A MALVERN-based mobile marketing specialist has boosted a car retailing giant’s sales with a new innovation in text messaging.

Textlocal.com of Malvern Hills Science Park, experts in mobile marketing and SMS communications, stepped in when Lookers needed help improving its customer engagement and sales.

Lookers, one of the top five motor vehicle retailers in the UK representing 31 vehicle manufacturers, from 391 sites across the UK and Ireland, already use a variety of tactics to contact customers, but were experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions.

Textlocal devised a bespoke solution, using innovative SMS messages, ‘Ticketing’ for four dealerships in the North West to drive sales of two Vauxhall models. Ticketing is a new type of SMS message which offers multiple benefits to the dealer and customer.

Through Textlocal’s online platform, Lookers were able 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.

Jason Palgrave-Jones, managing director at Textlocal, said: “While Lookers already use SMS to reach their customers for MOT and service reminders, they were finding that email and social media were giving poor response rates. They needed to test an alternative way of driving bigger campaigns to success. They asked us to deliver a solution that helped them reward customer loyalty with special offers to generate sales and insight and our innovative SMS ticketing was the answer.”

Paul Craft, divisional online sales & performance manager at Lookers, 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.”