Feature
Thumbs up to texting!
Text messages are short, sharp and successful, says Ian Laverty. I
received a text yesterday from Papa Johns. I hadn’t asked for it. I hadn’t ‘subscribed’ to the service but they’d obviously taken my mobile number
from a previous order and added it to their database. I opened the text, I read the text, I wasn’t off ended or annoyed by the text being sent to me – and in fact last night my son and I had an extra large pizza between us for only £9.99 (other pizza brands are available!). Marketing can be an expensive business so
it’s important that you get a bang for your buck and that you can monitor just how much bang you’re getting. Direct mail has been eff ective but it’s becoming increasingly less so. The price of sending a mail item to each potential customer is 46p for fi rst class and 36p for second class (discounts for large numbers, but still expensive) – that’s getting pricey. It’s also diffi cult to monitor the success rate of your mailers unless you ask a respondent to quote a reference number when they enquire about a property. Having said that, many businesses are making their mail marketing more interactive and bringing it up to date through the use of QR codes linking to good, interactive mobile optimised content. Done properly, you can track the number of times a QR code has been scanned and monitor the response rate. A good direct mail campaign will generate typically between 0.5 per cent and three per cent response though usually to the lower end of that scale. Doing the simple maths, I mail 200 people and I’ll get between one and six respondents – it’s not wonderful is it? In a world where we all want a quick turnaround (especially your vendors and landlords!) however, snail mail just doesn’t cut it.
AVOIDING THE SPAM What about email? – it’s free after all! If your emails are carefully targeted rather than sent out generically to a large database, then you can expect a response rate of around two per cent (click through rate). Email has a number of problems that you need to be aware of. We all have spam fi lters and if you’re sending emails to a large group of people it’s easy to fall foul of them. This can have implications when you want to send out important and legitimate emails to clients
18 ● July 2012 ● TheNegotiator
snail mail just doesn’t cut it!’
want a quick turnaround,
‘When we
where their email provider has determined that you are guilty of spam. The reality is that 90 per cent* of your
recipients delete the message immediately without opening it
never mind reading it. You’re now looking
for a response from a very small proportion of recipients making it diffi cult to generate the leads you’re looking for.
EFFECTIVE TEXT So what about text? Well actually, it’s proved to be an eff ective method of marketing and it continues to grow in both eff ectiveness and acceptance. Straight away you overcome the spam issue and the problem of people deleting your message without reading it. 95 per cent of the people who receive a marketing text message are reported to read it within 15 minutes. Look beyond the 15
www.thenegotiator.co.uk
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