Marketing Option Assessment - SMS Marketing providers like mGinger

Companies like mGinger send out offers to customers who have subscribed to their SMS based services. This is similar to sending out mass SMSs, except that they do it the legal way. It is illegal to send out mass SMSs, unless the subscriber has explicitly agreed to accept messages – I still wonder why I get so many junk messages. With mGinger, customers sign up for their services voluntarily. mGinger entices subscribers to sign up for their services by promising to offer them deals and discounts not available elsewhere. So if you want to use their large database available and send out a marketing message through SMS, you can pay mGinger to send out messages to a targeted list – they offer extensive refinement options, such as location, use profile etc. You can offer deals that make sense for you – say a 15% discount if someone shows you the SMS they have received from mGinger.

I believe that this is a viable marketing option for both new and existing restaurant businesses to reach a large targeted customer base in the area. Though the content you can send is limited through an SMS, it atleast gets the name of your restaurant out to a large target customer base and you may get a small percentage of the SMS recipients to actually visit your place to avail the deal.

mGinger charges around 30-50 paise per SMS. Bulk SMS services charge around 1-5 paise per SMS. In my opinion, the effectiveness of mGinger probably more than justifies their much higher cost. I would recommend that you try out both options and see which one is more effective for your business.