The Impact of SMS as a Response Channel

I spent this morning looking at some pretty dreadful results. One of our clients recently ran a test campaign that didn’t succeed. With 20/20 hindsight one can see why not. A new proposition to a new audience, with a new creative agency, and a new media mix, at a new price point. They had asked for a radical jump, and that’s what they got. Good clear learning that they shouldn’t progress in that direction in the near future. And that’s valuable.

But they also learnt one positive thing, and that’s the value of adding sms as a response channel to their DR advertising. For them it generated c40% incremental response. Net additional consumer contacts that wouldn’t otherwise have been captured. And that’s fairly typical of results across our client base. Increasingly we are seeing response to DRTV and other media channels move away from phone and towards text and online. And we would much rather consumers texted us than went online. Online we might convert 2% of responders to some form of sale. If they text us we typically convert 35%+.

Consumers’ love of SMS as a channel seems to be growing and showing no sign of abating. In 2009 we sent 104 billion text messages, 4 per day for every man woman and child. It’s a mobile medium that is here and viable for most clients now. It’s well worth considering if you aren’t using it.