Mobile Marketing - Five Steps to Start the Art and Master Targeted SMS

Everyone agrees that SMS marketing - text marketing - is growing by leaps and bounds. A new Verisign report notes that SMS traffic will grow to 5.5 trillion - yep, trillion - over the next four years and that messaging from businesses increased by 115% last year. This codifies even further what is obvious to most: SMS is the next big direct marketing channel. Sure, there is A2P, P2P, and MMS to boot. But, for now, let’s limit this conversation to SMS and how your company can enter this channel with a flourish.

1. Get your customers to opt in to not only email but to SMS “alerts” as well. Promise extra benefits for those on the text list. Email has always gone hand-in-hand with direct marketing, SMS has not. If you tell your SMS customers that they’re getting the drop on email recipients - that they’re getting product news earlier due to their willingness to be ahead of the curve - then there is incentive for them to give you access to their phone number. TMobile just became the last carrier to demand double opt-in so there is definitely the feel that SMS marketing has fully arrived on the scene and that users, now more than ever, hold the channel less sacred.
2. Start collecting your SMS marketing list now. Even if you don’t have anything to offer yet and don’t have any immediate SMS plans. Get a signup on your web site now. It’s coming and it’s coming quickly and you don’t want your list to be anemic when the time comes to go live.
3. Know the demographic and behavior of your mobile users and market products to them that matter. Wasting your customers’ time via SMS is more egregious than wasting their time via email. When they get that buzz on their hip or in their pocket, they’re gonna think it’s a text from their friend. And you don’t want them too let down when they realize it’s marketing from you. More than any other channel - ever - SMS direct marketing must be targeted.
4. Know the demographic and behavior of your mobile users and market products to them that they will respond to. Yeah, I know this sounds a lot like the last one. But this is the cost side of the equation. Unlike email, SMS isn’t free. Wasting your money on text messages to people who don’t care is ludicrous. With email, anyone could batch and blast and only claim to be losing 1/2 cent per unrequited email. Not so with SMS. You’re losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 times that 1/2 cent (or, as we call it in the multiplication world, 8 cents). This doesn’t put it in the catalog ballpark. But unlike a catalog, a text message isn’t likely to sit around your customer’s bathroom as light reading for two months.
5. Get yourself a good bulk SMS provider like Clickatell. The bulk SMS provider is still a very fragmented market seemingly dominated by, well, no one. But if we learned anything from the email service provider market, winners will emerge and they will likely differentiate themselves on the ability to track your SMS messages well and provide you with metrics as well as providing you with an interface that lets you prepare your messages and load lists.

Tags: bulk SMS providers, Clickatell, opt-in, SMS Marketing, targeted SMS

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under SMS Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.