Boost Your Christmas Promotion Campaign

As a matter of fact, most large retailers already report increased sales starting from 5-6 weeks prior to Christmas Day.

It’s the end of November now and in case retail is your line of work then surely the Christmas period has started in your office. But the holiday season is not only busy for retailers. Service providers from almost all industries use this time of year to get new customers and increase sales.

Here are a few examples of how some of our customers do it

An increasing number of companies use SMS in different creative ways as a part of their Christmas campaigns to engage with their customers. The main reasons for this are quite obvious.

a) There are no technical restrictions to reach someone (like customers having access to the internet or having/not having an app installed)

b) It’s delivered (and also read) instantly which works extremely well in case of time-critical messages.

All this makes SMS one of the best call to action channels as well as one of the most sensitive channels available.

This is what we learned from some of our customers who have mastered the use of SMS in their holiday campaigns.

1) Expect a lot of competition

Whether you are in retail or any other industry your Christmas promotions are competing for customer attention with thousands of online offers. That is much more than just your local competitors.

Simple discount offers might work during the low season but not when fighting for attention with campaigns powered by some of the most creative advertising agencies in the world.

2) Make it relevant and personal

Make your message relevant for every single customer you send it to in order to maximise conversion. Most companies we have talked to who use Messente always opt for sending a more relevant offer to fewer customers rather than sending out a generic one to more people.

Segment your customer pool into as many smaller groups you can, based on as much data as possible. Design your message carefully based on each group’s profile.

3) Master the timing

SMS enables to time your messages very accurately because the time from sending it out to getting read is usually less than a few minutes.

Try out different sending times and figure out what works best for your business.

4) Create a conversation

Sending out promotional messages is just the starting point. Successful companies work hard to engage people in conversations once they hit the stores.

Because Christmas promotions offer a great opportunity to get excellent insight about what your customers like. Take the opportunity to update contact information, renew permissions to get in touch every now and then or have people download your app.

5) Measure and analyse

Every promotion campaign should be regarded as an experiment. Measure as much as you can, not just the bottom line sales figures. Dig in all kinds of data starting from SMS delivery statistics to conversion of each step of the whole process.

Hopefully keeping all this in mind helps you to fine-tune your Christmas promotions and make the most of it regardless of the industry you are in.