Casino Enterprise Management

 SMS/Text Messaging: A Call to Action for Pennies Per Message

By Theron "Scarlet Raven" Thompson

What are you doing to drive market share and awareness at your property? Being able to communicate with a customer in real time effectively, efficiently and measurably has always been the elusive holy grail of marketing. But how do we initiate a dialogue with customers? How do we get customers to buy in? How do we measure our effectiveness? Those are the questions that every marketing professional has asked themselves at some point, and the answer has changed a lot over the years.

Over the past 20 years, many casinos implemented the John Romero-style direct-mail piece—a wordy piece of marketing material that repeated the customer’s name over and over within verbiage intended to engage the customer in a one-sided written dialogue. This type of direct mail took a month or longer to successfully measure, after matching the coupons, bar codes and other remnants of the paper trail that the revenue audit required. Many casinos considered a return of 12 to 18 percent a home run.

Direct mail isn’t the only ubiquitous but cumbersome marketing scheme that has been popular in casinos over the past decades. How many of us have sweated the results of our big car giveaway? We’ve anxiously awaited results from the proverbial “black box” to see why the promotion succeeded. And we’ve tried to piece together why it crashed, knowing that our general manager would be asking us the answers to questions he already knew the answer to by way of his courtesy copy (cc) of the same results marketing received from accounting.

To read the full article, visit www.casinoenterprisemanagement.com/articles/april-2012/smstext-messaging-call-action-pennies-message.