September 6, 2004

Marketing to your customer's cell phones

Direct mail, banner ads, Yellow Pages, and more are all marketing avenues available to businesses. More businesses are seeing that cell phones can be a good reveneu booster also.

Startup Journal writes Marketers at the Cambridge Side Galleria Mall had tried it all -- mass mailings, print ads, radio spots. But such tactics were no longer bringing in the shoppers, and the Cambridge, Mass., mall was on the hunt for something truly attention-grabbing. So last winter, Issie Shait, vice president of operations at the 116-store shopping center, turned to a new marketing medium: the screen of the cellphone.

Shait's team collected the phone numbers of nearly 2,000 shoppers. Over a six-month period, the customers received, via text message, 39 discount offers from 19 tenants -- messages like "Twenty percent off at the register" or "Free appetizer when you dine with a friend." Shoppers simply presented their phones at the mall's information desk in exchange for paper coupons to redeem in stores. According to Shait, an astonishing 80% of all the text-screen coupons were converted. "The tenants that participated all saw a jump in their sales," he says.

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