Successful retail companies know that communicating directly with their consumers can be very good for business, and that mobile offers a very powerful channel to do this. But actually implementing this communication is often not an easy task.

PizzaExpress – a UK restaurant chain with over 300 locations – has announced their partnership with MePlease, a mobile marketing platform that is designed to help business stay in communication with their customers, and at the same time harness the power of social media to grow the business.

The basic concept behind MePlease is quite simple – consumers opt-in to received “treats” from retailers that they like. According the MePlease, treats might be anything – from a special invitation, to an upgrade, an exclusive discount, or maybe even a drink on the house.

MePlease facilitates the sharing of these treats and communication by close integration with social media platforms. It also has the ability to include voting, competitions, customer feedback, location check-ins and the sending of treats and promotions which enables companies to help achieve specific business goals such as increasing loyalty, acquiring new customers, and driving footfall.

And equally importantly, the platform provides the consumer with complete control as to the treats they receive:

• only from the places they have specifically chosen to hear from,
• on their own schedule of how often they want to receive messages,
• the consumer can opt-out of any MePlease place at any time

Numerous consumer studies have shown that this feeling of control is a key ingredient for making consumers feel comfortable with accepting marketing messages.

PizzaExpress will be using MePlease to enable interactive customer voting during the final round of their ‘Create Your Pizza Challenge’, which has drawn 50,00 entries since the competition opened.

John Sullivan, Director of Group IT at Gondola Group, PizzaExpress’s parent company, said, “We really like that MePlease enables us to directly engage with our customers using their trusted one-to-one communication channel. Recently over 10% of our MePlease users texted in for a special lunch event at our Richmond restaurant; this response rate was very encouraging and happened within 15 minutes of sending the initial call to action.”

Here is short video of MePlease in action.