the dark side | sms marketing

Sending a personal, one-to-one text message is simple. All you need to know is a phone number and that your intended recipient is text message-savvy with a text plan. In this case, one person uses one phone to send another person a text message to his phone. A commercial version of text messaging is more complicated and involves four or five types of companies working together to make it happen. But don’t worry: Launching a text message campaign is easy.

Before you begin, it is helpful to know who you are working with along the way. First, as you can see in Figure 8.1, your company is the content provider. You are doing the promotion. If you choose, the next company to be involved is the advertising agency. If you are working with an agency, it will take care of every other company in this interaction for you. The agency is also responsible for the creative concepts and integration with your other marketing strategies. Since you will obviously not run a text message campaign using your personal cell phone, you need a company with the software to provide a short code and to send/receive the text messages for your campaign. These are called application providers within the mobile industry.

In this book, I refer to them as text message companies becau.se it is easier to remember. The text message companies (application providers) must then work with connection aggregators that provide the technical backbone by connecting the text message companies to the mobile carriers (cell phone companies).

Although you won’t work directly with connection aggregators, they are important because each aggregator has different agreements with different phone companies. Their service determines which cell phone companies your customers must subscribe to in order to participate in your campaign. (You have seen this when TV shows with interactive voting, such as American Idol, can only accept text message votes from people using certain wireless companies.) The last and most important connection in this

entire process is with the cell phone companies, often referred to as carriers (e.g., Sprint pes, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless). Again, you won’t have any direct dealings with the cell phone carriers, but they will have a huge impact on your campaign. Because carriers are the ultimate provider of service to the end user, they must protect this relationship. If they let a smarmy spam campaign reach their subscribers, they are likely to lose customers. Carriers can and do shut down (without notice) any and all campaigns that do not follow best practices. They also shut down campaigns for not producing adequate volume of messages. Even though you will have no direct dealings with them, the fate of your mobile marketing rests in the hands of the carriers. The best thing you can do to
ensure a smooth working relationship with the carriers is to follow the industry best practices outlined.

At each step of your mobile campaign, you have the ability to track how well each specific stage of your campaign is working. You’ll use a range of different tools to determine your campaign success, and it will be up to you to pull them all together for an overall analysis. Stay on top of your campaign, and use the analysis of it to reap the rewards of a bigger return on your investment.

To use voice, simply tell people how and why they should call you and then suggest that they do it right now with their mobile phones. Obviously, this is done via a marketing campaign that your customers will encounter while they are mobile.
This is not part of your Yellow Pages ad, TV advertising, or direct mail, as it would seem odd to suggest that they use their mobile phones to call you when their landline phone is handy. Instead, you would
use this in radio ads, signage, out-of-home TV advertising, and event marketing that your customers see and hear when they are out of the house with their trusty cell phones at their sides.

Your marketing strategy needs to convey a sense of urgency to make this work.

Your customers should feel they need to call now or they will miss out on something. Don’t go overboard, but don’t miss this crucial component either. If they don’t call right now via their mobile phones, they probably won’t remember to call later. Plus, they are unlikely to have the number handy at that time. The bigger the reason you give them to call now, the better.

The best practices and legal implications associated with this type of marketing are insignificant. You won’t need to educate people about calling or warn them that using their cell phone minutes can potentially cost them money. They already know this. The important part of this strategy is to compel them to call you. This is true of all marketing. The reason someone should come to your business must be spelled out clearly so that your customers want to take action. Without a reason to participate, people simply won’t do it.

An outstanding opportunity for major brands or companies with a major budget is a technology called abbreviated dialing codes (ADCs). These are a three- to six-digit alpha numeric code preceded by a # sign: BET (#BET), Univision (#323), MTV (#MTV) , Fox News (#3696), and Sears (#SEARS).

When mobile users dial such a number sequence into their phones, it makes a call for them. The call is answered by a computerized voice giving easy-to-follow prompts such as “Press 1 for this” and “Press 2 for that,” or the phone will immediately begin downloading a ringtone, playing a broadcast, or connecting callers to live customer service representatives. ADC campaigns are similar to text message campaigns in pricing, carrier approval, and the time frame it takes to launch a campaign;

Sales increased another 12.5 percent for a total of 62 percent.

