As a business owner you have many priorities and attracting and retaining customers is key. SMS marketing can help you to:

• Create a simple campaign to acquire new customers
• Target offers to retain your existing client base and grow sales during quiet periods in the business
• Provide better service by text messaging bookings for new work, or existing colouring’s
• Provide a substantial return on investment compared to traditional forms of marketing – email, newspaper ads or radio.

SMS marketing is great for busy business owners to target their busy customers. A short and ‘to the point’  message takes seconds to read and can generate a response just as quickly, whereas traditional means of marketing communications; emails and newspaper advertising, even a telephone campaign, take a great deal of time to organise and can be costly too.

From around 4p per message, texting is also by far the cheapest means of communicating with your new or old members. Take email for example. It will take someone time to create a great email marketing campaign. Unfortunately, only up to 25% of acquisition emails are read compared 95% of text messages.

As well as generating more people into your club, you can also use the 2ergo messaging manager system to manage your bookings if you have a booking system for appointments or non – complete works of art that need colour adding etc. The benefits of this are that it looks very professional, and you can reduce the number of costly no-shows to your business.

Is texting right for my business?

The simple answer is that SMS/text marketing can be beneficial to any company. The real advantage of SMS marketing is that it’s cheap and scalable; anyone can do it and to any number of contacts so it really doesn’t matter how big or small your club is, texting can benefit you.

Acquire more business

• SMS your old customers, offering20% off new work this month
• Offer extra incentives for referrals – SMS new members offering a gift when a friend comes in and has work done.
• 10% off all artwork on quiet days
• Send birthday messages to lost clients offering a discount on their birthday as a present from your business

Improve your customer service

• SMS appointment reminders
• Generate feedback and measure service – give your members the opportunity to send a feedback message to a short code.  This will help you measure service and you could then offer 10% off the next visit for customers who may have had a bad experience.
• Tell your customers about new tattoos or events happening in the shop

Knowing what to write
Text messages can only be 160 characters (including spaces) long, so there’s no room for waffling.
It’s important that you get to the point quickly and that the client understands exactly what you’re
offering them. As a rule, you should make sure that once you have created your message, it answers
these three key questions;

• Why you are contacting them – e.g. what offer are you making?
• When should they act? – e.g. is there a closing date for your offer or promotion?
• What do they need to do next? e.g. call or visit your club

It’s important to keep the style of your messages friendly and chatty but at the same time, your
message is clear and concise. Here are a few examples;

Example booking reminder message;
Hi Dave, you have your next colouring session
booked with us on Friday at 8pm with Alan
Looking forward to seeing you then!
Resident Needle 01234 567891

Example birthday message;
Happy Birthday Jane! Get 10% off any tattoos this week
Call 01234 567 890 to book your appointment

Example lost clients promotion;
Hi Laura, we miss you!  Get a free art working session
if you visit before 11th Jan. Call 01234 456 789 to book

Once you have decided on how you want to use texting in your club, and the content of your texts, you can determine how often you will need to contact members and what your average usage of text messaging will be.

How much is too much?
Your members may not be so pleased to hear from you if your messages start to become too regular. We recommend contacting them not more than once per month with offers or promotions in addition to your everyday reminder texts and booking confirmations. For the majority of shops, one promotion or special offer per month is enough to satisfy the sales targets set within the business.

Protecting your client data
Because texting is very personal, it’s important to gain permission before running a campaign. As a guide, if you keep your members personal details on file you should ask them to sign the file and you could insert a small paragraph asking for permission to send SMS messages there.

The final thing to consider before you embark on an SMS marketing campaign is: who should manage your SMS marketing? Who in your business should be given the responsibility of maintaining your client database and ensuring the right messages are sent to the right people?
In truth, there is only really one answer to this question. Your member contact database, in particular the mobile numbers it contains should be highly protected.

For a free consultation and trial of how mobile marketing can build your business, please visit our website http://www.crowd-connect.co.uk and contact us to arrange an appointment.