I’m Derek Johnson with tatango.com, and I’m answering the question, “How are retailers
using text message marketing?”
So if you’re a retailer that I’ve ever spoken to, when it comes to marketing, the
goal of the marketing is to drive sales for that retailer.
Now, that can be online sales, that can be in-store sales, it really doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, it’s increasing the amount of sales the retailer is doing.
So, with text message marketing, that’s the goal for a retailer, is to use text message
marketing to drive sales.
Now, how does that work?
So, first off, you wanna build a SMS subscriber database for your retail brand, and you do
that by usually advertising a keyword, so let’s say the keyword is “Join,” to
a short code, which would be owned by the brand, so let’s say a short code is 12345.
A shortcut can be anything between five and six numbers long.
So consumers would text the word “Join” to 12345 to opt in to receive the retailer’s
text messages.
Now, an opt-in is very, very important in the United States, because we have federal
law, which is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
It essentially says in a nutshell that you can’t text message consumers without their
prior consent.
So you always wanna make sure that you’re sending text messages to only consumers that
have asked for them.
So once a brand has got the mobile phone number from the customer, they’re gonna build an
SMS subscriber database, and that database is gonna grow over time.
Because one person’s gonna opt in today, one person is gonna opt in tomorrow, now we
have two subscribers, and the goal is to build that subscriber database for the retailer
as big as possible.
Now, why?
Well, text messaging has a 99% open rate.
So if you have 2 people in your text messaging list, compared to a million people in your
text messaging list, with a 99% open rate, it’s way better to send to a million people
than 2 people.
So the goal of text message marketing for a retailer first and foremost is to grow that
subscriber database as big as possible.
Now, as you’re growing it, you can market to those phone numbers.
I don’t think you have to get up to a million phone numbers and then you can start sending
messages.
No, you should start sending messages immediately, because the first couple of people that opt
in they’re expecting things.
So you don’t wanna wait a couple months until you get a million subscribers and then
start sending things.
You wanna stay on a frequency that makes sense for all the customers.
Now, one great way for retailers to grow their SMS subscriber database really fast and the
way that we recommend here at Tatango doing it is to offer some sort of incentive for
consumers to give up their phone number and opt in to the SMS subscriber database.
How does this work?
So instead of just saying, “Join our mobile club.
Text “Join” to 12345,” you wanna give some type of incentive for them to give up
their phone number.
So this will look something like, you know, “Save 20% off today when you join our mobile
club.
Text “Join” to 12345.”
So, again, there’s some type of incentive to actually give up the mobile phone number.
It was actually found that in a study consumers were 520% more likely to give up their mobile
phone number as long as there was some type of incentive given by the brand to give up
that phone number, pretty interesting.
Great way to grow your subscriber database if you’re a retailer.
So once the retailer has a subscriber database, whether it’s two people or a million people,
they’re gonna wanna send text messages to those subscribers, and those text messages
are gonna be offers, alerts, event reminders, really anything that the brand wants to send
out that eventually will drive both online or in-store sales.
Now, in a text message, there’s actually two different kinds of messages.
There’s text messages and MMS messages.
Text messages are 160 characters, that’s all, and it’s plain text.
You can put links in and phone numbers, but essentially that’s it.
Then there’s MMS messages, which are much longer text messages.
They’re 500 characters, including a subject line, which is kinda cool, but also in addition
to the text and the subject, you can include a video or an image.
Now, you can even include a GIF, I know that’s an image, but I kind of look at them as three
different things, so a video, image, or a GIF.
So that’s really popular for retailers, because people are visual, and when you’re
selling something in retail, usually you’re selling something that is visual.
So when you build up that subscriber database, you can then send text messages out.
And, with 99% open rate, it’s pretty likely that people are gonna open that text message.
And then whether you’re an online retailer, you’re an online, you’re gonna wanna link
in the text message to, you know, a consumer so they can open up a mobile app or they can
open up a mobile website and purchase.
If you’re more of a retailer with a physical presence, you can say in the text message,
“Come to our retail location and show this coupon code.”
But, essentially, at the end of the day, retailers are using text message marketing to drive
sales, either online or in-store.
So if you have any questions about retail text messaging, definitely let us know at
tatango.com.
Many of our clients are retailers.
We have a lot of experience in retail text messaging and would love to help.