Recently we have seen business text messaging advertising in stores and even in emails that come across our desktop. These messages often advertise some product or service With the click of a button you could find yourself subscribed to a service that you may not want to have. They are supposed to tell you up front that you are subscribing to some service. However in many cases it is buried at the bottom of the message in the fine print.
Business Text messaging Example
For example, a business text messaging service is used by the clothing store called Izod. They advertise in the store that cell phone and smart phone users can get an additional $5 off their purchase. All they have to do is send a text message to a particular number with a specific phrase. This only works if you are in the store and if you are already making a purchase. You can save $5 immediately.
They send a return message which you show to the clerk when you check out. Pretty simple really but now they have your cell phone number. They will send you text messaging advertising from time to time. I tried this and found that I receive a message from them about once a month, which is not too bad. Alternately you can unsubscribe from their service. Then the next time you are in the store, send another text message and get another $5 off the next purchase you make that day at Izod.
The Bay, another clothing store has recently started the same thing; however they will give you a $10 discount on anything you buy over $100. An incentive to purchase more, but then you do save $10 on your total purchase. We are not sure, but we believe this is a onetime thing. In other words you cannot send these text messages multiple times for multiple purchases. Izod only allows the one time savings while you are signed up for alerts.
Text messaging Advertising
Why do they do this you ask? They want to encourage you to purchase more. They want to learn some information about you and they now have your cell number. Which is a working number which they can use to send further advertising to you via text messaging.
They can also learn a great deal about their customers by doing a reverse look up on the telephone number. We are not sure that they actually do collect this information, but they certainly could and many companies are actively doing this sort of thing to improve sales.
There are ways to use this information and also prevent these businesses from sending more text messages to you as well as prevent them from learning more about their customer. Send the initial text message to sign up, collect your discount and then send a stop text message to the same number to prevent more from being sent to you.
In fact most will advise you regarding how to go about stopping a message once you have received whatever benefits you wanted.
For more text messaging ideas and discussion, click here.