In the latest version of our application, Swan has included several features focused on consumer marketing to aid customer retention and increase sales. The key feature for many of our clients is SMS marketing. The following article illustrates why and summarises the benefits;

Benefits of SMS marketing – “Business Link – June 2011”
Text messaging is growing at an enormous rate. One of the primary reasons behind this growth is that text messaging has become increasingly used as a business tool.
Text messaging enables information to be sent to groups of people quickly and conveniently in much the same way as email, making it an increasing popular e-marketing channel.
Advantages of SMS marketing
•    The personal nature of mobile phones make SMS marketing a very powerful tool.
•    Most people take their mobile phones everywhere - meaning they can be effective for time sensitive messages.
•    People tend to read virtually every text they get - unlike junk mail, spam or adverts which can be ignored.
•    Since your subscribers have opted-in to receiving your offers and promotional messages, you know they have an active interest in your business, and your products.
•    With text messages sent and received within minutes of starting your campaign, you can use mobile marketing for ad-hoc purposes, such as driving traffic to your store on slow nights (“Make a purchase within x hours, and receive a xx % discount!”), or clearing out overstock items before end of month.  This is the new “Blue X Special”
•    As mobile marketing can be used for a wide range of purposes:  announcing new product, one-day specials, new store openings, special events…etc, subscribers can be treated as an exclusive group for offers and information that only they have access to, increasing loyalty, purchases, and speed of communications
•    Reminders for appointments, delivery confirmation, payments, action points, etc

For more information please contact Swan Retail by clicking the link or calling on 01823 669122

Hoopers department stores, the independent group whose head office is in Torquay,  is to replace their legacy financial systems with the latest technology provided by Swan’s Accounting modules.  Operating five department stores and three menswear stores across the country, Hoopers run a very successful store card account system which currently has over 100,000 members.  Looking to expand on this success and the inherent marketing opportunities available with such a large and loyal customer base, Hoopers were looking for a specialist Sales Ledger that provided for complete flexibility with its set up and powerful functionality with its operation.  Key areas being looked for were the ability to automate more of the communication with customers and also better and more timely internal reporting of credit issues, through real time integration with the front end till system.

Phase 1 of the Swan implementation will be the customer database, store card and credit management and this will be closely followed by the introduction of new Purchase and Nominal Ledgers.

For more information please contact Swan Retail by clicking the link or calling on 01823 669122