Is TEXT Really THAT Powerful?

In a previous post, my colleague mentioned that 90% of text messages are read in the first 3 minutes and 99% are read overall. You may have read this and thought, it’s definitely hard to believe. Even I found it hard to believe, until this happened…

A few months after our launch last year, we were in the midst of a better than normal day, the daily campaign had gone out and we had delivered all the meals on time. We were planning the next day’s menu when suddenly I got a weird text message on my phone from our ARCADE number. The message read “ cocockcoocockckkckckckck”.

At first, I thought we were just testing something and only I had received the message. No sweat. Then my colleagues told me that they also got the message. Within 1 minute of me receiving the text, we were inundated with incoming messages from our users. Turns out, this random message had gone out to our entire user base.

My “no sweat” attitude quickly turned into panic. The text was embarrassing and by no means a reflection of our brand. Of course, we felt terrible that we spammed our users. Not only was it spam but the content of the message could easily be characterized as inappropriate and offensive. I was mostly panicked about losing hundreds of users, after working so hard to build their trust.

Besides panic, I was also blown away. I had never seen so many inbound messages come in within such a short period of time. Our user base was relatively small, but we literally had at least a thousand messages come in within minutes. Not only did our inbound message blow up, but so did our Twitter feed. Some members were very upset, while others thought it was hilarious.

After, we apologized and explained the situation to every person who messaged us, we sat back and looked at the data. A staggering 73% of people responded to the message! Typically, emails only have a 20–40% open rate and 2–4% click through rate. But in this case, we had an unheard of engagement rate!

To gain back the trust of our members and make the experience fitting to our brand, we were very transparent about what happened and crowdsourced the punishment.

This was the day when we realized that ARCADE is not just push notification for daily lunch, its much more than that. ARCADE operates on push AND pull, it’s a 2 way experience with our customers. “Arcadians” enjoy and look forward to the daily text and interaction. This experience sparked the need to add in a daily “fun” aspect to the text messages. We started to include funny GIFs, games, riddles and puzzles which dramatically increased engagement and user interaction.

Of course, I would NEVER recommend such a tactic to test your engagement, however sometimes mistakes can turn into your best lessons and transform how you see your company.

Try out ARCADE: txt MEDIUM to 22105 to get started.