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In today´s world of high-intensity direct marketing, text marketing takes advantage of a channel of communication - already used by your customers to connect with each other - in order to get your message heard quickly and effectively.

Not only does marketing retail promotions by text deliver your message to your potential customer wherever they are and whatever they are doing, but it can also be used to encourage engagement and generate sales.

Furthermore, as SMS sales marketing reaches older-model cellphones as well as the latest Internet-enabled smartphones, text messaging for promotions has a broader reach than any other electronic channel of direct marketing.

Show transcript

Speaker 1: What is CallFire? CallFire is the solution to save your business time and money. With CallFire's powerful voice and text messaging service you can reach your customers instantly. Want some examples? Let's say you're running a promotion and want to call your customers all at once to tell them all about it.

Speaker 2:This is David's Dry Cleaning. It's almost New Year's Eve. Get a 15% discount to dry clean your clothes.

Speaker 1:Or maybe you want to send a text message and reach your customers right in their pocket. Perhaps you're looking to find out what customers think of your business, so you send an automated phone survey to follow up. Or you want to find out which of your ads is driving sales, so you start tracking your incoming calls. Maybe you make calls all day and just need a better way to manage your outreach. With CallFire you'll reach more people in a shorter amount of time, and when they want to reach you, you can build an easy phone menu to route calls to the right person. And that's only the beginning. CallFire's platform makes it easy to do just about anything with phone calls and text messages, including group broadcasts, information hotlines for complex voice surveys, and with CallFire APIs, developers can build voice and SMS applications of their own. Best of all, CallFire is affordable, but as CallFire helps your business grow and grow, you'll find our services are priceless. If you're ready to take your business to the next level, call 877-897-FIRE. There's a bunch of friendly people on the other end waiting to help you. Call 877-897-FIRE or visit callfire.com.

Text Messaging for Promotions and Coca-Cola

Marketing retail promotions by text is not a recent phenomenon. In 2011, the Coca-Cola Company revealed that 70% of its mobile marketing budget was dedicated to text marketing. This followed research revealing that 91% of people had their mobile devices within reach twenty-four hours a day, and that 90% of text messages are read within three minutes of receipt (compared to 22% of emails).

Tom Daly - the Global Group Director of Mobile Marketing at Coca-Cola - justified the generous allocation of resources by saying “mobile is the closest we can get to our customer and it gives us the best opportunities to connect [with our customers] in the most intimate and personal way available”. Many organizations followed Coca-Cola´s initiative - reaching up to 95% of their target audience.

How Marketing Retail Promotions by Text Works

In order to run a campaign of text messaging for promotions, you need to create an account with a bulk text marketing service provider. The service provider assigns you a login to an online platform, on which you compose your text message, upload a list of opted in customers, and click send. Within minutes your customers will be reading about your latest promotion or special offer.

You can monitor the success of your text marketing campaign via the online platform. The platform receives all the responses to your text message, shows spikes in engagement and details such as coupon redemption rates. You can use this information to fine-tune future campaigns, encourage a higher level of customer engagement and generate more sales.

Generating a List of Opted In Customers

In order to receive your marketing retail promotions by text, customers have to opt in. The simplest way of generating a list of opted in customers is to use a short code keyword that customers text to a dedicated number (for example, text “join” to 313131). The list is generated automatically for you by the software for marketing by text.

Thereafter, it can be easier to manage your list of customers if you are able to sort them into groups according to their interests. This can be done by conducting a text survey using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, where customers have to press a number on their keypad to respond to the survey. This is not only an effective way to increase engagement with your custom, but it also reduces your costs by marketing retail promotions by text to just those customers for whom they are relevant.

Increase the Impact of Your Message with MMS Sales Marketing

MMS sales marketing can increase the impact of your message by the addition of multimedia files. By replacing your plain text message with audio, video and image files, your customers can obtain a better understanding of the message you are trying to convey. They can also see the subject of the special offer you are using text marketing to promote and your logo - helping to build brand awareness.

MMS sales marketing has plenty of uses beyond marketing retail promotions by text. Faith-based organizations effectively market their product whenever they place a sign outside their church or place an ad in a newspaper advising their congregations of service times. With MMS sales marketing, faith-based organizations can increase the impact of inspirational Bible passages or requests for donations.

CallFire´s Software for Marketing by Text

CallFire has been providing user-friendly, marketing solutions for organizations of all sizes for more than a decade. Our customer database not only includes retail industry leaders, but also small to medium sized businesses, sole traders and nonprofit organizations. Although designed for simplicity, our software for marketing by text includes many valuable features, including:

  • The option to schedule text marketing messages in advance, so that they are sent when they will have maximum impact.
  • The option to automatically personalize text messaging for promotions, so that each text message is addressed to the individual customer by name.
  • The option to save sent text marketing messages as templates so that they can be used again in the future or for a recurring campaign.

Our software for marketing by text also has extensive, customizable reporting, an easy to set up “Do Not Text” list, and simple to manage auto-replies. We offer all retail organizations a free short code keyword so that they can generate a list of opted in customers quickly and easily, offer the facility for replies to redirected to your personal mobile device and have an extensive API set for integration with third-party management tools such as SalesForce, MailChimp and EventBright.

We also work closely with developers to create bespoke solutions that meet your organization´s specific requirements. We offer campaign management, free recording storage, scheduling controls and much more, so that your code stays simple while CallFire´s software for marketing by text does the heavy lifting. Developer assistance is available 24/7 via our chatroom or via IRC.

Speak with CallFire about Text Marketing and Marketing Retail Promotions by Text

If you would like to know more about the benefits of text messaging for promotions, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Support Team on (877) 897-FIRE. Our team will be happy to answer any questions you may have about marketing retail promotions by text and guide you through the process of setting up your online text marketing account.

In addition to offering you a free short code keyword, we will also be able to provide you with online “click-to-join” tools you can place on your website or on your social media channels to encourage customers to join your text messaging for promotions service. Once you are ready to go, we can offer tried and tested tips and strategies to help your first marketing campaigns achieve maximum success.