SMS & Winter Sales
Trends 2023

Every year, SMS marketing traffic intensifies at the beginning of January. The reason? The start of the winter sales.

However, the emergence of new promotional highlights has changed the game somewhat in recent years, raising some questions: are winter sales still as important to consumers? Do marketers approach sales as usual? Which communication media are favored to promote this promotional period?

To answer all these questions, we conducted a survey among our customers. Here is a look at the marketing evolution and the use of SMS for the winter sales in pictures and statistics.

Computer graphics

The results of this survey, conducted from November 30 to December 20, are based on 203 responses from customers of the smsmode^©

The results of the smsmode© survey on SMS for the winter sales:

The first (reassuring) conclusion we can draw is that sales stay ahead of other promotional highlights. The two sales periods of the year occupy the top two places on the podium (summer sales in 1^erfollowed closely by winter).

Our survey also confirms another point: the power of SMS to effectively drive a strategy drive-to-store. Indeed, 80% of the customers who responded to the survey have planned to conduct an SMS marketing campaign for a physical store.

There is also a real paradox that this survey on the use of SMS for winter sales allows us to glimpse:

• 62% of our customers believe that the winter sales have lost importance to other emerging promotional highlights such as Black Friday and its online sequel, Cyber Monday.
• However, 68% of them plan campaigns that are larger or of the same scope as in previous years (52% same as last year, 16% larger).

Even if marketers perceive a decrease in consumer interest in winter sales, marketing pressure, at least that exerted by SMS, is not decreasing. Why is this? Probably because SMS is a channel with a high ROI, which even works in this kind of situation.

As for our customers' and prospects' favorite communication media, SMS is obviously the channel that dominates all others (92% of expected use). The media that ranks 2nd, far ahead of the others, is emailing. SMS seems to be the preferred channel of communication for those who have a digital and multi-channel marketing strategy.

But another avenue of reflection can be opened by these data. Indeed, the other common point of emailing and SMS is the opt-in. For a promotional period such as the sales, privileging loyal customers and/or those who have an appetite for our products and services seems to be a good way to boost sales without deploying colossal means.