To promote the new location, radio advertisements were broadcast on Wellington radio. They featured an SMS marketing call-to-action: to receive a mobile coupon, customers could text in to the shortcode 244 (in Australia we use 19 33 33). The mobile coupons could be redeemed at the new McDonald's location, and were valid for many menu items, ranging from McMuffins and sundaes to Big Macs or McChicken meals. Blair Wilson, Operations Manager at the new store, explains that the SMS marketing campaign's results were better than his expectations.
"The guest counts during the promotional period far exceeded our expectations with 11,739 customers coming to the store that week. This is approximately 2800 more than an average week."
Not only did radio and SMS marketing bring in more foot traffic than that seen in already established McDonald's restaurants; but it also resulted in higher-than-anticipated revenue.
As well as promoting foot traffic, the new McDonald's location needed to recruit around 50 staff members. To do this, they ran another similar radio and SMS marketing campaign. This time, listeners could text in to receive a link to a McDonald's Web page. From there, they uploaded their resumes easily and quickly. Wilson explains that recruiting staff by text message was a new step for SMS marketing, but it worked well.
"Using this method (SMS marketing), we had approximately 600 applications for positions in two weeks. We had the same amount of applications over a nine month period at the Johnsonville store."
This McDonald's case study demonstrates the many uses of SMS marketing. Mobile coupons are already a popular form of SMS marketing, and in this campaign they made it as easy as possible for McDonald's listeners to connect to their advertising. In contrast, the SMS-to-recruit strategy was an entirely new dimension of SMS marketing, and its use here tells us that there are many other possibilities still out there. So what's next? SMS-to-pay maybe?
About the Author:
This article was written by Emma Smith of TXT2GET, a leading SMS marketing company. TXT2GET supply affordable SMS keywords that typically increase ad response by 2-3x. SMS keywords also bring measurability & accountability to advertising, because you can see the exact time and date that responses come in. Click on the link to get free advice on how SMS marketing can improve your business' advertising.