Text Message Marketing

SMS Marketing is necessary for any business that wants to have an open dialog with their customers.  How many times per day does a customer come into your business, use your services, enjoy the experience, and yet you never know when or if you will ever see them again?  Unfortunately, for businesses without text message marketing, it happens all too often. 

Sending a text message to a customer keeps your business in front of your customers, and will connect you to them on a personal level.  Every morning when we leave our house, we grab our wallet, keys, and phone.  This connection to our phone makes us very sensitive to the material we receive.  Text message marketing takes advantage of this connection and the result is a high response rate.  95% of all marketing text messages are opened; most are opened within 4 minutes.  This allows SMS marketing to help you with short term goals, as well as long term goals.  For example, let’s look at a text message scenario through the eyes of a casino.

It’s a Thursday afternoon and a casino has a comedy club that seats 300 people.  It has been pouring down rain all day, so foot traffic has been slow.  The manager of the comedy club, who has been given access to a text messaging platform, looks at his ticket sales and there are 127 open seats for this evenings show.  Instead of letting these seats go unused, he sends out a text message to his database of 250 people that reads: “Rick Freeman, from the Conan O’Brien show, tonight at 8:00.  Tickets are Buy 1 Get 1 free. Call for reservation, 800-555-1234.”  A typical result for a situation like this is a 10% response rate.  So what does this mean?

A message was sent out to 250 people and 95% of those messages were opened.  This means 237 people read the text.  With a 10% response rate, 23 people purchased two tickets each.  Instead of having 127 empty seats, now there are 81 empty seats.  If tickets for the evening cost $20, then the club generated $460 in last minute ticket sales, plus any money spent on food and drinks.  The cost of sending this message would be around $35.