In this example, you can see how tracking your campaign and taking ction to improve it at each stage can increase your sales by 62 percent. This s the power oftracking. By tracking each step of your campaign from the initial contact with a customer to the actual sale, you have quantifiable, objective ways to decide what you need to change to improve your campaign. If all you know is how much you spend on mobile advertising and what your total sales are, you are missing several opportunities to make the campaign more successful.

If your CTR on the ad is too low, the rest of the campaign will suffer. If your coupon take percentage is low, and you know it because you’re tracking it, you can devote your time to getting a higher redemption.
Or perhaps you are getting a high CTR (plenty of traffic going to the site), but you’re not getting a high enough conversion. These numbers provide focus and strategic information about what details you need to work on to improve your campaign. If you are involved in mobile marketing and you’re not tracking your results, you are losing out on a great opportunity to boost your sales.

Another way to market to your customers is with a recorded message when they call. Granted, this is simple voice mail technology, but if you use your creativity and think about where your customers are spending time waiting (and have their mobile phones with them), you can get them to call your voice mail and listen to a recording. Before you have them call your number to listen to a commercial, remember that no one participates just to hear or see the commercials, unless it is during the Super Bowl. Your recording has to include some entertaining, informative, or helpful element.

For example, if an amusement park posts a sign in the busy queue area where people are waiting for a ride, the visitors waiting in line would see a sign with a phone number to call. They can then listen to a recording with trivia, a visual scavenger hunt (think “I Spy” via voice mail), or a quick story.

At the end of the recording, the park can include a prompt to send a text message to get a coupon for a caramel apple, a T-shirt, or another moneymaking item. This way, the people who are waiting are entertained, and the day at the park is more fun for them. The amusement park also gets to engage its visitors in a new way by getting them to request a coupon that encourages more spending inside the park. If you have customers waiting in line for your services, you can consider trying this marketing technique.

Think where people in your target market are waiting for something and advertise there too. A restaurant near an automotive service shop can advertise a two-minute voice recording of “Five Ideas for Dinner Tonight.” Four of them can be quick, make-at-home dinner ideas, and the fifth can suggest stopping at the nearby restaurant. Offer a coupon via mobile so you can track how well this works. Instead of having your customers waiting around in boredom, you can entertain them and attract new ones through smart mobile marketing.

Pay-per-call is a form of online advertising where your business and phone number is advertised, but you only pay when someone actually calls your business. It is almost the same as pay-per-click, but the action is different.
The ads are placed online in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Local, and online Yellow Pages. These online ads are also placed in mobile search engines such as AOL Mobile, MSN Mobile, and JumpTap (this search engine powers many mobile carriers on desk search engines). Your pay-percall ads are also provided via directory assistance such as 1-800-FREE-411 and 1-800-411-SAVE. Pay-per-call is a powerful way to get calls coming into your business, and you only pay when the advertising works. This option is always free for customers.

Pay-per-call is an effective tool to use with mobile marketing. It is the perfect direct response mechanism of a mobile search if you want your prospective customers to call you. And instead of your customers searching on their phones through mobile web sites to get what they want, let them connect to you instantly on their phones with the exact device they are using to find you. The following is the basic process of a pay-per-call campaign:

• Write a brief description of your business and the services you
  offer. Be as descriptive as possible and put in the most prominent
  information first. You never know how much of your pay-per-call
  listing will appear on someone’s phone.

• Determine the geographic area where you want your ad to appear
  when someone searches. You can appear nationally, regionally, or
  locally.

• Figure out the categories that best describe your business. You
  can choose from broad categories to specific ones. The more specific
  you get, the fewer times your ad will actually appear.
  However, your reach will be that much more targeted to your
  audience.

• Decide the maximum price you are willing to pay for a lead, or a
  call made to you as a result of seeing your ad. Take some time to
  calculate this figure; if you don’t already know your revenue-percustomer
  (how much you earn from each new customer), then figure
  it out. The key is to pay less for the lead than you will earn from
  a new customer. And remember that all the calls you receive may
  not be from new customers; you may receive calls from current
  customers too

• Set up your pay-per-call campaign. This is an easy, do-it-yourself
  online campaign. See the Resources section at the end of this
  chapter for vendors who offer this service

• Wait for the phone to ring. (You won’t hear me say that often.)

