Last year, Valentine’s Day was the busiest day for text messaging in the first quarter with 1.06 billion text messages being sent on Feb. 14th 2009 (VeriSign). This year, businesses should take advantage of the viral nature of sms text messages to increase sales and build relationships with customers. It will also make your advertising engaging and rememberable.
Here are some examples:
1. Hold a SMS Text Contest (Text2Win). This is an easy message to incorporate into traditional advertising and as Valentine’s Day approaches you can send additional ideas and discounts, “win a (insert product/service here) from YOUR Business, text LOVE to 95 4 95.” You can then response with, “You’re entered. Get 10 more entries by coming to the store.” Now your radio spot is fun, engaging and driving traffic.
2. Make a Valentine’s Gift suggestion. “Text for our hottest items (or) What will she love? Text ABC to 95 4 95 for our best sellers.” Again, as Valentine’s Day approaches send updates, discounts and reminders.
3. Text for discounts/coupons. “Get 20% off, text LOVE to 95 4 95″. If this is your first text campaign, this is where you start. Simple, high reach, easy to manage.
4. Store locator, mobile web. You can use any combination of #1-3 and also link them to the mobile web for pictures, discounts, offers, splash ads and more. Check out our mobile web demo: http://connectwithtext.com. Our software includes a style sheet and CMS program so you can add pages, change colors, etc. from your computer.
5. Let customers send a gift from your business. This is great for restaurants, wine tasting, candy/ice cream and retailers. Here’s the copy points, “send your friends a $2 chocolate (or glass of wine, free appetizer, etc.), text LOVE to 95 4 95.” The auto-response would say, “forward this message to your friends & they’ll get a $2 (product) thanks to you. Expires 2/14. Shw msg at purchase.” The great part is that you don’t pay from them to forward it to their friends. They spread the word for you. Word of mouth, viral marketing … it’s all great stuff.
Hopefully these ideas will help you think of more ideas! Remember if you interviewed 10 people after Valentine’s Day and said, “what ads do you remember?” They won’t remember the ad they saw 2 minutes ago. But they will remember the ad that asked them to pull out their phone, text in, they received a response and they sent it to a friend.
The Keywords LOVE and VDAY are available and text campaigns are extremely affordable. Great for a small business budgets and easy for experienced advertisers to incorporate into their traditional advertising budget.
For more info: http://www.mccormickmobilemedia.com.
