The Rise of Texting as an E-commerce Platform
After following the rise of invisible apps, conversational commerce posts, and being deeply invested myself. I decided, I would offer some statistics and experience to this very exciting channel.
So, why now, is texting suddenly trendy?
I spoke to a customer a few weeks ago. She is a creative professional and I was clearly boring her with my questions about why she was using ARCADE over the millions of other food delivery options available in NYC. She simply said: “I love that it’s not an app.”
Apparently, our creative friend doesn’t have time to open an app and sift through an endless menu. Works for us! Moreover, people spend 79% of time on 5 apps out of 27 that are used in a month. While you may have hundreds of unread emails, you may only have 1 or 2 new text messages. What is more enticing to you?
Text is simple. Not only is it pre-installed and convenient, it’s also hard to ignore vs. a push notification that you can easily turn off in your phone settings. With ARCADE, we see 90% of text messages read within 3 minutes of sending and 99% are read overall. This means that by 10:03am we can predict how many lunch orders we will get for the two dishes we are selling for that day.
The underlying reason for the rise of texting as a platform becomes obvious. It’s an addicting habit.
Look at any teenager and you’ll see just how much they text! At some point, ARCADE has become synonymous with a 10am weekday text. Last week, we had a glitch in our system which resulted in not many texts going out. We were inundated with texts between 10:05am and 10:33am asking: “is arcade closed today?”, “I didn’t get today’s menu”, “I didn’t get today’s text.” etc.. People were waiting for it!
This shows that our members have grown to look forward to our text-only interactions. But there’s more. When you look at habit forming products: Facebook, Instagram, maybe Fitbit, they offer something new and enticing every time a user comes back. If we were to just text food menus everyday, show the menu in advance, or repeat the same dishes, it would get boring and engagement would remain low.
When we added the additional elements of puzzles, games, funny animated GIFs, and contests/giveaways, this is when things really became interesting. Think Buzzfeed meets Twitter, our texts create a fun distraction to an otherwise hectic day with the official reason of e-commerce. It’s the element of surprise and delight that gets users to keep coming back. Also, like Snapchat, the “menu” disappears in an hour.
Pennie (our ARCADE persona) has conversations with customers everyday. We get thousands of interactions between 10am to 11am. Around 40% of “Arcadians” interact with us daily and 80% interact with us weekly. People tend to play the games, enter the contests, answers our quiz questions, and order lunch.
From an analytics perspective, our numbers are sound due to the fact that in text messaging, there are no “ghost” users, like there are in emails. When someone says they have 500K unique emails in NYC and your click rate turns out to be 0.1%, you have to stop and wonder. This leads to text messaging becoming an interesting medium as not only a media outlet but also a direct seller of non-food related products and services.
Operating solely through text just makes sense for fun, for payment and of course for simple communication. Whether it’s an automated message or a real human — it works and we will definitely see this becoming more and more mainstream.
Happy to have all of you try it out for yourself. Feedback welcome! Txt MEDIUM to 22105 to get started.
Learn more:
ARCADE: www.eatarcade.com
STADIUM: www.servedbystadium.com
Author: www.jasbanwait.co
