Email and SMS Promotion Made Easy

You are a business executive/manager looking to build on existing market strength and broaden your market share. For years your company has had a healthy marketing program and good staff running promotions for your products and events. You have loyal customers and want to seize the opportunity to increase sales to those customers and also gain new customers.

You don't want to tie up your marketers with technical chores, such as setting up and maintaining a broadcast email system. Their time is more valuable in creating appealing campaigns and writing copy for promotions. What you want is a service that can handle the technical side of broadcasting emails, and all other forms of marketing communication (such as SMS or fax), in one system.

In this case study, we will look at how Sandalford Wines quickly set up an event and wine promotion, using a communication service from Foote Francis. The Sandalford Wines marketing staff were able to consolidate email, SMS, MMS and existing customer lists into one, easy-to-administer system and manage a variety of profitable communication campaigns using F2 Shout Out and Joomla CMS (Content Management System).

What is SMS and MMS?

To explain briefly, the Short Message Service (SMS) is a text-based communication that most mobile phones use.  Multimedia Message Service (MMS) allows for the addition of audio, video or images to a message on a  mobile phone.

Message on a Bottle

For their "Jackpot" marketing campaign, Sandalford Wines designed a wine bottle with an appealing promotional "neck tie" that had an imprinted SMS number, which advertised prizes and discounts on upcoming winery events and wine products. The "neck tie" advertisement was distributed on bottles of wine sold at the Sandalford Winery cellar door and at events held at Sandalford.

The participant was instructed to send their full name and email as a message to the SMS number. When the message arrived, the F2 Shout Out system separated first name, last name, email and mobile number into a master list. F2 Shout Out then sent a personalised text message and email confirmation automatically back to the entrant.

Optionally, customers could also enter the competition from the Sandalford website. Keep reading to see how the F2 Shout Out system improved the quality of the promotion and helped the marketing staff manage the entries.

Programmed to Serve Your Needs

To avoid email spam, F2 ShoutOut performs a double "opt-in" process and participants can always access an unsubscribe option. To confirm an email address or mobile number sent through SMS, the double opt-in sends a message back to the entrant asking for a confirmation. If the user does not respond, then the email address or mobile number will not be added.

Whether the user entry comes from an SMS text or the website, all entries are stored in the same list. F2 ShoutOut's list also includes the contacts from Sandalford's existing "Wine Club" loyalty program. At the end of the promotion, the marketing staff logged onto the administrative side of their website to review customers, pick prize winners and evaluate repeat participation among customers.

As a service, you can use F2 Shout Out solely for email-only communication or you can use it for any combination of SMS, MMS, fax and/or email communications. Foote Francis provides the complete technical side of the F2 Shout Out service including customizing the settings and maintaining the servers hosting. For an additional nominal cost, Foote Francis can order an SMS number and add the SMS service.

F2 Shout Out can be added to existing websites or Foote Francis can provide custom website development for a companies entire website, including the F2 Shout Out service.

F2 Shout Out has been programmed to consolidate duplicate entries – so a person subscribing by both SMS and email will only have their contact data once in the system and will not receive multiple communications.

The real payoff of the SMS and web promotion solution is the simplicity of executing the broadcast of a message over multiple channels. Using this case study as an example, once the promotional copy is ready, the marketing staff enters the text into an administrative web-form on the Sandalford website. Then F2 Shout Out sends that one communication to all types of subscribers in a single effort. The office staff only needs a web browser and an Internet connection to view participants and to send new messages.

If your company would like to add F2 Shout Out to promote your products, events and services please contact F2.

Email and SMS Promotion Made Easy by Hayden Foote is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License