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Irish Marketing: Using SMS Marketing To Promote Your Business |
By:
Matt Eve.. |
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Irish Marketing: Using SMS marketing to promote your business
by Matt Eve..
On Friday I received the following SMS message from Crunch Fitness Gym in Clonsilla, Dublin that I used to be a member of. It said "ST PATRICKS SPECIAL. Rejoin Crunch fitness before 7pm Mon 19th and receive a free Nike Rockstar course and no membership joining fee. Ltd spaces avail. 01 8025906"
This is a good example of using SMS marketing to try and reactivate dormant customers using a direct response mechanism. It is much more cost effective and easier to sell to past and existing customers than it is to sell to new ones. This is because once they have dealt with you already they have an affinity with you and know what you can do for them. Seeing as the cost to send 1 SMS message can be less than 5cent this makes it a much more cost effective and less wasteful medium, than sending a direct mail packages by post.
At present response rates for SMS marketing in Ireland can sometimes be as high as 40%, I think people are much more likely to read an SMS message than they are to sift through the junk mail at home. Receiving a SMS message is still something that is very hard to ignore as opposed to receiving a 'junk' mailing piece.
The sender of this SMS message did well to give a reason for the special promotion. People like there to be a valid reason for you to contact them and using the excuse of St Patrick's day is as good as any.
Another positive thing about this message was the way a free offer was incorporated into it. By getting rid of the joining fee there is one less barrier for a potential customer to take advantage of the offer. To make the offer even stronger it might have been a good idea to offer the first months membership for free at no obligation. This would have completely removed all barriers to rejoining and got the prospects back in the door.
Incorporating a deadline into the SMS marketing message is also another good idea. By giving a deadline of when the offer closes prospects know that they need to act fast. It gives a powerful call to action.
Having seen this example of the gym using SMS marketing in Ireland perhaps you can see how you could maybe incorporate SMS marketing to promote your Irish business. This type of campaign can be very straightforward to implement. You don't have to use SMS marketing solely for reactivation of old clients; there are many other business promotion uses for it. One example might be to use inbound SMS messaging to make it really easy for your customers to request your sales materials. You could do this by simply including instructions to text your name and email address to a specific free text number.
The use of text messaging as a way of communicating with existing customers is well suited to offers that are time sensitive in nature. For example the owner of a pub which is running a comedy night could let his regulars know and also perhaps include some kind of offer such as first drink free to attract customers. Other businesses can use SMS marketing to fill spaces that once past can no longer be sold. For example appointments at a beauty therapist that are not taken could be offered to regular clients with say a 20% discount.
Author: Matthew Eve is a author and runs a specialist marketing company in Ireland.Read more of his articles at his irish marketing blog You are welcome to reprint this article - but get your own unique content version here.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article53794.html |
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