Text Message Marketing

With smartphones growing in popularity, it’s not hard to imagine that newer marketing tactics will involve tapping into the mobile market. It’s amazing to me just how many people cannot disconnect themselves from their mobile phones.

Smartphones and iPhones have helped many people be more comfortable with texting. QWERTY keyboards and unlimited mobile plans have turned us into a texting society. Just think, in some states they have had to recently pass laws against texting while driving!

With that kind of user dependence on a device that they monitor regularly all day. Text Message marketing can be surprisingly effective.

In a recent podcast interview, Paul Rosenfeld discusses how text message marketing is quickly becoming the next must have marketing tool.

“Let’s face it, we’re all connected to gadgets and information 24/7 these days. So, it only makes sense that tapping into these channels is going to be the next wave of the future.”

SMS is still a relatively uncluttered and spam-free marketing channel. It’s also the one form of communication that many people are tethered to 24/7. Which helps explain why, at a time when in-boxes fill with hundreds of never-opened e-mail messages from direct marketers, 97 percent of all SMS marketing messages are opened (83 percent within one hour), according to the latest cell-carrier research.

Recent “Business Texting Fast Facts”

• 65% of people send business text messages from their mobile phone on a daily basis
• 50% of people receive business text messages from a member of their team/ department/ office
• 47% of people receive business text messages from a colleague
• 36% receive business text messages from a customer or client
• 71% of people use business texts for setting ‘reminders of meetings and appointments’
• 18% of people used business texts for ‘notifying people about new meetings and appointments’
• 14% of people use business text for ‘chasing up suppliers or new orders’
• A third of respondents (36%) said that they receive text messages from a customer or client
• 11% of people receive text messages from suppliers.

Wow! It all sounds so tempting. A captive, dependent audience with a relatively untapped marketing tool… “all the cash I could make!”

Show Restraint. Moderation. Common Sense! Once you have gathered phone numbers from people who are surprisingly leery of offering their cell numbers; you don’t want to get over zealous and make potential customers hate you!

If you’re texting your customers more than five times a month, you better have a really great reason,” Mr. Lee (president of Distributive Networks, a text-messaging application and consulting firm).  Some other lessons learned in the course of sending and receiving tens of millions of texts in the course of the Obama campaign: When writing out your short code in your ads, don’t put quotes around the number — “12345” — because people will type them in. “We’ve found they take instructions very literally,” Mr. Lee said.

Also, when devising the text messages, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it should be steeped in youth-culture texting slang. “Stay away from shorthand like ‘4u’ or ‘gr8,’ ” Mr. Lee said. “Even the folks I know who work for Adidas, which has a big youth-oriented clientele, feel that when that kind of language is used by a marketer, it comes across as pandering.”