Valentine’s Day is full of opportunities for marketers, provided you have the right kind of message for your business. Consumers are enamored with clever messages that run parallel to the word of the day – Love! Here are a few important SMS marketing strategies to better engage with customers.
1) Personalize messages according to your audience.
Start with the couples. Husbands and wives (as well as boyfriends and girlfriends) will always be compelled to make purchases for their significant others. However, studies show that husbands are the most likely demographic to forget about Valentine’s Day – so help these guys out! Make sure your message reflects how your product will ease the burden of remembering Valentine’s Day, and make love-filled gifts convenient and affordable.
On the other hand, be sure to create tailored messages for all kinds of singles. Certainly, you want to target those who are open to mingle at a “Singles Only” event. But don’t forget about those who simply despise Valentine’s Day! You can reach these consumers by playing up the motif: either offer encouraging messages to the brokenhearted, or if it fits your brand, you might blast V-Day with some fun rhetoric (i.e., Love bites, Cupid is dead, or sign up for a Revenge Makeover that’ll make your ex weep).
2) Get to the point.
SMS text messaging is a fantastic way of reaching lovers any time of the year, but since you only get 160 characters in each text message, get to the point quickly. Great SMS campaigns always take advantage of the character limitations. Try offering a promotional gift for anyone who sends in the best love poem of the day: shorter poems like haiku and limericks fit nicely into the parameters of SMS messages. Or you could have users send you their definition of love, as the UK-based Scribbler did last Valentine’s Day, definitions that they republished on their website. As a result, they fostered mobile engagement, crowdsourced their content, and they managed to generate a ton of leads for the rest of the year.
3) Create a Valentine’s Day promotion.
Consumers love promotions that revolve around holidays, helping them feel the spirit and celebration of the special time. Create a promotion that involves SMS engagement, and suits the loving themes of Valentine’s Day. Take a look at these Valentine’s Day promotions:
- #RomanceOnDemand by Uber
- “Whose heart do you love?” by MegaRed
- “Pay With Lovin’” by McDonald’s
With whatever promotion you decide to go with, just make sure that you can get the word out using a simple and them inspired text message.
4) Send multiple messages according to a drip campaign.
While SMS marketing tends to work well for Valentine’s Day, studies show that multiple text messages are much more effective. Customers are open to receiving more than one message prior to Valentine’s Day, provided the messages are valuable, relevant, and timely. By creating a marketing calendar, you can customize these deliveries to correspond with a drip campaign, sending out messages on the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 11th of February. That way you stay top of mind when customers make their purchasing decisions.
Using these simple ideas, you can help your customers feel the love in the air. Remember, consumers are looking for ways to spend their money on loved ones this Valentine’s Day, and your business has the power to make the process fun and easy!