This one is familiar and yet entirely different. Which is to say, I’ve seen people doing something similar, but never from this angle before.
And I think it’s absolutely genius.
We’re gonna call our guy Mark and I’m allowed to tell you that Mark operates in the US, but this could work most anywhere.
Mark works with businesses to set up SMS messaging with customers. He targets mainly restaurants, bars and movie theaters, although he also has a few amusement parks and others.
The idea is to find businesses where a group of people might go to celebrate a birthday.
He sets up SMS messaging for the business and then trains the staff to capture customers’ phone numbers and birthdays so the business can send out a free birthday gift redeemable on that person’s birthday.
For example, a restaurant might offer a free meal to the birthday person on their birthday. But who eats alone on their birthday? The birthday person ends up bringing at least one friend and often several friends, all of whom eat and drink, too.
Plus, the birthday person might have drinks, starters or dessert, too, so that adds up as well.
Now here’s the beauty of this plan: People can be reluctant to receive SMS messages from a business. But if you’re offering a FREE MEAL, much of the resistance is overcome. People want the free meal, and they won’t mind so much if they also get some other offers the rest of the year, too.
And when that birthday person is in the restaurant celebrating with their friends, what does the server do? She offers to give everyone else at the table a free meal on THEIR birthdays, too!
Now that one person who came in to celebrate their birthday not only brought in a lot of other business from their friends, but their friends are signed up for SMS and will be bringing their friends in on their birthday, too.
It’s a sneaky way to build an SMS list FAST while simultaneously increasing profits.
Just 2 birthdays a week in which they bring 4 other friends can easily result in an extra $200 plus per week to the business. 10 birthdays could bring in an extra $1,000 a week.
Then there’s all the goodwill that is built up by giving away birthday dinners or movie tickets and so forth. It’s hard to put a price on customer loyalty but it definitely means more positive reviews online, more customer visits and so forth.
And remember, the business can now SMS the customers throughout the rest of the year as well with special offers.
Mark charges a fee up front to set up the business with SMS and train the staff to capture emails. As you can imagine, this takes him very little time.
Then he handles the SMS messaging for the businesses so they don’t have to deal with it. Usually, he’ll create an SMS calendar with the business so that everything is set up in advance. For example, the first Tuesday of the month is a buy one, get one half off coupon. The second Friday is a TGIF special deal. St. Patrick’s day is a coupon for half off of green beer, and so forth.
The businesses love that all they have to do is capture phone numbers and Mark handles everything else. Mark loves that he gets money up front and a steady stream of monthly income from each business. And he offloads all of his work on an assistant which enables him to focus on getting new businesses.
And that is all that Mark would tell me. I pressed him for more details, financial numbers and so forth, but he didn’t want to share anything more. Perhaps I should have paid for more drinks to loosen his tongue, but here’s the deal:
You already have everything you need to get started. Choose an SMS service, create a little website and start talking to restaurant owners. This is such a drop-dead simple method of helping businesses that I think getting your first client is going to be fairly easy. You can explain the benefits in about one minute.
And once you have a couple of clients, showing new prospects how much revenue this birthday SMS system is bringing to your current clients is going to make this service super easy to sell.