• Track how well your campaign is working. You need to know how
  often these incoming calls turn into actual customers as well as
  the number of returning customers. If the number of current customers
  who are calling you this way is higher than you are willing
  to pay for, then it means you’re not easy enough to find another
  way. You can launch a customer service campaign where you
  inundate your customers with your phone number as well as beef
  up your mobile search engine marketing so you are more easily
  found when someone is looking for your number.

SMS texting is used by 2 billion people, about twice as many people
send SMS text messages as use any other messaging types
combined including email and instant messaging. SMS texting
is the nearest thing to a universal format for media content on
the mobile phone.

What Is Text Messaging ?

Text messaging, also known as texting, is the process of sending a short message using a maximum of 160 characters to a cell phone via short message service (SMS). The majority of text messages are sent from one cell phone directly to another as a form of personal communication. Text messages can also be sent commercially via text message services that send texts to multiple phones simultaneously. It is that commercial form of text messaging that is covered in this chapter.

When to Use Text Messaging as a Marketing Tool

My recommendation is that if you want to do any mobile marketing, start with a text messaging effort, especially if your customers are a mobilesavvy audience as described in Chapter 1.

Text message campaigns are the easiest and most affordable mobile marketing campaign to launch by far, and they are also the most likely to succeed now. Text messaging is the easiest to implement because it is a universal application on cell phones and across carriers. Even basic cell phones can do it, and it works the same on all phones, so the technological barriers to launch a campaign are much lower than with any other mobile marketing tool. The costs have become affordable for even small businesses.

The reason a text message campaign is most likely to succeed is that more people send and receive text messages than use the mobile Internet or any other mobile application besides phone calling.

Here’s another sample campaign:

With no other changes, sales increased by 20 percent

Now let’s say you improve the page where people are first offered the coupon and increase the number of people who take the coupon. This is known as improving your conversion. In this example, you are driving ad traffic to a landing page that offers a mobile coupon. In reality, it could be anything else you want people to do after they click on your ad: using a click-to-call to your business, providing an email address to opt in to your email list, or downloading something. At this stage, you are trying to get more people to accept or request your initial offer. In this case, it is the coupon. To do that, you can write different copy, change the way people accept the coupon, add a graphic, or even change the coupon offer. So if you make the coupon more appealing and get a 3 percent boost in your coupon-take response, you’re now getting an 18 percent conversion rate from your mobile site. Here’s what happens.

The same website tracking tools that work on the desktop Internet do not work on the mobile web. The technology is just not the same. Browser based techniques such as cookies and Java scripts don’t work on mobile so the analysis is not accurate for a mobile site. Instead, you need a mobile web analytical software package that will track detailed information and analytics, including what specific handset your visitor is using, what carrier that phone is on, and the specific capabilities for each phone. Your analytical software can tell you how often your return visitors change phones and what kinds of other sites your visitors frequent. It is amazing to see the amount of usable information you can get via mobile analytical software. Some effective and affordable mobile-specific analytical software is available to track all statistics related to your mobile site, even at this early stage of mobile marketing. See the Resources section at the end of this chapter for a list of options.

Knowing these key pieces of information about your visitors can help you develop more targeted and robust campaigns. For example, if you want to know what percentage of your visitors support streaming video, download MP3 files frequently, or visit a particular genre of other mobile sites, your mobile analytic software can provide the answers. If you want tQ know the most common screen size that your visitors are using, you can find that out too.

More importantly, certain mobile analytical software tools can show you exactly where your advertising dollars are going. Mobilytics, one of the mobile analytic packages, can help create tracking URLs to use in all your ads. You can track each ad by campaign, by ad network, and by keyword, and then describe exactly what you are getting for your ad dollars. If you are paying for ads that search engine crawlers or desktop computer users click on, you will know. You can then even tie these ad campaigns directly to sales made on your mobile and get an exact amount of revenue per ad.