Top SMS Campaigns
Lots of your donors, probably most of them, are avid smartphone users by now, and recipients of all sorts of text messaging (SMS) campaigns.
A good source of info on how commercial marketers are using the channel is Mobile Marketer.
Here’s their recent list of ‘Top 10’ SMS campaigns so far this year, with brief discussions of each.
- Ace Hardware
- Aveeno
- Coca-Cola
- General Mills — this was one of two cause marketing campaigns to make the list. The campaign asked for $5 donations to First Book, which provides low-income families and schools with books and educational resources. Simon & Schuster matched the donations up to 50,000 books.
- JCPenney
- Macy’s
- Reese’s
- Rite Aid — another cause marketing campaign … this one inviting $5 donations benefiting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
- Starbucks
- US Tennis Association
Most of these campaigns are built around the premise that getting a text response (often to ‘text to win’ something messages) is the first step toward building (or deepening ) a customer relationship.
We’ll see!
But meantime, it’s worth being aware of what your commercial brethren are doing with text campaigns, if only to know what kind of promotional drivel you’ll be competing against.
Tom
One response to “Top SMS Campaigns”
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Thanks for sharing. I saw that post in mobile marketing recently and was struck by how simple they were.
Coca Cola in particular are putting a lot of focus into SMS marketing. Last year one of their senior directors said “SMS is the number one priority at Coca-Cola in mobile”. Not Apps or mobile web, but SMS.
Here in the UK we love SMS, everyone can send one, you don’t need a smartphone and I’m sure I’ve seen research somewhere that suggests over 90% of SMS messages are read.
I’m involved in lots of charity SMS projects, most of them fundraising, where we seek to acquire a new donor via text donation rather than cash. An example of our most recent is here http://openfundraising.com/2012/03/05/getting-angry-with-the-rspca/
We know that the key to success is ongoing giving, so these new supporters are stewarded towards monthly giving by direct debit as well as monthly giving by SMS. We’re also testing one off appeals to these SMS supporters. As well as starting to deliver retention communications and updates by SMS.
What I love about SMS is that it enables the donor to chose to remain semi-anonymous if they decide that’s what they want to do. No name, address, credit card or bank details are required to give in this way. Before long we will have huge donor files full of people who we don’t know the name of – that will be the challenge!
Thanks for the post – great stuff as ever.