Bloomsbury Racing is a betting service that provides a subscriber-based horse racing tipping service to its members. Subscribers sign up to a monthly service for all the latest news. Bloomsbury Racing is now using an SMS marketing platform from RedSMS as part of its service. The immediacy of text marketing makes it ideal for communicating hot racing tips quickly and easily to a large subscriber base. Initially Bloomsbury Racing used it purely to drive new business, but now it also uses it for retention marketing, once punters have signed up.
“The RedSMS platform and the text marketing medium is very successful for signing up new members,” says Jill McAleer, Office Manager at Bloomsbury Racing. “As we send thousands of texts at a go, we needed a reliable system that offered the flexibility to be automated to work with our sales team during the key weekly sales periods.”
Timing is key for the company – it can specify the time when the message goes out, and when it wants customers to call into the call centre – i.e. when it’s fully resourced. “We’ve already found timing is critical for mobile marketing. We tend to send Friday afternoons as a reminder to call us Saturday morning. This works well, as customers are generally not at work at the weekends and it’s a big racing day,” adds McAleer.
Bloomsbury broadcasts a text campaign to the target prospect database, with an incentive to register. Typically, it sends the first broadcast as a free of charge tip, then a second broadcast to all those who responded – thanking them for their business, and offering them another free tip.
“We receive an excellent response to these incentivised campaigns – normally over a third of those contacted reply, which makes this an extremely cost-effective medium,” says McAleer.
In future the company is planning to exploit the SMS channel further, with more regular campaigns. The Bloomsbury Racing is finding they are getting smarter on how to use it more effectively with every broadcast.
“The RedSMS platform and the text marketing medium is very successful for signing up new members,” says Jill McAleer, Office Manager at Bloomsbury Racing. “As we send thousands of texts at a go, we needed a reliable system that offered the flexibility to be automated to work with our sales team during the key weekly sales periods.”
Timing is key for the company – it can specify the time when the message goes out, and when it wants customers to call into the call centre – i.e. when it’s fully resourced. “We’ve already found timing is critical for mobile marketing. We tend to send Friday afternoons as a reminder to call us Saturday morning. This works well, as customers are generally not at work at the weekends and it’s a big racing day,” adds McAleer.
Bloomsbury broadcasts a text campaign to the target prospect database, with an incentive to register. Typically, it sends the first broadcast as a free of charge tip, then a second broadcast to all those who responded – thanking them for their business, and offering them another free tip.
“We receive an excellent response to these incentivised campaigns – normally over a third of those contacted reply, which makes this an extremely cost-effective medium,” says McAleer.
In future the company is planning to exploit the SMS channel further, with more regular campaigns. The Bloomsbury Racing is finding they are getting smarter on how to use it more effectively with every broadcast.
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