Polish fashion retailer drives sales with a sense of urgency using Apifonica’s extra-fast SMS

Creating urgency when you sell is a proven way to increase the number of sales dramatically. People are much more likely to act quickly and make a purchase when they face a deadline. Communicating a sense of urgency means convincing potential buyers that a product or service might not be available in the nearest future, at least, not on the same conditions.

In the retail sector (and fashion retail in particular), one of the most common tactics is limited incentives with an expiration date. “Today only, 20% off everything” is a typical example of how online fashion retailers from ASOS to LuisaViaRoma increase conversions and boost sales.

Offers with strict deadlines require quick communication channels. Email doesn’t quite fall under this category: only 6% of total email opens happen within an hour. That’s why businesses prefer alternative channels when they need to communicate a sense of urgency. The most popular choice is SMS with its impressive 95% read rate within 5 minutes from reception. Phone calls show even better results: an automated calling campaign can reach up to 10000 contacts at 80% call answer rate in mere seconds.

One of Apifonica’s clients is a Polish online fashion retailer who uses a sense of urgency as a core part of their sales strategy. They used to work with multiple SMS providers before, but as they started trying new tactics with tougher offer expiration deadlines, they ran into some technical limitations.

The issue is, although SMS is one of the quickest mediums, every SMS provider’s capacity is limited: you can only send a certain number of messages per second. The industry standard is around 20 SMS per second, so if the contact base is large, it may take hours until all the messages are processed and delivered. For the fashion retailer testing flash offers that only last a few hours, the industry standard wasn’t quick enough. In their search of alternative communication providers, they turned to Apifonica.

Being an international SMS aggregator, Apifonica was able to tailor-make the solution for the retailer that combined extra sending capacity with close to 100% delivery rate and competitive pricing. The pilot SMS campaign powered by Apifonica reached 20K+ contacts in mere minutes, with 99.5% of messages successfully delivered.

The campaign performance was trackable in real time. Every message contained a unique URL generated by Apifonica’s URL shortener so the retailer could see which recipients exactly had clicked the link. Apifonica has also captured a geoposition for each click, providing the retailer with the data where each interaction had happened. The performance report contained a full picture of the campaign funnel (messages sent, delivered, and read) along with the detailed click statistics.

Although it’s common to evaluate the quality of SMS campaigns based on their performance exclusively, sometimes it’s the technical capacity that can hit or miss the goal. It’s no coincidence that in the telecom industry, the quality of SMS campaigns is often evaluated based on throughput (the number of messages sent per second) criteria. Delivering high volumes of messages without delay is crucial when sending SMS passcodes, emergency alerts, or time-sensitive notifications. For the fashion retailer, Apifonica’s extra-fast SMS became the key to the successful implementation of the new sales tactic and the subsequent increase in monthly sales.