Making the Case for Mobile Marketing: Baxter Avenue Morgue and the Spooky Secret to SMS Success

by Victor Green
3 mins read

The impact of mobile marketing can’t be overstated. According to IDC, more people in the U.S. will access the Internet through a mobile device than through their PC by 2015. In this new series, Elite Email takes a look at highly successful campaigns to uncover their mobile marketing lessons. This week’s case study: How Baxter Avenue Morgue connected with customers looking for the perfect Halloween scare via smart SMS messages. For many people, there’s nothing quite like Halloween. While other holidays focus on bringing together friends and family for more serious reasons, this night is all about scaring the pants off each other. To help add an extra element to the fun and festivities, haunted houses, like the Baxter Avenue Morgue in Louisville, Kentucky, offer up delightfully ghoulish attractions. Unfortunately, when it comes to seasonal businesses with a short operational run, competition can be pretty stiff. With this mind, Baxter Avenue Morgue decided to go all in on a smart SMS plan in an effort to get a leg up on the rest of market. Even if your brand isn’t in the business of scaring its audience, there’s still plenty you can learn by taking a look at this haunted house’s frighteningly successful text message campaign.

The Basic SMS Plan

Baxter Avenue Morgue had one goal in mind when it came to setting up an SMS operation – engage it’s audience and set up future remarketing opportunities. To do this, the campaign decided to offer up a chance to win two free tickets to the attraction for anyone willing to join the haunted house’s mobile marketing contact list. All customers had to do was text the keyword BAXTER and wait for a new contest winner at the end of each week of the promotion.

Taking It a Step Farther with Targeting

However, no great campaign just fires off messages with reckless abandon and hopes for the best. Like plenty of other cases in this mobile marketing series, Baxter Avenue Morgue understood the importance of targeting. With this in mind, the haunted house chose to focus on teenagers and young adults in the Louisville and southern Indiana areas. Not only were these two portions of the local population into scary scenarios and thrills, they’re also some of the most active segments of the population when it comes to texting and mobile phone use. Basically, there’s little chance that an SMS message from the haunted house would go unnoticed by those who can’t stand being away from their phones.

Tuning Into the Right Channels

To get the word out on this campaign, Baxter Avenue Morgue picked up commercial spots during high volume television periods. Honing in on open commercial space during related programming, like AMC’s Fear Fest and ABC’s 13 Nights of Halloween, helped add a little extra punch to an already smart campaign approach. As information came in about these TV spots and correlated signup numbers, Baxter Avenue Morgue focused on optimizing its marketing budget by pulling weaker results and adding extra spots on successful networks and time slots.

The Final Numbers

Once the dust had settled and the campaign came to a close, the SMS campaign managers were ready to tally the results. In total, thousands of customers from the surrounding areas joined the mobile marketing list, giving Baxter Avenue Morgue a major boost in SMS contacts. From here, more than 50 percent decided to stick around and receive future messages from the organization. Considering that the commercial spots employed by the haunted house ran for only 15 seconds – a relatively short time to convey a call-to-action (CTA) – and that the value of the sweepstakes tickets were just $40 a pair, having such a positive and lasting response makes the results even more impressive.

Everything Your Business Needs to Scare Up the Same Success

So now that you know Baxter Avenue Morgue’s story, what lessons can you pull from this tale of mobile marketing success? To start, finding the right portion of your audience, and connecting with these individuals via the appropriate media, goes a long way. SMS marketing is more about quality than quantity, so don’t be afraid to focus on a select group, especially if these people are the most likely to convert by a wide margin.From here, you don’t have to spend an arm and leg on marketing to make a splash if you have a smart strategy. This haunted house gave away one pair of tickets a week, hardly a king’s ransom by any stretch of the imagination, yet it still raked in thousands of new customers. With this lesson, and everything else you’ve learned from Baxter Avenue Morgue, you should have all the info you need to scare up some stunning results of your own the next time you send out a text.

Related Posts