Mobile Conversations 2008: Small advertisers benefit from SMS marketing

mGinger demonstrated through case studies how small advertisers used SMS marketing and achieved good results

At Mobile Conversations 2008 in Bengaluru, Chaitanya Nallan, chief executive officer of GingerSoft Media, presented four interesting case studies of SMS campaigns done by his company for advertisers.

The first case study was that of a small retailer in Bengaluru called Sathyam Enterprises, which is a franchisee for Adidas products. The objective of the campaign was to generate footfalls and announce a 40 per cent discount.

Mobile Conversations 2008: Small advertisers benefit from SMS marketing

An SMS announcing the offer and giving the contact number of the store was sent out to 10,000 mGinger members in eight pin codes in the vicinity of the store. The timing of the campaign was Sunday morning. It was targeted at people aged 18-28 years. The total cost of the campaign was Rs 10,000.

As a result, 250 people visited the store, generating Rs 3,00,000 in sales in a single day, claimed Nallan. A hundred phone calls were also received on the contact number.

The second case study was on an apparel brand called Cavin Cally. The brand is unknown and thus needed to promote itself. It also wanted to announce a 50 per cent discount sale.

Chaitanya Nallan

As part of the campaign, an SMS was sent out on a Tuesday to inform people aged 18-35 years about the brand. On Thursday, the promotional offer was announced. It included a response mechanism for people who wanted to know more about the store. To the people who responded, an SMS was sent repeating the offer and giving store details.

Nallan said that as a result of the campaign, there was a 30 per cent increase in footfalls in each location of the store and a 40 per cent increase in revenue.

In the third case study, Nallan illustrated how a good or bad creative can have an impact on the results of a campaign, even though SMSes are limited to only 160 characters.

In the first instance, an SMS with the following message was sent out to 25,000 people: “ONLY the FINEST are invited at www.artleaves.net.” Nallan claimed that despite giving no other information, the website saw an increase of 20,000 unique visitors that day.

On the other hand, there was a series of SMSes which were sent out for a South Indian movie, in which almost the same message was repeated again and again. Most of the people who received it responded by asking for the messages to be stopped.

In the final case study, Nallan talked about a client from Yos Technologies, who wanted to drive registrations to his website through SMS to receive diabetes care information.

The message was sent to 2,00,000 people under 25 years of age, who were known to have an interest in health care. Three slightly different messages were sent out. According to Nallan, the campaign received an average of 3.5 per cent conversions.

Mobile Conversations 2008 in Bengaluru was presented by afaqs! and MyToday in association with mKhoj.

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