Welp MagazineA good marketing plan can mean the difference between amazing success, just scraping by, and utter failure. Using mobile marketing is a great way to get more customers through the door or placing orders every day. Almost everyone you know likely uses text messaging in some capacity. They probably have a smartphone or access to email as well. With the ubiquity and widespread use of such technology, it only makes sense to leverage it somehow to help with marketing your establishment. That’s where using a comprehensive mobile marketing platform can really help improve business performance.
Return on Marketing Speed
To understand this metric, you should first understand what it is and what it actually measures. Ideally, you want to spend less money on the marketing campaign that it generates in practice. Basically, you shouldn’t be spending more on marketing than the return it provides. Marketing speed in this sense is simply monitoring which marketing methods are working and which ones aren’t. If a message isn’t performing well, your marketing platform can use an algorithm to calculate your return on that message and help you decide if you want to continue sending it or need to adjust it to enable it to work better/more efficiently.
Allows Different Kinds of Messages
A text message does not need to be limited to a short message. There are a few different types of text messaging that can improve both engagement and conversion rates.
SMS stands for Short Messaging Service. These are your typical text messages that do not have images or larger files.
MMS means multimedia messaging service. MMS messages can have links, attachments, and images (essentially any kind of multimedia).
RCS is an amazing service that takes things to the next level. It’s sort of a blend of SMS and MMS, enabling the use of both simple messages and multimedia. An abbreviation for rich content services, these can lead to very high conversion rates. They engage customers more in the long run.
Another option is to use text message marketing in conjunction with other marketing methods or platforms. A powerful mobile marketing platform can handle this type of integration while maximizing open rates, conversion, and returns.
Metrics
Getting messages out to customers and potential customers is one thing. Understanding and measuring how well they’re performing is another. One of the most useful aspects of your mobile marketing platform is the ability to see those metrics quickly and clearly. These metrics include:
- Open rates
- Redemption rates
- Purchase history
- Sharing statistics
- How each message impacts revenue
- Click rates
- Visit frequency
- Most active daypart (this is especially important in the restaurant business and insights here are invaluable)
- Market segment
- Metrics for every message you send
By equipping yourself with the knowledge that comes directly from customer behavior, you can tailor promotions and messages to generating business the optimal way. If more people are opening a “buy one, get one free” coupon than a “20% off” coupon, you can choose to re-send the BOGO coupon again with a different message or send more of those types of coupons to the subscribers who open those messages most often. If they’re visiting your restaurant or making purchases at certain times of the day, you can react to that in real-time as well. The possibilities are limitless here, giving you the tools to adjust not only your marketing message but also your operation to maximize revenue generation.
Offers for Customers
A large part of successful mobile marketing lies in making customers feel as if they’re getting some value out of being part of the program. Coupons, specials, deals, and promotions all work toward the same goal: increasing your sales. So, why not offer your customers something they can’t get anywhere else? Maybe you can pair up with another business to offer a discount if they bring in a receipt from that business. Let’s say you’re located next to a movie theatre. You can run a promotion where customers who bring in their ticket stub can get $2 off their meal. If you’re adjacent to an ice cream parlor, perhaps you can work out an arrangement with them to provide a discount or complimentary item at both locations when the customer provides a receipt. Even if you’re only doing in-house promotions through your text message marketing, you can use mobile marketing to your advantage. Once you determine what your offers will be, you’ll need to communicate them with your subscribers through your mobile marketing platform. From there, you can see how well the promotion is doing, who’s most interested in it via demographics, and obtain first-party information that can inform future offers or promotions.
Monitoring Promotions
Part of running a promotion is monitoring it. You want your promotion to succeed and drive sales, but you also need to manage it so you don’t lose any revenue from unexpected issues. One thing to monitor is open rates. Your marketing platform can give you insight into that. Another big one is expiration dates, which nearly all coupons have in one form or another. Sometimes customers will try to hoard coupons, attempt to re-use them or cause issues for your staff at the time of redemption. That’s where expiration dates and timelines come in handy. The mobile marketing platform can let you build messages with an expiration date that automatically informs subscribers when the promo is no longer valid. This saves some of the aforementioned trouble while giving you better control over the coupon/promotion. Keeping an eye on your promotions is just as important as sending them in the first place, so it’s best to rely on your marketing platform to help guide you through the finer details.
