Note: this was done prior to smartphones becoming so common.
Reaching out to consumers is difficult with typically very low percentage rate of success - e.g. successful mail or email campaigns have a single digit success rate. However, SMS/Text messages are practically always read and have an immediate response. But there are strict rules. Sending out cold-call messages can get you shutdown.
The ClkClk solution provides a membership approach where people can easily sign up to join businesses they are interested in. For example, a table tent at a restaurant offers a free dessert if you text a number to our short code. This registers you into the ClkClk club, and member of that restaurant. Doing the same at another business will mean you are also a member there too.
Once registered, there are push and pull messages with other offers.
For a push example, one morning a tire store saw they were very low on customers so sent out a special offer to their members that was only valid that day. That quickly filled their schedule.
A pull example is a family is going out to dinner after a long hot day of kid's sports. They text to see all offers are available to decide which restaurant to go to.
An interesting pull example is a popular bakery would make certain pies each day - and by the end of the day, all pies would be sold out. They would get calls all day from customers wondering what pies were available that day. With ClkClk, customers could text in for that business and get the list of pies for the day. For a local bakery, it was a huge time savings.
The solution of course had to integrate with the cellphone carriers and adhere to all the overall rules. And providing a portal for businesses to manager their offers and see results.
The most interesting part of the solution was to keep track of which businesses a customer was a member of.