AVA: Driving In-Store Traffic with RCS During Peak Holiday Season

The challenge

Holiday season is traditionally one of the most competitive periods for retail brands, fighting to cut through the media clutter. Email, SMS and paid media are heavily used to capture customers’ attention. Whereas traditional email suffers declining open rates, and SMS is text oriented, it’s a challenge to find rich media that stands out.

AVA needed to solve three main challenges:

• Stand out in an increasingly competitive and crowded communication landscape.
• Drive people to physical stores, not just online interactions.
• Communicate a fairly complex, tiered discount offer ( -10% to – 25% based on spend) that requires more than 160 chars and space for visual layout.

Our role: technology partner 

Universal Media and The Wave, expert in data marketing, supported the campaign strategy and audience activation.

RingRing acted as technology partner, covering:

• Support to define and validate the RCS agent with the Belgian telecom operators.
• Provide the RCS API to send the RCS messages.
• Technical support to create the RCS message, including rich media content like images and interactive elements.
• Provide RCS message delivery and read receipts through webhooks.    

This set up allowed AVA to use RCS as a more premium and measurable messaging channel.

The solution: RCS (Rich Communication Services)

RCS is the next evolution of mobile messaging. Compared to SMS, it offers companies a richer format where brands can combine text, visuals (images and videos) and interaction directly inside the native messaging app, without requiring any third-party app to download.

AVA worked with The Wave, Universal Media and RingRing to launch Belgium’s first RCS campaign, bringing the technology into a real retail use case for the first time in the country.

The experience included several native RCS capabilities:

• Verified Sender: A clear brand identity with a verification badge, which increases trust and recognition instantly.
• Rich Media: High-quality visuals from the AVA’ntastiques campaign, making the message more engaging than standard SMS.
• Extended Content: No character limit, which made it possible to clearly explain tiered discounts without cutting information.
• Interactive UX: Carousels and suggested replies built directly into the message, allowing users to interact without leaving the inbox.

Results

The €0.44 cost per read includes the cost for both RCS message delivery as for renting the prospection data.

These results highlight strong technical performance in terms of delivery and engagement. Please note that the cost per read may vary between campaigns, as it is directly influenced by how users interact and engage with your brand.

Performance in context

With a read rate of 69%, the AVA RCS campaign significantly outperformed typical Email open benchmarks of 20%. As such RCS succeeds in delivering 3 times higher attention than Email. The RCS campaign clearly demonstrated its technical maturity and strong engagement power. Customers’ interactions occurred instantly, with no signs of fatigue.

Key takeaways