I used to be a member of Crunch Fitness Gym in Clonsilla, Dublin but my membership lapsed a few years ago. The other day I received a SMS message from them which said something like “SPECIAL offer for St Patricks day. Rejoin Crunch gym before 7pm Mon 19th and receive a free Nike Rockstar course and no joining fee. Only a few spaces remaining. 01 8025906” I was impressed with this use of SMS marketing to try and entice me back to their gym, it was a good example of using direct response SMS marketing by an Irish business. It works on the theory that selling to existing or past customers is much more cost effective than it is to sell to new ones. This is due to the fact that you have a track record with them already and they know what you can do for them. SMS message marketing is also much more cost effective than traditional direct mail at a cost of only 5 cent per message as opposed to 80 cent to put together and post a mailer. The response rate of SMS marketing in Ireland versus traditional media is also impressive. It is not uncommon for response rates to get as high as 40%. It is much harder to ignore a mobile phone beeping in your pocket than it is say a direct mailing piece sitting on your doorstep. This SMS message was also good as it made some attempt to give a reason for the promotion. People like to know the reason why you are making them an offer and a St Patrick’s day offer is as good as any. Another plus point of this message is the use of a free offer and waiving of the joining fee; this helps to strengthen the offer and makes it easier for people to try out the service. An even better approach might have been "no joining fee and first month free - try us out a no cost" Including a deadline in the offer was a good idea and should form the basis of any direct marketing piece not just SMS marketing. Giving a date and time limit of when the offer expires ensures prospects act straight away rather than ‘leaving it on the long finger’ and forgetting about it. Having seen this example of the gym using SMS marketing in Ireland perhaps you can see how you could maybe incorporate SMS marketing to promote your Irish business. This type of campaign can be very straightforward to implement. You don’t have to use SMS marketing solely for reactivation of old clients; there are many other business promotion uses for it. One example might be to use inbound SMS messaging to make it really easy for your customers to request your sales materials. You could do this by simply including instructions to text your name and email address to a specific free text number. SMS marketing is also very well suited to offers that are time sensitive in nature, for example if you were a bar owner you might wish to notify customers that you have a special poker night running. Other businesses such as alternative therapists could use SMS marketing to try and promote unfilled appointments that they may have on a particular day. They could send a SMS message to all their clients offering a discounted treatment to all those that take the slots.
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I used to be a member of Crunch Fitness Gym in Clonsilla, Dublin but my membership lapsed a few years ago. The other day I received a SMS message from them which said something like “SPECIAL offer for St Patricks day. Rejoin Crunch gym before 7pm Mon 19th and receive a free Nike Rockstar course and no joining fee. Only a few spaces remaining. 01 8025906”
Author: Matt Eve is a writer and runs a specialist marketing company in Ireland.See more of his articles at his irish marketing blog Feel free to grab a unique version of this article from the marketing Articles Submission Service
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