SaleCycle’s Remarketing product was born out of a requirement to communicate with website visitors who left shopping carts or online bookings behind. Since its inception in 2010, SaleCycle has seen impressive results from its sizeable enterprise customer base.

Historically this has been achieved through the use of email being triggered after a cart or booking abandonment. With over a billion abandonments being managed, Email has produced some impressive results, 45 per cent open rates, 4 per cent uplift in total online sales and in the example of Virgin Atlantic an additional $29 generated from every remarketing email sent.

However as the use of Mobile has accelerated and become the main device people use to consume communication, SaleCycle needed to understand and leverage a technology that was more relevant to a mobile channel.

Product evolution
Head of product at SaleCycle, Michael Barber, recalls how the product evolution started: “We’re always looking to deliver innovative and effective solutions for the enterprise clients we work with. The market and our customers had helped us identify how the growth in ‘mobile’ was impacting their business.

“Mobile as a topic covers a wide spectrum of subjects and we’d begun looking at how our On-Site Remarketing solution could deliver a different experience to website visitors on smartphones and mobile devices. Cross-device tracking and apps are also high on our customers agenda. So knowing all this we looked for a ‘mobile’ topic we could deliver and we discussed it with one of our most innovative clients, Firefly.”

Firefly, a subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines, set SaleCycle the challenge of delivering a service that could drive more immediacy in conversions. How could they communicate quickly and efficiently with visitors who abandon a flight that was due to depart just days after the customer had initially visited their website? As an innovator, Firefly were already asking for a mobile number during the quoting process.

It was obvious that if SaleCycle could expand its solutions to include SMS as a method of remarketing this immediacy could be realized. The need from both a product and customer had been established.

Due diligence
From previous roles as product lead for other marketing platforms, Michael had done significant due diligence in the SMS space. “We needed a partner that understood how to integrate with service providers, delivered highly consumable APIs and a team that focused on not just technically enabling SMS as a channel but also enabling and training the other business functions to become SMS experts.”

For this reason he had previously chosen Dynmark and it made sense to do the same again. He explains: “The whole project to integrate with Dynmark took just four weeks. The great part about working with Dynmark is that part of the scoping process uncovered the fact that we could leverage SMS for many uses that are valued by our customers and now we have a platform that can sit as a standalone SMS solution or part of our Multi-Channel remarketing solution. Excitingly, I believe we have now delivered the world’s first SMS remarketing campaign!”

So how did Firefly find using the new solution? Boon Chuan Teh, Airline Systems Manager says: “The ability to mix SMS remarketing into our existing campaigns has really increased our capacity for reconnecting with potential customers. We have already started to see recoveries and conversions from the SMS tool, and are excited to work on future developments with SaleCycle.”

Immediately after go live, Firefly saw its first recovered sale from only the fourth SMS message sent; the recipient returning to the site and buying the flight they’d left behind.

Paul Putman CEO of Dynmark says: “We were really excited when Michael and SaleCycle presented this challenge to us. We are always heavily focused on helping partners achieve their product goal but helping SaleCycle deliver a world first solution was a real achievement. I can’t believe how quickly, when working together as a team, we helped deliver their solution. The results speak for themselves; a recovered sale after the fourth SMS is huge, I’d calculate a ROI but it would look too good to believe! It also validates that SMS still has a fundamental part to play if companies want to engage with immediacy in a mobile orientated landscape”

What does the future hold for mobile messaging that uses website data? Barber continues: As a market-leading provider we’re acutely aware that globally, and specifically the APAC region, mobile represents a significant opportunity for us. The growth in ecommerce is boosted by the proliferation of smartphones in emerging or developing markets”

With SMS Remarketing up and running for airlines, Michael can see it working for a number of growing sectors too, ‘It’s great to see our new solution work in one of our key industries and I’ve got no doubt SMS remarketing will be successful for travel brands.’

“I think SMS will really help SaleCycle demonstrate the value of remarketing to businesses such as mobile and broadband network providers, smartphone resellers and other big players in the telecoms sector. Remarketing via SMS to customers of these businesses is a natural fit and complements their existing communication strategies. Actually SMS remarketing represents an opportunity for any brand to immediately engage with website visitors who abandon their website in the most personal way.’

In terms of the new relationship between SaleCycle and Dynmark, it will continue to grow with exploration as to how the data captured by SaleCycle can be fed into Dynmark’s secure app messaging platform Donky. This allows mobile app users to be remarketed to in the same way as email and SMS but within the customer’s own application, driving deeper engagement and brand interaction.

This article first appeared in the February 2016 print edition of Mobile Marketing. You can read the whole issue here.