Relationship Marketing Through SMS: A Case Study

Relationship Marketing Through SMS: A Case Study

The Situation

How does one communicate with customers efficiently, quickly, and cost effectively, while still managing to strengthen the brand and deliver a personal message?

Relationship marketing is based on a sustained and two way communications process. It involves the management of communications strategy and implementation, and incorporates the creation and management of client databases. Using one of Clickatell's products, Clickatell Communicator, jSRM has been assisted in achieving this goal.

The Solution

Using SMS was the obvious answer to their requirement for a fast and cost effective medium. By its very nature, SMS is extremely useful for delivering short messages which need to be delivered in a short space of time.

Aside from the time taken to deliver the messages themselves, SMS allows marketing communications to be prepared and delivered faster than any other traditional media. Since the message is short and text based, the preparation time is reduced dramatically. A standard mail, or even an e-mail, would take considerable time in order to be properly prepared.

Also, since SMS has an extremely low cost associated with it, jSRM and their clients are able to use it more frequently than standard media. And, as SMS is database driven, it allows the marketer to target and profile the audience according to the strategy or the specific message content.

All these factors help jSRM to facilitate the relationships between their clients and customers.

With Clickatell's SMS delivery service, some of the message headers, or Sender ID's, can also be branded. This adds an extra level of credibility, which jSRM can attach to each outgoing message. From the recipients' point of view, the message comes from a company that they have a growing relationship with, and not from an unknown telephone number. All this without the recipient even knowing that jSRM is involved. This feature is only available on some of the networks that jSRM delivers to.

The Application

Clickatell Communicator has been designed to make SMS messaging simple and seamless. Some of the features that have helped jSRM are:

• An intuitive, easy to use, messaging interface,
• A database uploading facility (where recipient databases may be uploaded for easy messaging),
• A group management system (for creating groups of recipients)
• A message personalization tool, which, similar to a mail merge, can personalise each outgoing message with up to 5 variables (such as name, account details, birth ate etc.)
• A message delivery reporting tool

And jSRM have successfully used SMS for a wide variety of different message types, including:

• Event reminders (sent before an event to reaffirm attendance)
• Calls to action (such as "Collect your tickets at…..")
• Birthday wishes
• Thank you notes (for attendance etc. etc.)

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