How a UK business beat the biggest brands in the country and achieved a 4,000% return on investment
Earlier this year, a marketing campaign from one of the top five UK motor vehicle retailers, Lookers, utilised a new SMS technology to offer a winning combination of personalisation and a highly desirable offer. The result was a profit of over £74,000 for a spend of just £1,800. This represented a return on investment of 4,000%.
The campaign also beat the likes of John Lewis, Heineken, Audi and Jaguar to triumph in two categories at the highly prestigious Effective Mobile Marketing Awards last week. Including: Most Effective Sales Promotion Campaign and Most Effective Automotive Campaign or Solution. As well as being shortlisted for the Most Effective Rich Media Campaign.
So, what is this new SMS technology, and how did the large motor vehicle retailer use it to spawn this success?
The secret to Lookers’ award-winning success
Lookers already used a variety of tactics to contact customers, but were experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions. They wanted a cost-effective solution to generate car sales quickly. The solution? SMS ticketing.
Although they already used SMS to reach their customers for MOT and service reminders, they saw the potential in this new text messaging technology.
Using this new feature, Lookers created and sent individually coded tickets that could be saved to any mobile phone, each of which were personalised for 80,000 customers across the North-West region.
The SMS tickets contained special offers on two specific Vauxhall models and links embedded in the texts directed customers to web pages with more information about the cars. These pages were hidden from search engines so only those who received the message could see the website pages. This made the customer feel valued and a part of an exclusive club.
Each of the unique codes on the SMS tickets, were linked back to Lookers’ customer records. This allowed them to redeem these codes in several ways, such as through integration with their CRM system.
Lookers were also able to track which customers had clicked links, giving them great intelligence in their customers’ interests and levels of engagement for future campaigns.
The results of the SMS ticket campaign were phenomenal and drove a huge level of customer engagement.
Not bad for a simple text messaging campaign.
It just goes to show that SMS can do so much more than just deliver words. You can send vouchers, surveys, attachments and, in the case of Lookers, tickets. Plus, with text messaging boasting a 98% open rate, there’s no better way to communicate a new campaign.
Donald Trump’s successful use of “Text Trump” in his recent election campaign, also demonstrates the potential of mass communication via SMS as well. In fact, a recent study by data agency mobile squared revealed that text messaging is officially the fastest growing marketing channel in the UK.
The brains behind SMS ticketing
Textlocal offered the car giants their new innovative ticketing solution to instantly cut through the noise of other marketing channels and effectively deliver award-winning results.
Paul Craft, Divisional Online Sales and Performance Manager at Lookers, said: “Textlocal’s brilliant, but simple SMS ticketing, was the solution to overcome the barriers that we had been experiencing in communicating with our customers. Not only were we able to offer genuine benefits to our customers, but also generate sales and crucially for us gather important information for the future.”
So, if you’re interested in generating more sales and improving your communications in the build-up to Christmas, try the fastest-growing marketing channel today. Sign up for a free Textlocal account to start building your SMS campaign today.
Who knows, maybe your next campaign could beat the likes of John Lewis and Audi to win a highly prestigious marketing award.
For more information on business SMS for motor companies, get in touch with the team today.
