According to a blog by Coleen Ferrier and Rick Petry, reported by the ElectronicRetailing Association, text has emerged for consumers to reach out to marketers. The authors note that, for many years, direct response advertising has offered consumers two primary ways of reaching out to marketers: the telephone and the web. Now, text has emerged as a third powerful communicator, by their analysis.
Convincing numbers, says the report, that support this conclusion:
Beyond these numbers, is the critical role that text now plays in our everyday lives, says the report:
In other words, says the report, marketers have an opportunity to align their outreach with behaviors that are already habitual for smartphone users. In simple terms, texting is easy, casual, and conversational. That may explain why the public has expressed a desire to interact with businesses using this vehicle as evidenced by the following findings:
Advertisers, according to the authors, stand to significantly increase their inbound leads and conversions simply adding a text option to their call-to-action. Using an easy to remember five-digit short code, marketers are able to leverage a memorable and easy-to-recall numerical sequence across all of their advertising.
According to the report, those who are running DRTV ads, that include a texting call-to-action, are seeing a material lift in sales for the same media dollars from what appears to be a more qualified lead. Consumer traffic that arrives to a DRTV marketer’s e-commerce site, by way of text, has been seen to convert at two or even three times the rate of web traffic arriving from other sources, concludes the report.
Colleen Ferrier is a seasoned direct marketing expert with an acute focus on ROI
Rick Petry is a direct marketing veteran of over 25 years providing creative services to both B2C and B2B marketing campaigns
The original blog may be found here.