SMS Marketing Best Practices

How To Make Dollar General Text Message Promotions Better

When it comes to text message promotions, the most successful campaigns are exclusive campaigns. What does this mean? To put it simply, if a brand has my mobile phone number, they should give me something special for that relationship, something that can’t be found on their website, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Why? Like most consumers, my mobile phone numbers is heavily guarded from advertisers. That being said, there are a select amount of brands that I do allow to advertise to me on my mobile phone, and these brands recognize the power of this relationship, and reward me differently than others that haven’t taken that next step with a brand.

For example, check out Kmarts text messaging campaign, see the how they advertise it? They don’t encourage consumers to give up their mobile phone numbers by saying “Get alerts for the hottest deals that you’ll also find on our website, Facebook page, Twitter, etc.”, they say “Get exclusive alerts for the hottest deals”, the key word there being “exclusive”.

With that being said, below is the text message promotion I received from Dollar General’s short code 34898, and to be honest I felt pretty special as $5 off a purchase of $30 or more is a pretty good deal. Wow, thanks Dollar General for making me feel so special!

Dollar General Text Messaging Campaign

Below is the same promotion found on their website, and now I’m not feeling as special anymore.

Dollar General Mobile Marketing Campaign

Below is the same promotion found on their Facebook page, and now I’m starting to wonder if I’m special at all.

Dollar General Facebook Fan Page

Below is the same promotion found on their Twitter, and now I’m wondering why I gave Dollar General my phone number in the first place, if I could have just got the same promotion almost anywhere else on the web.

Dollar General Twitter Promotion

The worst part about this campaign is that being an SMS subscriber doesn’t even get you the actual promotion code until you respond “5OFF” to the text message, which is unlike their website and Facebook fan page where the coupon code is actually displayed without having customers take any additional steps.

Luckily for Dollar General, there’s a pretty easy fix for the next promotion they run. My recommendation would be to send out the text message promotion first, then advertise on their website, Facebook and Twitter accounts that by joining the Dollar General SMS club, they’ll receive the same promotion that was sent out earlier to already existing SMS subscribers. This way only SMS subscribers get to receive the promotion, and Dollar General is able to reward those customers that shared their phone numbers with their brand. The best part, because Dollar General is giving such a great incentive for new SMS subscribers, they’ll be able to grow their mobile phone number database at a much faster rate than they’ve previously experienced.

What do you think, would this make the Dollar General text messaging campaign better? Let me know what you’re thinking and if you have any additional feedback in the comments below.

 


Jump to Content