I am in a unique position where I have learned extensively about things like internet marketing and social media and yet work in a space where my customers are not very tech savvy. For a few years now, I have been operating a carpet cleaning company in Perth that caters to both domestic and commercial clients. As anyone in this industry will tell you, a lot of business in these industries come from word of mouth marketing – if you are doing a good job, you will continue to get new references from existing customers. That is how the business has worked for a while now.
As the owner of Priority Floor Care, a company that dealt with domestic and commercial establishments in specific suburbs of Perth in Australia, I mostly dealt with an audience that was not tech-savvy enough to respond to my social marketing campaigns. Email marketing worked but I noticed that a lot of my audience only checked their emails every few weeks or so. Restricting my campaign to just those who had better tech-access would mean I would be missing out on a huge chunk of paying customers.
But recently I realized that I could make a difference by translating my knowledge in social media marketing into a strategy to draw more customers offline. In the internet marketing world, the strategy I used has a very specific name : sales funnel. This is basically baiting your prospects by offering them something useful, and once you establish contact with them, you engage your prospects to convert them into leads and eventually into paying customers. This channel works the best over email or through networks like Twitter. But I was successful in translating this strategy over a medium that my customers used more frequently – text messages.
Step 1 : Lead Magnet
The first step in creating a sales channel is crafting the right lead magnet. These are mostly informational products (like ebooks), giveaways or software products that businesses offer their subscribers in exchange for providing them with a marketing touch-point (email, phone number, etc.). Since I dealt with a very specific geography, I tied up with local grocery stores to put up a bunch of free booklets about carpet cleaning at the point of sale. People who picked up a copy were ‘charged’ zero dollars in the bill and the contact details of these customers (from the retail database) were shared with me. In order to ensure customers knew what they were getting into, this information was printed broadly on the front cover of these booklets.
Step 2 : Establishing Contact
In a typical email marketing campaign, the sender has the luxury of setting up an elaborate content strategy where they establish trust and over time sell their product to their subscribers. With SMS marketing, we did not have this luxury for two reasons : one, SMS is quite intrusive and would be an annoyance if the contact was done multiple times; and two, sending an SMS costs money and we were quite bootstrapped as a business. In order to get around this, we only sent one message to every subscriber after they were added to our list. We used a service called Gupshup to help us with our SMS campaign. In the message, we wrote something like this:
‘Thank you for picking up our carpet cleaning guide today. I’m Jay Barnett, your neighborhood carpet cleaner. For any questions, please reply or call this number’.
Step 3 : Sales Pitch
Unlike traditional email marketing, we did not touch-base with our subscribers too frequently. What we however did was divide the subscriber-base into 30 equal parts and sent a discount offer to one of these bunches every day. Our marketing campaign also included an option to unsubscribe. Also, we stopped sending out messages to customers who did not respond after three touch-points. This way, we ensured that our marketing budget was being spent on the most relevant subscribers.
Overall, this marketing campaign helped us bring over 150 enquiries (and repeat orders) over a five month period. As in any other form of marketing, the trick to succeed in the campaign is to ensure that you are not being spammy and you treat your subscribers the way you would want to be treated yourself. This is the best long-term strategy for not just SMS campaign, but for every other form of marketing out there.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1J49XQZ via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1WFE3n6
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