Today the news site Mobile Marketer interviewed mobileStorm sales director Elyse Rossler about Overstock.com using our platform for its beta SMS promotions campaign. It’s not just a boon for us, though. We’ve long believed that texting can boost sales for any retailer. The medium offers a sense of a personal relationship between consumer and brand, and can also be used to encourage spur-of-the-moment purchases.
What Overstock is doing is a twofold strategy. First, it is offering sales and news alerts, including coupons, to customers who subscribe to receive such messages via text message. Second, it has launched a mobile site so that on-the-go consumers can shop wherever they are. Conceivably, a consumer could receive a sales alert via SMS, then go directly onto the mobile Internet, check out Overstock’s mobile site for the item of interest–and buy the item right then and there.
Says Overstock’s James Munnerlyn in our news announcement: \”Using the mobileStorm 4.0 platform will open an entirely new channel of communicating with Overstock.com customers. After a thorough analysis of vendors in the mobile marketing space, we selected mobileStorm based on their ability to quickly execute our mobile marketing vision at a reasonable cost, and with all the complimentary resources and services we need to run the programs.\”
One important point in the Mobile Marketer news article: “A whopping 98 percent of consumers have mobile phones that are capable of sending and receiving text messages. Also, 90 percent of all text messages sent are responded to within 15 minutes, making SMS a good way to reach consumers.”
So the scenario I outlined in the second paragraph could result in a conversion within 15 minutes.
Now, that’s a bright spot for businesses during cloudy economic times.