Gone are the days of coupons and loyalty cards gathering dust in a drawer! Now that loyalty programs are going digital, email and SMS have become the two preferred channels for pampering your customers. And in this game, it's text messaging that has the greatest impact on the business of retailers in all sectors.
Email has not said its last word in marketing, but is it really suitable for retailers? Cheaper to send, it's not all that profitable when it comes to return on investment... Across all sectors, email open rates are traditionally very low, below 30%.
For restaurants, it gets more complicated: according to the 2018 review by Mailchimp, the leader in email marketing, the open rate of promotional emails sent by restaurants stagnates at 20.26%. The click-through rate, meanwhile, drops dramatically to 1.06%...
It's simple: restaurants have the lowest click-through rate in the study, which takes into account 44 different industries. If you're a restaurant, your emails are even more likely to clog inboxes and even spam folders, with no return on investment.
Physical commerce is the sector that lends itself least to email marketing... Emails are drowned out by the mass of advertising messages. The reason for this is the impersonal aspect of email, not necessarily suited to a choice as intimate as that of your local shop.
On the contrary, with SMS, there's a much greater chance that your messages will reach your customers - and that they'll respond! Even more so if they always have a smartphone at hand. Text messages are much better exposed on the phone, with instant notifications that can't be missed - where some achieve the zenitude of only checking email once or twice a day.
As a result, SMS messages are consulted faster and more reliably than e-mails. There's no contest: texting with Pongotext messages are opened 80% of the time in the first 2 minutes, rising to 98% in the hours that follow.
Text messaging is the ideal way to reach customers who are always on the move. Much more integrated into daily life than email, they perform better for all categories, not just young urbanites for whom texting is second nature. Subscribing to a mailing list can be done in a restaurant, quickly and easily. The messages are personalized, for greater effectiveness in line with your customers' style.
There's just one constraint linked to the text format: it forces us to keep things short! But it's also an advantage: as our attention span is reduced to a few seconds, 160 characters are ideal for restaurant promotions and loyalty programs. Efficiency guaranteed!
The key to a successful SMS campaign is a good customer database! For this, you can easily collect a large volume of contact data with Hey Pongo tools.
Restaurants, stores, beauty salons, hair salons, CBD shops, etc... Several tools enable you to collect your customers' phone numbers, in compliance with the RGPD.
Place a contest on your website or social network accounts. The Booster is a contest customized to your colors. It reveals who your visitors are. Convert all your followers and users, collect phone numbers and activate all the marketing levers you want thanks to the impact of SMS campaigns.
Discover: 7 examples of successful SMS campaigns
