voted the most innovative company in the world for the last 4 years has solely focused on one fundamental pain point – How do you make information accessible from everywhere and make it affordable for businesses of all sizes? To find an answer to this question, they looked skywards and found the Cloud! And in the cloud, they found a way to innovate – Frugally!
The underlying trait in all contemporary innovations reeks of frugality – It’s about getting more for less. Some choose to call this metamorphosis Efficiency; others call it Innovation. Take Salesforce for example, from making software cloud-based, and thereby reducing the costs of IT & Server Maintenance, Salesforce has frugal innovation at the heart of its entire CRM product!
As a part of the Marketing and Sales team at AppShark, my work exposes me to multiple industries of various sizes. On the marketing front , companies have one challenge – How do they increase visibility of their products/services without shooting the budget up north? A lot of our clients at AppShark have embraced frugal innovation in marketing and have planned their campaigns by using the Open SMS Pro App! The Open SMS Pro App allows one to send text messages to leads and contacts, Chat with Leads or Contacts directly from Salesforce, Conduct SMS/Text Campaigns from Salesforce.
In today’s world of mobile ubiquity, you don’t have to worry about getting into the pockets of your customers (I’m referring to the mobile phones in their pockets – Not their wallets!). If you want to innovate in marketing (Which is a pre-requisite these days – The competition is ruthless!), you have to master the art of treading the thin line between being intrusive and being informative. Customers expect to be recognized and their loyalty to the brand, rewarded. In the retail space, customers want to get those personalized texts with their first name. They want to be greeted on their birthdays and anniversaries with an “Only for you” coupon. This is where Text based marketing campaigns are most effective at making an impact. With the burgeoning emphasis on digital marketing, suddenly a text marketing campaign has carved its own niche. It’s de-cluttered and it’s direct. Texts, unlike E-mails or tweets don’t get lost in an ocean of promotional campaigns, they can be highly personalized. There are only a few players who have understood the potential of text –based marketing and they are the ones taking all the big bucks home.
Text campaigns produce valuable data on whom your texts are reaching and on where your efforts might be lacking. This information can only benefit you if you have the correct tools to organize and analyze it. This is why it is important for Salesforce users to pick the right Text marketing tool off the AppExchange. Dominos Pizza has a very simple but highly efficient process of running their text based campaigns. The first time you order from Dominos, you get a welcome text. Week after week, you keep receiving their promotional offers which prompt you to reply back to redeem the “offer of the week” coupons. If Dominos doesn’t hear from you in a couple of weeks, you get another personalized text saying they’ve missed you and that they have a super deal exclusively for you. This entire process at Dominos is automatic. All the text campaigns are scheduled and all the texts that you receive are templates. But, yet it feels like every text has been tailor made for you. With an open rate of 98% and say a conventional conversion rate of 1-3%, we are looking ata decent chunk of customers buying from Dominos not because of the food, but because of the service. Better yet, this text based engagement is extremely inexpensive and gets the job done both effectively and efficiently! Dominos innovates frugally with their text campaigns.
So the next time you think of promoting your product/service to contacts and leads on your Salesforce platform, pay a visit to the AppExchange, download the Open SMS Pro App and get the job done frugally! With the ability to schedule Texts, create templates, pull reports, send bulk SMS's and live chat with your leads, you would not only have embraced frugal innovation in marketing, you would have also made the best marketing investment!
Think futuristic. Think frugal. Think Texting. Think Open SMS Pro!