If you've been searching for a way to increase the open rates of your
messages, text/mobile marketing may be the answer you're looking for. The open
rate of SMS is 98%, compared with 22% for emails (find more mobile marketing
stats at 19 Mobile Marketing Stats that Will Blow Your Mind).
I decided to seek out an expert to see just how beneficial text marketing
could be for a pizzeria. I found Joe Brannon, co-founder and CEO of textLIVING, who shares with me below some of the best ways
to build a database of customers for your text marketing campaign, and a few of
the most successful examples of messages to send.
The Pizza Insider: What are a few of the
benefits of texting customers?
Joe Brannon:
Texts are opened 98% of the time and 83% are opened within 3 minutes. This form
of communication has the highest open rates of any platform. Texting your
customers gives you the ability to engage customers immediately.
Whether it be for a last minute event update, an afternoon special, or to
increase your social media presence, text will give you immediate results. And
if you partner with the right firms you will be able to track
your text results.
The Pizza Insider: What are the big dos and don'ts of text marketing?
Joe Brannon: The number one
"do" is to always offer value when sending out a text to your
customers. Make sure grammar and spelling are correct and craft your message to
be one message which is 160 characters. If you have more you would like to
tell you customers, then use a miniature URL for them to click inside the
message. The biggest "don't" is overuse of the service. A message
every 7-10 days is about the max you want to blast your entire customer base
with a text.
The Pizza Insider: Please give me a few
examples of texts that get the biggest response from customers.
Joe Brannon:
The texts that get the biggest response have a short expiration period. The
offers that we see the best results are either a FREE item with purchase (FREE
Burger with purchase of large fries and drink) or a specific dollar
amount off ($5 Off $10). In our platform these specific type
offers have seen upwards of 10% redemption rates in a single day.
What are the best ways to grow a text marketing
database of numbers?
Joe Brannon:
When textLIVING first started, we used the traditional way of
engaging customers to join a text club by texting a keyword to a short code
such as: Text COFFEE to 91681 for a FREE Coffee and to join our text club. We
found that the adoption rates for this type of engagement
was extremely low. We then decided to build a text based digital
rewards program that allows consumers to sign-up on an iPad in a tamper-proof
case at the point-of-sale or hostess station. Our adoption rates increased
dramatically and we now have customers with 10K plus subscribers
per location.
Are you using text/mobile marketing in your
pizzeria? Let me know how it's working for you in the comments below.
--Liz
Eddy Puig-CEO Expose Mobile. Liz, i like the article and i agree with Joe, SMS is a piece of the marketing a lot of the pizzas shop owner are not taking advantage.It is easy to deploy a SMS campaign,something Joe forgot to tell is 96% americans got smartphone right now,around 50-54% got a Facebook account.Text combine with Social media and Email Blast create a powerful platform to reach customer anywhere anytime.
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