SMS Marketing Best Practices

What Type of SMS Coupons Should You Be Sending Customers?

Best SMS Coupon Types

If you’re reading this blog post, we’re going to assume that you’ve already read our guide on growing your SMS subscribers. You’ve learned the secrets used by companies like National Wholesale Liquidators who generated 50,000+ mobile opt-ins, or Julep who generate 5,000 mobile opt-ins during the first 24 hours of their SMS campaign and have used these secrets to build your own massive SMS subscriber database. Now that your business has this massive SMS subscriber database, it’s time to leverage it to generate more sales, and there’s only one way to do this… Send a message!

Sounds easy right, but there’s a lot to learn when sending text messages to your customers, and one of the most important things to learn is what type of SMS coupons should you be sending to customers? Luckily for you, we’ve got the answer to what type of SMS coupons you should be sending to customers, which will get opened, get read, and most importantly, result in new sales for your business.

The first step in selecting the perfect type of SMS coupon to send to your customers is determining your messaging objectives. Before you start sending text messages to customers, it’s essential that you figure out what your objectives are. Why? If you don’t know what your objectives are for sending text messages, you’ll never know if the text messages you’re sending are “working,” as you’ll have no definition for “working”. Our good friends over at ExactTarget recently took a survey of 68 brands running SMS marketing campaigns, and they asked these brands what their top SMS marketing objectives were. You can see the results in the pretty graph below.

SMS Marketing Strategy

When it comes to why brands are sending text messages to their customers, the most common reason was to sell products or services. Makes sense, as for most businesses, selling products or services generates revenue, and this revenue helps keeps the lights on. It’s because of this, that the majority of this guide will be focused on how to send text messages that will sell products or services.

The second step to selecting the right type of SMS coupon to send to customers is to figure out what type of offer you’re going to send, and what type of offer your customers want to receive.

If you’re part of the 46% of brands that are interested in using text messaging to sell more products or services, then the next step is to determine what type of offer you’re going to send to customers to get them to buy. Instead of just guessing, our good friends at Responsys asked consumers what kind of offers excited them the most to trigger an action, like buying a product or service. You can see below what types of mobile offers consumers said were most likely to get them interested.

To simplify things, we extracted the “Likely” response percentages from the graph.

  • Pricing-based Offers: 66%
  • Time-sensitive offers: 52%
  • Location-based offers: 50%
  • Product-based offers: 47%
  • Similar product-based offers: 45%
  • A very general offer: 31%

Our advice, if 66% of consumers report that a pricing-based mobile offer will likely trigger them to take an action, and only 31% of consumers say that a very general offer intended for the masses will trigger an action, we’d recommend sending more pricing-based mobile offers than general offers to your SMS subscribers.

How do you know what type of price-based mobile offers to send? Our friends at Cellit recently conducted a national survey among consumers finding out what specific type of mobile promotions they most like. It turns out that the buy-one-get-one (BOGO) type offer came in a distant first with 68% of consumers preferring this type of offer over others. You can see an example of a buy-one-get-one SMS offer below.

BOGO SMS coupon

According to the consumer survey, the “% off” SMS coupon was preferred by 22% of consumers. You can see an example of a “% off” SMS coupon below on the left. A “free with purchase” SMS coupon was preferred by only 6% of consumers. You can see an example of one of these SMS coupons on the right.

       percent off SMS coupon         Free with Purchase SMS coupon

When asked, consumers said they preferred the buy-one-get-one SMS coupons over the other SMS coupon types, as they said it simply holds the most value.  Consumers felt that the “free with purchase” SMS coupon was too often for items that held little value, and a traditional percentage discount wasn’t mentally as appealing. The fascinating part of the survey is that all of the SMS coupon types presented to the survey participants gave virtually the same value discount.

With this information, we recommend sending a mix of BOGO and % off SMS coupons to your customers, with a higher frequency of BOGO deals than % off SMS coupons.

Want more great advice on how to send the best SMS coupons to customers, download our free guide here, or by clicking on the guide below.

Free SMS Coupon Guide


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