A US mobile phone-based customer loyalty system has launched in the UK, targeting the retail and leisure sectors, offering brand owners substantial growth in profile by connecting their new or existing loyalty schemes with social media.
LoyalTXT, which has been operating in the States for a number of years, is planning to tap into the phenomenal growth in loyalty schemes over the past decade, by cutting the reliance on plastic cards.
It uses a mobile phone number in place of a card and allows the client to run short-term targeted promotions using text, email and voice messages; to build a fully populated customer database, and critically, to link their loyalty programme to social media to increase exposure and gain new members at no cost.
In an environment where over 90 per cent of text messages are opened within 15 minutes, mobile marketing becomes an intensely powerful tool.
LoyalTXT director of mobile marketing UK Chris Morton, who is also a consultant in the hospitality industry, is leading the UK charge, having seen it working to its full potential in the US.
“Once the business has collected the customer’s mobile number, LoyalTXT does the rest automatically, sending out a sequence of incentivised, branded messages that the business owner has agreed in advance. Incentives are linked to the reward programme and are selected to increase the amount of data collected from each customer,” he explains.
“As demonstrated in the US, LoyalTXT has power to develop customer numbers and revenue through linking with social media. Potentially, every time a member pays at your business, LoyalTXT will paste an agreed offer to their Facebook wall, encouraging friends to sign up to the loyalty programme too, growing your membership database. We’ve seen business in the UK grow their loyalty membership by in excess of 60 per cent in the first month of use.”
With a smart dashboard that gives businesses an insight into their customer behaviour, promotions, redemptions and social media reach, LoyalTXT claims to make monitoring the ROI of loyalty schemes relatively straightforward.
