In today’s world, where people seem to communicate strictly in 140, 160, or 420 character chunks, vying for and capitalizing on people’s brief attention spans has become increasingly important. A recent digital activism campaign from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) demonstrates the type of cross-channel approach marketers can use to harness this reality to their advantage.

For those not familiar, one of PETA’s main marketing goals is to promote its various action alert campaigns. Traditionally, PETA has sent out emails reminding subscribers to send another email in support of a particular cause. However, given some of email’s limitations, PETA wondered if there was a different way it could improve its campaigns’ effectiveness and participation rates.

Enter Msgme (yes, PETA is a wonderful client of ours). Although PETA has been engaging a mobile audience for a while now, it was became quickly apparent that the immediacy and timeliness of SMS would be a perfect solution for enhancing their traditional action alert process.

The implementation was fairly simple: registrants in PETA’s CRM system would receive an SMS asking them to reply “Y” to trigger an email sent in support of the particular PETA cause described in the text message. After members participated in the action alert, PETA offered several other ways to get involved, including making a donation or signing up to join PETA’s action team.

The results were nothing short of jawdropping. PETA saw almost a 20x higher conversion rate in all of its campaigns than traditional email. Additionally, some 43% of the responders did so within 2 minutes of receiving the text, causing a wave of action alerts to hit their targets in unison.

Three key takeaways emerged from PETA’s strategy:

1. From a big picture perspective, PETA successfully capitalized on the bite sized information mindset described earlier. Rather than relying on people to sift through their email, all they had to do was reply Y to a text message to participate. No matter where people were when they received a text, if they felt inspired by the cause they could act on that impulse. That’s social media marketing at its best.


2. From a mobile perspective, PETA smartly avoided the one-off mentality that has crippled many marketing campaigns in the past. Mobile marketing plays in the customer lifetime value arena, making the follow-up options to get involved so crucial for the campaign’s success.


3. Finally, from a CRM perspective, PETA has done an excellent job of integrating its email and mobile subscribers into one database with multiple communication points. This way data can be shared, aggregated, and collected across multiple channels so that PETA’s segmentation and targeting can be that much more effective.

You can download the full case study here.

Kane is the Director of Marketing at Waterfall Mobile.  To learn more about mobile CRM solutions visit www.msgme.com