August 29, 2011
Not just more business -- business when you need it!
Target how people react to your advertising to increase sales
By: Roger McManus
The one thing about advertising is that it is very hard to “aim.” Not the outgoing part, the incoming part.
People have gotten very good about targeted advertising. With the Internet, businesses can target very specifically the precise demographics of the people they want to reach. What is not so easy is targeting how people will react to that advertising.
Generally, advertising in the traditional sense (Yellow Pages, radio, newspaper, direct mail) will drive traffic if executed well. But a tire dealer does not necessarily want more business on a Saturday. Same with golf courses, while dry cleaners are pretty busy on Mondays. You get the idea.
So, how do you drive traffic to visit you on a Wednesday morning or a Friday afternoon? You make them a deal. You make it short-notice and make it for a specific time period. Most important, make sure the customer gets the message immediately before the target time when you want more business.
This is done using the latest technology sweeping the country (the world, for that matter), text marketing. Also called mobile marketing, this phenomenon relies on the fact that most people always have their cell phone with them and almost all phones today receive text messages.
Mobile marketing has been around for about five years, but the number of consumers who have phones which can fully utilize the technology is just now coming into the mainstream.
Over half of the population now has a “smart phone” and more than half of the balance have a “less smart” phone that still receives texts. All in all, over 85% of the U.S. population can technically participate.
So how does this help you?
Unlike e-mail, which is opened only about 18% of the time — and often days after it is sent, people who receive text messages open them within three minutes 90% of the time. Also, unlike e-mail, text messaging is rarely considered “spam” because (by law) the customer asks you to send them the text. Further, the consumer knows that to stop you from sending texts to them, they only have to reply “STOP” to your message, and the system (by law) will erase the consumer from the system that sends your texts.
It may be slightly different in the tire and auto service business because of purchase patterns, but, as was stated in Modern Tire Dealer last month, response rates for text-delivered offers can reach a phenomenal 20%! Compare that with direct mail of around 1%!
You invite the customer to get texts from you by offering them an “insiders club” of some sort, the members of which receive special, private messages from you when there is a deal going on or something of significance they need to know. So, if you want a little more business on Wednesday mornings, send a text to 200 customers in your list offering a deal on oil change, tire rotation or whatever you want to promote. You can send the message at noon on Tuesday and the deal can be good only from between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. the following day. You decide!
Being a friend, not a vendor
By having a select group of customers who consider themselves special in your eyes, the relationship changes. They feel special and your messages reflect that. You do not always have to send sales messages, but can offer helpful hints that demonstrate your professionalism and caring.
Text messages are generally not sent more often than once per week. So during a given month, perhaps two of those messages are special sales opportunities and two others offer helpful information.
For example, a non-sales message might remind them when it is time to switch to winter tires — and run a deal for storing their summer tires “just for insiders.”
The point is, without being a pest, you are reminding your customers that you are in a special partnership with them to keep them safe. This goes a long way toward neutralizing the impact of “big box” advertisers trying to undercut your prices.
Mobile marketing is not free
One of the pluses with e-mail marketing is that it is virtually free. Other than the time it takes to build and cull the list, pushing the button to send out thousands of messages doesn’t cost anything. The problem is, many of them are deleted without being read.
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