British supplier Approved Food & Drink turned to mobile to drive traffic to its ecommerce Web site.

The food and beverage retail supplier tapped Mobilize for the initiative. The goal was to increase the revenue of its existing online ecommerce site by harnessing the mobile channel to engage existing customers.

"Approved Food & Drink has an online shop where retailers can log on and order products from them, and we were driving them to the Web site where they could key in a discount code," said Hugh Cockwill, chief operating officer for Mobilize, London.

"From Approved Food's point of view, mobile made sense, because typically people buying these types of things are very busy people who are not always at their PC," he said. "We have a modular platform that can link to third parties and generate mobile coupons for the point of sale or a Web site."

Approved Food & Drink claims to be Britain's biggest online sellers of clearance, short-dated and out-of-date food and beverage products.

Originally starting as a wholesale market trader at http://www.cragscashandcarry.com, Approved Food & Drink now delivers goods to consumers' homes.

Mobilize's mobile CRM platform M Bar Go is designed to increase sales to traditional and online retailers by driving footfall and incentivizing shoppers.

The platform also powers the 40,000-member Shop Scan Save mobile savings club. Its mobile coupons can be redeemed securely in more than 21,000 convenience outlets across Britain.

This was Approved Food's first foray into mobile.

"They've used email fairly frequently, which can be effective to a point, but they were looking for another channel," Mr. Cockwill said. "One reason mobile is very suited to what they were trying to achieve is they already had about 6,000 mobile numbers in their database that they hadn't harnessed.

"We recognized the opportunity to use the mobile channel and helped them understand how much more influential it is than the email channel," he said.

The Approved Food campaign include a simple SMS call-to-action tied to an online offer on a minimum spend available through a retailer customer of Approved Food & Drink.

The offer was "Get a free case of Just Juice, Apple from Approved Food with every order over £20 at www.approvedfood.co.uk . Enter FREEAPPLE online to claim."

The offer recipients were 6,000 Approved Food & Drink customers who had submitted their numbers and given permission for Approved Food & Drink to send them marketing information.

The campaign, which was executed using Mobilize's M Bar Go's mobile CRM platform, was sent in the late afternoon -- 4 p.m. to be exact -- on a weekday.

Results were tracked in real time using Web tools, and the M Bar Go profiles for the customers were updated to reflect their activity for use in further campaigns and formulating segmentation data.

Site visits in the hour immediately after the texts were sent were 90 percent higher than average, according to Mobilize.

Revenue for the day was up by 150 percent on the previous day, according to Approved Food.

Orders placed in the three hours immediately after the texts were sent out were up by 550 percent compared to the previous day.

The campaign illustrated how effective SMS can be in persuading consumers to shop, according to Mobilize.

Typically, more than 90 percent of text messages are read, versus 25 percent of emails.

Stated simply, this campaign was able to drive people to a Web site using mobile.

Approved Food was able to profile customers and then refine its mobile campaign based on targeting.

Now planning to incorporate mobile into its regular marketing mix, Approved Food will be using the complimentary mobile profiling, further segmentation and mobile campaign management capability to drive further business in a number of areas.

Its goals include increasing the spend of selected high-value customers; driving seasonal opportunities on food products; driving higher margin turnover; reactivating lapsed customers; and exploiting footfall via loss leaders.

Mobilize believes this campaign is a template for driving ecommerce via the complementary channel of mobile exploiting the client's CRM database.

"Approved Food got many of its customers to opt in a while back, that's why it was such a beautiful opportunity for both players," Mr. Cockwill said. "They had the database, but hadn't really exploited it.

Mobilize deliberately chose not to include a call-to-action on Approved Food's Web site.

"We were testing the ability of bringing people to the Web site as a result of using the mobile channel," Mr. Cockwill said. "The only way they would know about the campaign was the mobile direct marketing impulse uniquely communicated through the mobile channel via SMS."