cool advertising method

[eda]

Ok, so my text message went out to customers 10 days ago. I sent out 988 messages to cell phones numbers I had on file.

We have dollar off coupons on site, and 3-4 times or so a year I have a mailer that offers $2.00 off. The Val - Pak mailer has never returned more than 10%

For this text, we offered $1.50 off any wash & a free air freshener. So far to date I have had just over 150 customers utilize this. The expiration date is Sunday, the 10th.

Overall, I am pretty happy. Return is at 15% and still have time left for customer redemption. In addition, I have had customers in line who asked what the customer is showing my cashier the phone for. She explained the coupon. Now, we put a sign by the register for customers to provide the cashier the cell phone # for future discounts.

I will do one final update the middle of May.

Eda

 

[bigleo48]

Eda,

Thanks for that. It seems like a good way to retain customers and get their attention, however I would not compare it to the Val-pak coupon directly. I too have done the Val-Pak type mailouts and they have been OK, but in that case, I'm going after new customers...so if I can get 10%, with say 5% that are new, then that's good. Your SMS coupons go towards existing customers. So the focus is different.

Also, I found the direct mailouts work well for the first few and then tail off after 4 or 5 mailouts. So it will be interesting to see if you can maintain that 15% with the SMS coupons, or will they tail off too or even better grow as the customers better understand what they are getting.

BigLeo

 

[eda]

Final text message tally.

The last 10 days the coupon went really well. Out of the 988 messages that went out with the discount offer I received 365 phone coupons. At over 35% return, I rule it successful.

Since I had the coupon out there for 3 weeks some of the customers used it twice. We guess about 15 -20 people used it twice. This is new to me, so maybe next time I would shorten the length to two weeks.

Also, as I mentioned last time I put a sign out asking customers to provide us their cell number to receive future discounts via text. Just over 50 people did this, which expanded my database a little bit.

Well, that's my feedback on this campaign. Truly, I would recommend it to someone else.

Eda