Use SMS Coupons to Grow Your Business

If your customers love a bargain and you love your customers and sales, Echo’s SMS coupons will make you both happy.

As any digital marketer will tell you, coupons are a must for small businesses because they drive and sustain sales by:

• Encouraging new customers to try your product or service.
• Encouraging existing customers to try a new product or service.
• Cultivating customer loyalty.
• Driving foot traffic to stores, events and service providers.

Yet paper, TV, and radio campaigns are costly to produce and distribute, and their impact is difficult to track. Echo’s SMS coupons solve this problem.

Now you can automatically generate unique digital coupon codes on Echo and distribute them to select customers via SMS. Each code entitles the recipient to a time-bound discount or financial reward, creating an urgent incentive to buy your product or service.

Coupons can be redeemed via free SMS from your sales people or distributors, or by customers themselves as part of an SMS survey. Then in real time, you can track how many coupons have been redeemed, for which products, where, and by whom!

Organizations are using Echo’s SMS coupons to:

• Enable Buy-One-Get-One-Free promotions.
• Reward loyal customers for sustained or high-volume purchases.
• Reward sales representatives and brand ambassadors for reaching sales targets.
• Enable customer to register into sweepstakes or giveaways through product purchases.

What Makes SMS Coupons Different?

Highly Targeted and Personalised Campaigns

On the Echo platform, your messages and conversations can automatically include personal data points like name, location, brand preference, or any other relevant information you know about your recipients. Using this feature when sending coupons or confirming redemption captures customer attention, builds trust, and distinguishes your messages from spam.

This same data — anything you have uploaded or collected about your customers — can be used to decide who receives your coupons, and which kind of coupon they receive. This means you can also create and design coupons based on exactly what each of your customers are looking for instead of blasting out the same type of SMS coupons to everyone.

Cost Effective

Distributing coupons via SMS lowers your costs and increases your return by:

• Saving you time and money. Say goodbye to printing costs!
• Giving you more flexibility. Run pilots and make changes on the fly.
• Allowing you to scale easily. There is literally no limit!
• Allowing real time monitoring. Track exactly how many people are acting on your campaign, right now.

SMS coupons are also convenient for the customers. No more holding up the queue digging out a printed coupon. SMS coupons will be safely stored in the customer’s phone to be redeemed at their convenience.

On the Echo platform, you can choose to incorporate coupon codes into one-way SMS (Notices) or two-way engagements (Surveys). For the latter, coupons can be generated on the fly during the course of the customer interaction.

Quick and Painless Redemption

Customers who redeem coupons in stores are more likely to buy additional items. The Echo platform provides two redemption options to best suit your business model and promotional campaign:

1. Third Party Coupon Redemption: You can enable third party retailers or distributors to validate and redeem SMS coupon codes. When your customer makes a purchase, they simply show their code to the sales person, who will send it in a free SMS to your shortcode. Echo will validate the code instantaneously, deliver the reward to the customer, and send a confirmation to the sales person.
2. Customer Coupon Redemption via Survey: Customers can redeem a coupon themselves in response to an SMS survey question that they trigger or receive. Once the customer redeems the coupon, they need only to show your sales person the redemption message.

Real-time Monitoring and Analytics

Paper coupons don’t tell you anything about the customer who redeems them, or the impact of your campaign. Echo enables you to track and quantify the your campaign impact in real time.

Throughout your campaign, the Echo platform gathers useful data on your customers and their behaviours. When a customer or store clerk redeems an SMS coupon, information contained in the coupon code syncs instantaneously to your Echo account.

Coupon data will link to a contact’s phone number, helping you build customer profiles in your groups. Moreover, at any time you can see exactly how many coupons have been generated, how many have been redeemed, for which products, where, and by whom!

Interested in using SMS coupons to stimulate growth for your business? To get started with setup guidance , reach out to sales@echomobile.org