Pump Up Your Results With RichSMS

In a previous post about how you can market with 98 percent read-rate and 10 more compelling stats, I introduced SMS marketing. Then, I offered a three-part series on SMS best practices. It’s now time to kick things up another notch, so I give you RichSMS®, a cool feature from French Adobe Campaign partner MyElefant. Even better, you can tie together MyElefant EnRich® and Adobe Campaign to make SMS messages sent by Campaign even more effective.

By now, you must be curious about what RichSMS is all about and what it can do for you, so I asked Jean-Philippe Gallet, cofounder of MyElefant to help me present it to you.

MB: What is RichSMS and why should Campaign customers use it?

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JPG: RichSMS is all about mobile engagement. With 90 percent of the global population expected to own a mobile phone by 2020, it’s obvious that mobile is now crucial to building efficient customer relationships.

Even though mobile is part of the digital mix, it has its own characteristics that differentiate it from the well-known “PC” digital marketing. It’s intimate, instantaneous, and in-context, which are key success factors that drive new uses and new expectations.

That’s why we created RichSMS, a mobile messaging ad format tailored to these needs. It mixes the reach of SMS media with the complex functional scenarios available on smartphones. The format is highly personalized. It dives the end user into your brand universe, integrating pre-packaged functionalities such as coupons, drive-to-store, product catalogs, click-and-collect, add-to-calendar, data collection modules, and more.

MB: Is it complicated to set up a RichSMS Campaign?

JPG: Not at all. Our offer is a one-stop-shop for mobile messaging marketing. Basically, RichSMS is a module of our mobile messaging ad-management platform, called EnRich. It works as an add-on to Adobe Campaign, making it super-easy for marketers to do what they need:

• Create rich and personalized mobile ads without needing any technical skills.
• Broadcast those ads over the best SMS routes worldwide, thanks to close partnerships with established SMS operators such as Mblox.
• Monitor campaign success with built-in real-time analytics.

The best part for Campaign users is that we fully integrated EnRich with Campaign workflows. A web API and dedicated connector help you pilot the EnRich platform through Adobe Campaign and then automatically import customer data generated by RichSMS campaigns back into Campaign.

MB: Can you share some specific client benefits and success stories?

JPG: Of course. There are many benefits, but I’ll concentrate on three of the most important ones. First is efficiency. It should be no surprise that when you add media and functionality to the classic SMS experience, you enhance campaign ROI. The improved efficiency takes many forms, depending on your campaign goals.

For example, one of our clients, a clothing brand, saw 50 percent higher increase in sales compared to their experience with a regular SMS campaign. Another client, a retailer, saw a 100 percent higher increase in store visits. A third, who runs surveys for the drug industry, saw a 60 percent higher response rate to their surveys.

The second benefit is how easy it is to track results user-by-user with our built-in analytics. During a recent chat with a clothing-brand marketing manager, she told us that RichSMS campaigns dramatically increased her mobile site turnover. What’s more, using our analytics, she could track the comprehensive click-stream by each individual user from SMS delivery to payment, including clicks on mobile ads and product catalog items, as well as customer location and handset characteristics.

The third main benefit, and one our clients really appreciate, is agility. Setting up mobile projects can be a long and complicated process. With RichSMS, they can go live with rich mobile scenarios in just a few days, including an iterative test-and-improve process. That was the experience of one of our clients in the travel industry. Last summer, before the vacation rush, they launched an automated personal assistant in just three weeks. This let them send each guest a daily RichSMS message containing highly customized information on activities available in the resort. Use rate was tremendous, so our client decided to deploy this on a large scale, tweaking and improving it before each vacation season.

Conclusion

RichSMS is a powerful key to unlocking the power of SMS marketing whatever your business goals and industry. Integrated with Adobe Campaign, it makes it easy to seamlessly implement highly personalized cross-channel marketing. The built-in analytics lets you dig deep into data showing each customer’s journey. This makes it simple to identify problems, turning them into opportunities for improved customer experience. It also lets you see what is working and build on it even more.

If you use SMS marketing, what do you think would become possible by using RichSMS? If you already use RichSMS, what’s your experience?