Today, over 90% of French people have a mobile phone, and a significant number of them consult for it more than 100 times a day. Suddenly, many advertisers see SMS as a new marketing action to promote their products and services…
Specialized services for campaign management
SMS marketing has become widespread in recent years, with many companies emerging to provide advertisers with advanced tools to manage the automation of mailings to large audiences. A service like Mobimel offers to send 37,000 SMS for less than 2,000 EUR (ie 0.054 EUR/message). Other specialized services have developed to allow SMS sending in France and abroad (for example Primotexto, Smsfactor or Esendex).
These platforms may provide a link between a site and an SMS campaign manager account to facilitate the collection of numbers (CleverSMS offers a dedicated WordPress plugin, for example).
Advantages of SMS over Traditional Marketing Tools
Text messaging is the most popular form of communication in France (source Ofcom), French is used to view and read them, unlike email. More than 85% of emails are considered spam against just 1% of telephone messages (source Symantec). Thus SMS can be used to retain acquired customers (who gave their number when shopping in store or on the Internet), and to convince new prospects.
Many services provide associated information with telephone numbers to allow issuers to have information about the number to which they are sending messages (CSP, accommodation, vehicle, age group, etc.). Hence it allows personalization of shipment which can be beneficial.
Also, SMS marketing has an open rate (over 90%), and often a short wait (usually less than 10 minutes) before reading: so the message is opened and read by the majority of recipients.
The speed of reading the offers that can be sent by text message also helps the user to make a trip to the store. Thus 25% of mobile users visit the store immediately after receiving a promotional offer by text (source MVA – Arcep).
Its affordable cost means that SMS marketing fits into the overall marketing strategies of large companies (Canal+, AXA, Angie, Decathlon, TF1, Celio, etc.) and smaller companies, as the return on investment can be interesting.
With phone owners always (or almost always) having their phone in hand and connected via mobile data, SMS evangelists are almost certain to reach their goals efficiently every time.
Even though legal obligations for campaign managers must be respected (banning of messaging at night or on weekends), SMS marketing is a powerful lever for BtoC marketing strategies. It has also established itself as a pivotal channel for building loyalty and obtaining new “leads”, as an element that is both essential and complementary to traditional techniques…
About the Author
hakim saucy
project Manager
Malabar Design Agency
www.malabardesign.fr