Customer engagement lifted with SMS and mobile landing pages

4 min read | September 2, 2019

Everthought Education (Everthought) group is a trades, building and construction registered training organisation (RTO) delivering qualifications from its Queensland and Western Australia base, as well as workplace skilling, training and assessment solutions through its network of Recognition for Prior Learning (RPL) and apprenticeship operations around all states of Australia. The organisation delivers industry-recognised trades qualifications from Certificate I through to Advanced Diploma, as well as quality assured RPL and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) services to highly experienced trades professionals and employers seeking to advance their workforce trades certifications.

Challenges

• Lead generation through a ‘Refer-a-mate’ campaign, designed to encourage tradespeople to refer a mate who had industry experience but not recognised trades certification.
• Previous campaigns were organic, largely via social media and referrals.
• Everthought wanted to improve on its already good SMS open rates, especially compared to email rates, by taking the campaign to the next level. “Promotional SMS activity and, more recently, conversational SMS, have been a great platform to reach our audience in the past, but we’ve been looking for ways to up that experience.,” says Lucas West, Director at Everthought.

Solution

• MessageMedia’s mobile landing pages were used for the campaign to increase engagement and track conversions.
• Conversational messaging was particularly appealing. Everthought’s audience is highly engaged with social media, and therefore very comfortable with messaging solutions and responding via SMS.
• The SMS included a short trackable link, which expanded to a link preview on supported mobile phones.
• The link preview for Everthought’s campaign features an engaging image and call-to-action (CTA) text, ‘Refer a mate for $100 cash’. This enhanced the look and feel of the message – without the need to alter Everthought’s website content to match.
• By tapping on the CTA, customers then viewed a mobile landing page. This continued the look and feel of the link preview, and invited customers to either refer a mate or find out more via two CTA buttons.

Benefits

Everthought was very happy with the results of the messaging campaign and use of mobile landing pages:

• Better engagement: The campaign generated greater engagement and conversions than previous campaigns via other channels, with a click-through rate (CTR) of 12 percent. “We thought mobile landing pages could help solve some challenges we’ve seen with engagement and conversion from other channels, such as email. We’ve since seen higher contact and response rates, and also better quality engagements, and we believe it’s due to the improved user experience and visual impact of mobile landing pages,” says West.
• Conversational messaging: West described it as a strategic decision to leverage SMS for conversational engagement. “We’re connecting to our audience on a channel where they are most comfortable, so we use that interactive conversational element to engage them.”
• Integration: Everthought previously took customer details over the phone and manually entered them into its CRM, which was time-consuming and prone to human error. After integrating its CRM with SMS – and now mobile landing pages – this information automatically feeds into the system, improving internal efficiency.
• Further plans: There are plans to use the technology to promote other offers, apprenticeships, and RTOs. West also sees mobile landing pages as ideal for reaching international students. “Smartphone usage and dependency is very high within our target demographic. Tradespeople effectively run their businesses from the app stack on their smartphone and tablet devices, so we are keen to continue using SMS and mobile landing pages for engaging communications that appeal to our client community,” says West.

“Promotional SMS activity and, more recently, conversational SMS, have been a great platform to reach our audience in the past, but we’ve been looking for ways to up that experience. We thought mobile landing pages could help solve some challenges we’ve seen with engagement and conversion from other channels, such as email. We’ve since seen higher contact and response rates, and also better quality engagements, and we believe it’s due to the improved user experience and visual impact of mobile landing pages.” Lucas West, Director, Everthought

Find out how you can increase customer engagement with mobile landing pages.