A text message marketing campaign by Lookers has won two industry awards.

The campaign used a new SMS technology from Textlocal.com to offer personalisation and a customer offer, resulting in a return on investment of more than 4,000%. 

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’.

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

Textlocal.com developed a new technology, SMS ticketing.

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.

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.

Paul Craft, divisional online sales and performance manager, said: “We already used a variety of tactics to contact customers, but were experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions.

“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.”

Jason Palgrave-Jones, managing director at Textlocal, 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.”

A recent study by data agency Mobilesquared found that opt-in SMS is the fastest growing marketing channel in the UK.

Its 2016 study also predicted that it will continue to grow by nearly four million people each year.

SMS boasts a 98% open rate, with 90% of those being read within the first three minutes.