Mobile marketing blog

Text marketing, or text message marketing as its more commonly know, is the process of contacting existing or potential customers with a marketing message contained within a text message. As a rule, marketing messages should only be sent to customers that have opted in to receive information by SMS, this could be a soft or hard opt in.

A soft opt in usually means that a customer has entered a related campaign, where the small print states something along the lines of "by entering this campaign you agree to receive future relevant offers from us or relevant third parties". A hard opt in asks the user to implicitly opt in by sending a message requesting permission to send future marketing messages.

Traditional forms of marketing, such as print, billboard, TV, and Radio can make use of mobile call to actions for customers to register an interest in the advertised product. This usually takes the form of call to action such as "Text KEYWORD to SHORTCODE to find out more!". Other forms of call-to-action can include competitions, texting pictures, sending views, or voting.

If you add a text response to any form of advertising, around 50 per cent of respondents will choose to make their initial contact by text if you give them the choice consistently - the key word here being consistency. Text Marketing will have the highest success rate if you target your customers with timely, relevant offers.

I recently helped plan and organise a broadcast on behalf of a music magazine. Previously, the magazine had run one or two SMS based competitions per month as a way to increase interaction with readers, and of course build a valuable customer database of mobile phone numbers. A targeted broadcast message was sent to all entrants from all campaigns, detailing a special offer on a music event which matched the profile of the magazine readers. What was the uptake? An incredible 25% - try getting that from any other form of marketing!