As revealed in our 2021 Text Message Marketing Benchmark Report, the data show that 60% of offer redemptions delivered to customers via a brand’s text message program occur within the first 24 hours. Even more noteworthy: 39% of offer redemptions occur on the very same day that the subscribers of the 40+ foodservice brands received them.
Brands that use text messages to deliver offers need to be ready to roll because customers will respond almost immediately. Predictably, the redemption rate drops considerably every day after the release of the offer, so the timing is critical for a text message marketing campaign’s effectiveness.
The benchmark report also looked at the rate of redemptions broken down not just by the day but by hourly increments. It revealed that more than 30% of redemptions occur within the first three hours after subscribers receive the offer via text message, and nearly half of those are within the first hour!
This speaks to the immediacy of text messages and fact that they are usually read faster than emails. It also points to text messaging’s ability to increase traffic around slower days or dayparts, or conversely to time offers based on prime dayparts. Sending an offer one or two hours before a specific dining occasion has a high likelihood of driving redemptions for that occasion.
For larger brands operating massive text marketing programs of, for instance, more than one million subscribers, the throughput capability of the text platform determines whether this is even possible. Consider, for example, that you won’t get much value from shooting out in the morning a same-day lunch offer that doesn’t reach the text program subscribers until 6 PM.
Therefore, the larger the brand, and consequently the larger the number of subscribers, the more important it is for brands to seek an enterprise-grade solution, one with high throughput and performance capabilities.
Most consumers keep a close guard on their mobile number, which is why text marketing programs typically work best when the brand provides a high-value reward in exchange for the consumer choosing to opt into the text message program (e.g., “Get a free entree when you join”).
Not surprisingly, because of their higher value than typical ongoing offers and immediate delivery upon joining, opt-in offers outperform ongoing offers by a factor of 20.
Our data culled from more than 30 million text message-based offers showed that:
The second-greatest factor we observed is the frequency by which a brand discounts. Brands with highly loyal fan bases are able to charge premium prices and rarely discount. But when launching a text messaging program, they often offer a discount or free food as a reward for enrolling and agreeing to receive text messages.
These brands tend to generate high redemption rates for opt-in offers, even if the value isn’t substantial, since any discount is a valued and rare reward from the brand.
This article highlights several — but far from all — insights on text message offer redemption and other key discoveries relevant to any brand considering making the investment in opening up a marketing channel to reach customers on the most-used app on their phone: text messaging. In the report, you gain other insight, including:
This groundbreaking report is available for free at the link below.