Stéphane Faugeras, CEO at Mtarget, specialised in mix-media marketing, tells us what is their point of view on Alphanumeric Sender ID usage in the SMS Marketing space.
You have carried out SMS Marketing campaigns for well-known brands in Luxembourg in the recent months. What were the contents of those campaigns?
We work with large international brands in the cosmetics and decoration sectors, particularly for their campaigns in Luxembourg.
These customers mainly sent messages as part of the brand’s loyalty program to announce the change in customer status, for example, to send a welcome offer with a discount, or to follow up with customers who have not made a purchase for some time.
In order to promote drive-to-store, the sending of promotional offers is widely used with reminders about the approaching end date.
But our customers have also sent numerous transactional messages for order tracking at every stage of the package delivery.
You chose to go with Alphanumeric Sender IDs to send your SMS camapigns. What made you choose those instead of the usual short-codes?
Alphanumeric Sender IDs allow a message to display the name of the brand directly in the sender field instead of a numeric short code.
This technical development is a real breakthrough for these brands! From now on, their messages are directly identified by their customers and better yet, the messages will be easier to find later on in their messaging conversations, and therefore they will be able to access and use the offered promotions. Above all, it significantly increases the opening rate of the message because the recipients are reassured upon seeing the brand. Another important advantage is the gain in terms of characters in the body of the SMS. In fact, it is no longer necessary to indicate the name of the brand in the message itself, leaving more space for our client to communicate his information.
Based on your international experience, is direct marketing via SMS taking an increasingly important part in the marketing mix? What’s the reasoning behind it?
We are indeed seeing that SMS is an essential element in the marketing strategy of our customers in France and internationally. Its performance is exceptional: a read rate of 98% and a memorization rate of 60% make it a much more efficient tool than email, for example, where only 20% of messages are read and whose click is 10 times lower than that of SMS.
To illustrate the reasons for this success in businesses, during the deconfinement in France, the resumption of activity was driven by SMS, used by brands for its drive-to-store efficiency. After receiving an SMS from a brand, on average 44% of people went to the store and 22% actually bought the featured product.
The alphanumeric sender allows consumers to instantly recognize who is speaking to them and thus contributes to this excellent open rate. This is not only impactful in the context of marketing campaigns, but is also extremely usefull for other types of SMS. In particular, it makes life easier for the recipients of transactional messages, reassuring the customer of its authenticity and giving them confidence when using SMS for One Time Password transactions.
In view of the performance encountered with the first brands, we will of course alphanumeric service to all of our customers.
We are committed to providing them with all the innovations that can help them develop their sales by making their marketing campaigns more effective.