SMS and sun tans are a perfect summertime pair. That much is clear from the abundant success touted this week by Seattle Sun Tan, a 35-location tanning salon located in Washington state.
A recent SMS campaign designed to connect with the company’s ever-increasing mobile reliant customers proved not only effective, but stunningly profitable.
“When looking at different mobile marketing options for Seattle Sun Tan, we selected text messaging because of the high customer adoption and that it works across all wireless carriers and operating platforms,” says Stewart Kelpe, VP of Marketing at Seattle Sun Tan.
Seattle Sun Tan set up their SMS campaign with Tatango using a vanity SMS short code (33733) and descriptive SMS keyword (TANS) in order to ensure the opt-in process for customers was “easy and memorable.” From there, Seattle Sun Tan created an attractive initial text message offer, “$20 off your next purchase,” to encourage customers to purchase higher value tanning subscription packages.
Within 30 days, the results were clear and provided a compelling example of how powerful SMS marketing can be.
In one month, Seattle Sun Tan built a mobile database of nearly 5,000 customers. 57% of recipients redeemed the text message offer, generating $196,101.87 in new revenue during the first 30 days of the campaign.
Perhaps most impressively, however, is the fact that customers redeeming the text message offer, on average, spent 500% more than customers that didn’t receive the offer.
“Not only did Tatango help us build a large database of customer’s mobile phone numbers that we’ll be able to use for ongoing promotions, the initial text offer generated significant revenue for our company, far exceeding my expectations,” Kelpe said.