A MASSIVELY successful marketing campaign that used technology from a Malvern-based mobile marketing company has been rewarded with two industry "Oscars".

The campaign, by car giant Lookers, utilised a new SMS technology from Textlocal.com on Malvern Hills Science Park to create a winning combination of personalisation and a very desirable offer, resulting in a return on investment of more than 4,000 per cent.

The campaign beat the likes of John Lewis, Audi, Tesco and Jaguar to scoop two prizes at the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards for most effective sales promotion campaign and most effective automotive campaign. Lookers, which has nearly 400 sites and is one of the top five motor vehicle retailers in the UK, was looking for new ways to engage with customers and increase sales after experiencing poor returns from social media and email promotions.

Paul Craft, divisional online sales and performance manager, explained: "We wanted a cost-effective solution to generate sales quickly, which can be a challenge to achieve when trying to drive bigger campaigns to success.”

At the time, Lookers was using the business text messaging platform Textlocal.com to reach customers for MOT and service reminders. The company, renowned pioneers in text messaging for business, recently developed a new technology that provided the answer to Lookers’ challenge, called SMS ticketing. Lookers used this 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. The results of the SMS ticket campaign were phenomenal and drove a huge level of customer engagement.

Jason Palgrave-Jones, managing director at Textlocal, said: “SMS marketing can be far more powerful than other forms of direct marketing and we have proved with the Lookers campaign that the humble text message can be a highly effective communication platform. To win two industry awards in extremely competitive categories is a reflection of just what an impact the campaign had and we are delighted that our work with Lookers yielded such excellent results for them.”

Mr Craft 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.”