getting past the initial clutter of “text marketing is spam” messages, text marketing has the potential to have a very high ROI.
Text marketing feeds into consumers’ new desire to get information in real time. No longer do we have to wait for the specials to be shown on television, hear them on radio, or log on and register for a coupon. The coupon code(s) comes directly to our cell phones and all we have to do is save the message until we need it.
Retail stores and restaurants can leverage text marketing and almost immediately see an increase in traffic. Imagine if your restaurant or store had a database with the phone numbers of customers who opted in to receive texts, and you schedule a message to be sent at noon with a coupon code that is good for four hours. It’s safe to assume your store will be a little more crowded than normal during that timeframe.
Text message marketing gives people what they want, although it may not be exactly when they want it. You’re not going to see a 100% response rate to your texts, but that’s expected.
As long as the text craze exists, text message marketing will be valuable to some businesses. Adding text messaging to your marketing mix has a high potential ROI as long as you don’t overuse it.
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I know that texting a simple code securely provided donations to Haiti a few months ago, and I am sure there was a lot involved behind that effort. How wonderful it would be to be able to tell folks to text a certain code from their cell phones and donate, $1, $5, $10 etc. dollars to their favorite charity or fundraiser on a local level. That way, the promo isn’t texted as telemarketing spam, but rather it is their choice to send the ‘text donation.’ Not sure if I am making sense, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately.
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Kristine,
If the frequency of the texts were low texting on a local level may work. Especially if the person has given their cell phone information and have opted in to receive occasional texts. If they get annoyed they can unsubscribe.
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As always, I appreciate your prompt responses and ideas, Geoff. If I am understanding clearly, you would not want to text an immense amounts of messages or it would be a turn off, per se–if the prospect donor or current supporter accepted to opt in to receive them from an organizatoin. They can then unsubscribe from these texts just like they could e-commerc e. I guess the catch would be to ensure you have credible cell phone numbers, not just work and home digits, and also a program to send all texts to everyone at once…kind of like an e-mail blast to a listserv? Food for thought!
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