AN innovative marketing campaign which used technology from a leading mobile marketing company from Chester has been rewarded with two industry ‘Oscars’.

The campaign, by car giant Lookers, utilised a new SMS technology, called SMS ticketing, from Chester-based Textlocal.com

The campaign beat the likes of John Lewis, Audi, Tesco and Jaguar to scoop two prizes at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards for Most Effective Sales Promotion Campaign and Most Effective Automotive Campaign.

Lookers were looking for new ways to engage with customers and increase sales after experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions.

Divisional online sales and performance manager Paul Craft said: “We wanted a cost-effective solution to generate sales quickly, which can be a challenge to achieve when trying to drive bigger campaigns to success.”

At the time, Lookers were using the business text messaging platform Textlocal.com to reach their customers for MOT and service reminders.

Lookers used SMS ticketing to create and send individually coded tickets that could be saved to any mobile phone, each of which were personalised for 80,000 customers across the North-West region.

The SMS tickets contained special offers on two specific Vauxhall models and links embedded in the texts directed customers to web pages with more information about the cars. These pages were hidden from search engines so only those who received the message could see the offer. This gave the campaign a personal edge that is a growing demand marketers sometimes struggle to meet.

Each of the unique codes on the SMS tickets, were linked back to Lookers’ customer records. This allowed them to redeem these codes in several ways, such as through integration with their CRM system.

Lookers were also able to track which customers had clicked links, giving them great intelligence in their customers’ interests and levels of engagement for future campaigns.

The results of the SMS ticket campaign were phenomenal and drove a huge level of customer engagement.

Managing director at Textlocal Jason Palgrave-Jones said: “SMS marketing can be far more powerful than other forms of direct marketing and we have proved with the Lookers campaign that the humble text message can be a highly effective communication platform.

“To win two industry awards in extremely competitive categories is a reflection of just what an impact the campaign had and we are delighted that our work with Lookers yielded such excellent results for them.”

Paul Craft added: “Textlocal’s brilliant, but simple SMS ticketing, was the solution to overcome the barriers that we had been experiencing in communicating with our customers. Not only were we able to offer genuine benefits to our customers, but also generate sales and crucially for us gather important information for the future.”