The campaign, by car giant Lookers, utilised a new SMS technology from Chester-based Textlocal.com to offer a winning combination of personalisation and a highly desirable offer, resulting in a return on investment of more than 4000% per cent.
The campaign beat the likes of John Lewis, Audi, Tesco and Jaguar to scoop two prizes at the prestigious Effective Mobile Marketing Awards for Most Effective Sales Promotion Campaign and Most Effective Automotive Campaign.
Lookers, which have nearly 400 sites and are one of the top five motor vehicle retailers in the UK, were looking for new ways to engage with customers and increase sales after experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions.
Paul Craft, Divisional Online Sales and Performance Manager said: “We wanted a cost-effective solution to generate sales quickly, which can be a challenge to achieve when trying to drive bigger campaigns to success.”
At the time, Lookers were using the business text messaging platform Textlocal.com to reach their customers for MOT and service reminders.
Textlocal.com, renowned pioneers in text messaging for business, recently developed a new technology that provided the answer to Lookers’ challenge, SMS ticketing.
Lookers used SMS ticketing to create and send individually coded tickets that could be saved to any mobile phone, each of which were personalised for 80,000 customers across the North-West region.
The SMS tickets contained special offers on two specific Vauxhall models and links embedded in the texts directed customers to web pages with more information about the cars. These pages were hidden from search engines so only those who received the message could see the offer. This gave the campaign a personal edge that is a growing demand marketers sometimes struggle to meet.
Each of the unique codes on the SMS tickets, were linked back to Lookers’ customer records. This allowed them to redeem these codes in several ways, such as through integration with their CRM system.
Lookers were also able to track which customers had clicked links, giving them great intelligence in their customers’ interests and levels of engagement for future campaigns.
The results of the SMS ticket campaign were phenomenal and drove a huge level of customer engagement.
Jason Palgrave-Jones, Managing Director at Textlocal, said: “SMS marketing can be far more powerful than other forms of direct marketing and we have proved with the Lookers campaign that the humble text message can be a highly effective communication platform.
“To win two industry awards in extremely competitive categories is a reflection of just what an impact the campaign had and we are delighted that our work with Lookers yielded such excellent results for them.”
A recent study by data agency mobilesquared found that opt-in SMS is the fastest growing marketing channel in the UK. Their 2016 study also predicted that it will continue to grow by nearly four million people each year. SMS boasts a 98% open rate, with 90% of those being read within the first three minutes.
Paul Craft added: “Textlocal’s brilliant, but simple SMS ticketing, was the solution to overcome the barriers that we had been experiencing in communicating with our customers. Not only were we able to offer genuine benefits to our customers, but also generate sales and crucially for us gather important information for the future.”
