In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by John Stuckey from MobileDigital. The company is focused on helping businesses utilise the power of text to communicate with customers. John and the team create personalised MMS which have open rates of over 98% and click through rates of 60%. Boasting customers including Country Road, Pet Circle and Harris Farm, I asked John to come on and give us a bit of a 101 on text messaging and how to get the most out of it. In today’s episode, we dive into the elements that make a great text campaign, where text campaigns can go wrong and how to get started with your marketing team. John has also given Add To Cart listeners a special offer which entitles them to 5,000 free SMS and 500 free MMS with a three-month SNIPER trial.
“You can get 40 and 50% conversion, but you’ve got to be sending it right place right time.”
John Stuckey
Questions answered in this episode include…
- What are the top tips for building a brand in a customer’s phone?
- How does text marketing compare to email marketing?
- What are some common mistakes companies make when initially taking up text messaging?
Tips on text for success
“One would be personalization, the more trust you can create with someone. So the first thing would be using their name, and that’s simple. With an MMS, you can send a contact card, and then you can have that contact card in their phone, so anytime they get an SMS or an MMS from that number in the future, it comes up as a contact. That’s a really good way of doing it, and some of our clients do that, certainly Country Road send out their messages with a vCard on them. Not everybody downloads it, but over time, that’s something that you want to continue to build on.
Also in the content of your message, if you use their name, the person’s name, and also if you can link it to a prior product purchase or something that they’ve done before. We talk about context, but if you can make your message contextual as well as timely and as well as valuable, if you can make that message, it’s… There’s a whole dark art to it, to be very honest. It’s not email, it’s different. It’s a new channel, and different strokes for different folks, but when it works, it’s ridiculously outstanding.”
Hit them in the phone…carefully
So an MMS is a very powerful device, and I say to people, even if you’re only going to send one MMS, send the first one up front to build your brand in somebody’s phone, and then you can alternate with SMS.
You wouldn’t want to be sending an MMS every month. You might want to send one every quarter to put your brand in front of people, and then you might want to send an SMS every month to remind them or to put an offer in front of them with a call-to-action or something like that.
The enemy of text is overuse and I think anyone who ever got spammed by Domino’s might agree with it. Because of the results, people can get greedy, as people have got with email, which unfortunately has made a great product not as good as it could be, and now we tend to look at email as a very passive product, whereas this one, because this one hits you in the face or hits you in the phone, you have to be very respectful of how you use it, because it’s a very personal medium.
Car wreckers’ best tool
“It works for any size business. My favorite business, and you’ll have to forgive me because I talk about this one all the time, it’s the lowest revenue earner we have, but I love it.
The guy wrecks cars. Yeah, auto repairs. If you’ve ever been super broke, you have to put your name on a list at a wrecker to get a panel or something for a car like that. I remember I had a Datsun 120Y, and it had three different panels on it that I’d got from wreckers. Anyway, that was when I was super poor. But anyway, so he wrecks cars, but they used to have a register and you put the name of the car in, and then contact you if they got the car in. So what he does is he takes your name, they put it into their database, and if that car comes in, they send an MMS with a picture of the car that they’re wrecking to the people on the list. Now, they used to have to phone those people.
He may send between 15 and 20 different campaigns based around 15 to 20 different cars he gets in a week, but he does it in 30 minutes, and he has 100% take-up. So that is a replacement to the outbound call, and it’s the same team of people he had in the Philippines doing it. He doesn’t have the team anymore, he has one person using the product to produce that. So I think they’re the big changes because 90% of the world would prefer to deal with someone by text.”
Links from the episode:
- MobileDigital
- Country Road
- Harris Farm
- Pet Circle
- Salesforce
- Tealium
- Don Draper
- Texts We Love (Attentive)
- SMS Archives (Tatango)
- Rapidshop
- Net a Porter
- Airship
- Replybuy
- Signet (sponsored)
- Shopify Plus & Jenny Craig (sponsored)
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