Mobile marketing blog

In the current economic climate what should retailers, business owners and sales managers be thinking with 2010 fast approaching? Primarily, generating more sales! The best way to achieve this is through staff incentive schemes, and one delivery mechanism for incentive schemes set to take off next year will be SMS.

Here's the theory... staff register to take part in an SMS sales incentive scheme by texting a keyword followed by their name, or employment number for example. Upon making a sale that qualifies for the scheme, they are given a unique code to text to determine their reward. A random reward is chosen and a confirmation sent back to the employee. At the same time, an email is sent to a fulfillment company to send the reward. In most cases, the process can be completely automated by use of e-vouchers as rewards.

Asda used SMS to increase take-up of its share incentive sharesave scheme to enable staff to join via SMS text message, in order to boost employee participation levels. Mike Hazelgrave, reward manager, said: "Around 97% of our colleagues have mobile phones, so we are definitely hoping that this boosts take-up of the scheme." In this case, Asda did well to recognize that the most widely used communication tool its staff used on a regular basis was the mobile phone!

Text-to-win campaigns have also been used in the past to incentivise retail sales staff to push products in store. Upon completion of a successful sale, the sales assistant is given a text to win code which enters them into a prize draw. Platforms such as The Text Works allow you to setup and monitor campaigns, confirm winners, re promote to the sales staff, and update teams on targets. This is also a great method to use for field based sales staff, keeping up momentum on the move.

Using SMS for your business incentive scheme has a number of advantages over tradition methods. It's easy and quick to setup, its affordable, it's scalable to the size of your organization and participants, and most importantly it's a new and fresh way to incentivise your staff to help drive sales in 2010.