Text Message Marketing Case Studies

SMS Marketing Generates $196,000 In First 30-Days

SMS Marketing Advertising Example from Tanning Salon
Are you looking for a good SMS marketing case study? If so, you’re in luck because recently Seattle Sun Tan, a 35-location tanning salon located in Washington state, launched their SMS marketing campaign, and it almost immediately produced some pretty impressive results for an SMS marketing case study.

 

SMS Marketing Advertising

The best part about this SMS marketing case study is that Seattle Sun Tan didn’t have an existing database of customers’ mobile phone numbers, which means they grew their SMS list from zero to 4,774 in only 30-days. How did they do this? They advertised their SMS marketing campaign in-store, online, and using traditional advertising channels. Below are some of the metrics.

  • Advertised to pre-existing email database of 80,000+ customers.
  • Advertised on the leading page of their website, in addition to social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, with a combined reach of 37,000+ customers.
  • Advertised in visible high traffic locations throughout each store of their 35 stores.

SMS Marketing Advertising Example 2 from Tanning Salon

SMS Marketing Opt-In Process

To opt in, customers simply had to text the SMS keyword to Seattle Sun Tan’s SMS short code. Seattle Sun Tan used the double opt-in method, as Tatango recommends. For more information deciding whether a double opt-in SMS marketing campaign is right for your business, click here.

SMS Marketing Example from Seattle Sun Tan 1

SMS Marketing New Subscriber Incentive

By far the #1 strategy to grow your SMS list is to offer an extra incentive for customers to opt-in. In a recent study, it was found that by offering customers some kind of extra incentive to opt-in, businesses were able to grow their SMS marketing lists 520% faster.

What do we mean by an “extra incentive to opt-in”? In Seattle Sun Tan’s case, they offered new SMS subscribers $20 off their next purchase. Just this little opt-in incentive will significantly boost your SMS list growth, and as the study found, can have a significant impact on your SMS marketing campaign. It definitely had that impact on Seattle Sun Tan’s SMS list, as it grew to 4,774 new SMS subscribers in just the first 30 days.

SMS Marketing Example from Seattle Sun Tan - New Subscriber Incentive

SMS Marketing Results

During the first month of Seattle Sun Tan’s SMS marketing campaign with Tatango, they were able to get 4,750 customers to opt-in. What’s even more impressive was the fact that the initial text message offer had a redemption rate of 57%.

Seattle Sun Tan used two Tatango features to boost redemption rates and stop possible coupon fraud.

  • The use of Tatango’s rolling expiration date feature within the text message offer ensured that no matter when a customer opted-in, they only had 5 days to redeem the offer.
  • Seattle Sun Tan used Tatango’s scheduled messaging feature to only send the initial text message offer once per unique mobile phone number. This ensured that customers were unable to receive the opt-in incentive multiple times.

This initial SMS offer generated $196,101.87 in new sales during that first month. It’s interesting to note that Seattle Sun Tan customers redeeming the initial SMS offer, on average spent 500% more than customers that didn’t receive the SMS offer.

While we can’t disclose the unsubscribe rates for our client, we’ve found that on average the number of people that opt-in to an SMS marketing campaign with a strong initial incentive like Seattle Sun Tan was offering, then opted-out within 24 hours is 1.3%–6.1%. That means for every 100 people that opted-in to join their SMS marketing program, they could expect to retain between 94-99 new SMS subscribers.

 

Stewart Kelpe (VP of Marketing)

“When looking at different mobile marketing options for Seattle Sun Tan, we selected text messaging because of the high customer adoption and that it works across all wireless carriers and operating platforms. Not only did Tatango help us build a large database of customer’s mobile phone numbers that we’ll be able to use for ongoing promotions, the initial text offer generated significant revenue for our company, far exceeding my expectations.”Stewart Kelpe (VP of Marketing)

 

Mobile Marketer

These SMS marketing results were so good, the SMS marketing campaign was featured in Mobile Marketer. You can read the story here.

SMS Marketing Case Study Featured in Mobile Marketer

 

Other Retail SMS Marketing Case Studies

If you’re interested in seeing how other retailers are using SMS marketing, check out this blog post, or visit the following retail SMS marketing case studies below.


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