The new marketing secret is the "old" text message

Millennials regard SMS as a kind of ancient relic of the past  -fossils of communication largely supplanted by the more agile Whatsapp. But the old phone messages may still have a few tricks up their sleeves: according to the agency Belardi Wong, mentioned by BoF in a recent article, «sales driven by text messages rose 35 percent year-over-year versus a 5 percent increase from emails, according to e-commerce data on more than 100 brands». According to another survey last year conducted by the company Klaviyo, 72 of the 500 brands surveyed were considering adopting SMS marketing campaigns. The reason for this rise in SMS success (honestly, who saw that coming?) is the result of the growing importance in the market of Millennials-a generation more accustomed to communicating by text than by email. SMS in a nutshell is a simpler and more direct, as well as easily organized, way to give their clients updates on order status, new store arrivals and possible discount codes-all activities that are usually done via email but often end up being funneled into the press kit. Of course, this marketing strategy has a golden rule not to be broken under any circumstances: never annoy customers - which necessarily implies providing a personalized experience that is not solely (or too explicitly) aimed at beating the cash register. But there are other considerations to be made.

To make sure that a store-customer relationship is established (which in any case already happens unofficially usually via Whatsapp) and also to prevent text messages from becoming an endless stream of announcements about what has arrived in the store, there is a need for these verbal exchanges to allow the customer to engage with a real person and not an automaton that only provides pre-recorded answers. The ability to engage in dialogue also makes it possible to personalize the customer's experience of the message service. The practice is unorthodox but, say, one could ask the customer for honest opinions, find the model of handbag or shoe they prefer, and in short provide them with all those little attentions and courtesies that go beyond trying to shell out money and just deepening the relationship in human form. Also according to BoF: «In a 2023 survey of 900 brands, nearly 80 percent said they use text messages to drive repeat purchases from customers, according to marketing software firm Attentive. More than half of those brands said they will increase their marketing spend on text message campaigns this year». A balanced business model probably still needs to be put in place to automate something but make everything else personal and human - as we said, contacting customers via Whatsapp is already a very common practice everywhere. What we are seeing now is perhaps the first attempt to formalize and structure it within a coherent marketing strategy. In love as in business, however, the number one enemy will return to be ghosting.