Mobile commerce isn’t just about purchasing goods on a phone, it all starts with using mobile as a marketing tool – and it appears that, if you get the right and receptive audience, it can work. Online fashion and sports retailer MandMDirect.com has seen a 6% sales conversion rate from mobile promotional campaigns over the last four months. Text messages were sent each month to its active customer base, driving them to the website with various offers. 6% of customers receiving text messages from MandMDirect.com then went on to make a purchase.

The campaigns, created by mobile marketing agency Sponge, featured a wide range of offers where people were encouraged to buy products via discount codes that could be activated on the retailer’s website.

“The results we’ve seen since working with Sponge are further evidence of the growing importance of mobile in retail,” said Jonathan Jones, Head of UK Marketing at MandMDirect.com. “Our customer base wants the best deals but doesn’t want to spend ages looking for them – by using text messages we’re able to give them relevant and timely offers such as free delivery, ensuring they can take advantage of promotions as and when they happen.”

MandMDirect.com is now considering broadening its range of mobile promotional mechanics – testing a wider variety of offers, techniques and tactics to understand what best drives response – and extending its current mobile marketing programme to overseas territories.

“SMS broadcasts to intelligently derived segments of MandMDirect.com’s database have driven good response rates – and by response rates we mean people buying,” said Alex Meisl, Chairman of Sponge. “Mobile has proved to be the perfect tool to direct heavy volumes of traffic to the website.”

Related news

• Planet Funk sees 91% redemption rate on mobile coupons
• Dairy Queen tests mobile stickers for loyalty campaigns
• MandMDirect chooses Tealeaf to monitor customer journeys