Guide to SMS Marketing

What is SMS?
SMS refers to "Short Message Service" and involves the delivery of text messages to mobile handsets. SMS is a general name for the technology that enables users to send and receive text messages via mobile phones.

Where does SMS fit in?
As marketing professionals, CRM specialists and business people there is a great opportunity to harness this medium and be able to serve our customers better as a result. Improved client services, communications and value delivery will in turn result in greater returns and business success.

Given that SMS has an extremely personal nature (not unlike email), we firstly have to ensure that we treat the medium with the appropriate level of respect. And, since it seems that SMS is being hailed as the best thing since sliced bread – well, that’s if the usage and adoption rates are to be believed anyway – how do we go about using this new channel, without making the mistakes that we did with email and using the lessons learned with other traditional media? Later on in this article we will review some basic rules and steps for efficient SMS usage.

Content is critical
Regardless of your chosen media, the content that you deliver is vital to your success. It doesn’t matter whether you are delivering a full multimedia boardroom presentation, a newspaper commercial or an SMS – if your message is not clear, your goal will not be achieved.

Sender ID Branding
The space on each message, usually reserved for the mobile number of the originating mobile phone, can be replaced with the name or brand of the company sending the message. This is not possible on all networks. Using the Sender ID Branding feature means that there is inevitably more space for text in the body of the message. Since you do not have to include the message sender in the body text, this leaves more room for the important content.

Flash SMS
Flash SMS is a specialised SMS feature which enables a standard text SMS to be delivered directly to the screen of the mobile device. In other words, instead of the SMS message being delivered to the inbox of the mobile phone, it appears directly on the screen automatically. This way, it can make the SMS less intrusive or disruptive than normal. Since it can take a few seconds for a recipient of a message to browse to that message in a mobile phone’s inbox, this is a powerful SMS protocol for important messages that do not need to be stored – but should be read quickly. The recipient is, with most handsets, able to save any flash SMS by selecting that option once the message has been read.

Permission based marketing only
Email is personal. SMS is more personal.

Although an email reaches the individual directly, is cheap, convenient and fast – this is where the similarities between email and SMS come to an end. Mobile phones do not have "Spam filters", and as a result, it is virtually impossible for recipients to stop receiving messages – even if they do know who the sender is. The deletion process for an SMS is also longer and more tedious than for an email. People are therefore far more conscious of unwanted SMS messages than they are of traditional email Spam. Anyone engaging in any type of SMS marketing must ensure that tacit permission has been given by the recipient to receive information. Sending unwanted messages to the mobile phones of your users will be extremely damaging to your brand. SMS is only less intrusive than other media when it’s permission based, relevant and meaningful.

Take the high road with permission and privacy – it’ll pay off!

To ensure that you use SMS to its full potential, you should practice permission-based marketing by following these simple guidelines:

1. Offer your existing and prospective customers an incentive for volunteering to become part of your database.
   
2. Ensure that the information passed to the customer increases in value over time (for the customer).
   
3. Constantly reinforce the incentive using new info from the customer (create a dialogue, not monologue)
   
4. Increase the level of permission - more reward to the customer for more information!
   
5. Turn the permission you have into a profitable situation for yourselves and your clients!

Customise, personalise and give people what they want
Any meaningful and enduring marketing relationship is built on relevance for the end user. Value needs to be carried from the communicator to the recipient for the message to result in return value for the sender. It is therefore imperative that the message be personalised and customised as much as possible.

If you travel from one city to another regularly, a note advertising reduced fares between those cities will definitely rouse your attention. And yet there are many companies and web services, which do not pay attention to purchase histories, and will simply send generic messages to their client bases. So, instead of receiving some pertinent information that relates directly to them, the client receives a message that may be of no use at all.

Customising the message does not only lie within the content of the message itself, but consideration should also be made for the geography, time zone, culture, understanding of technologies etc. etc.

Measure
Being able to gauge the success of any marketing campaign is critical. An effective method of tracking the response to a particular message or campaign is to include a text token within the message or some form of call to action. Recipients can then exchange or redeem the token or voucher in some way. Alternative forms of calls to action are providing a number and a prompt to call, prompts email, visit a store etc. etc.

For example, a night club might send a message via SMS to each of its patrons, informing them that showing this at the door with earn them free entry. The one drawback of this mechanism is that SMS messages can be forwarded – which means that you would never know whether or not the messages shown at the door are the original ones which were sent out. A solution to this particular problem is to send each recipient a unique number that may then be tied back to track which particular recipients respond to your messaging.

The guide by Clickatell is freely available online (in PDF format) at www.clickatell.com/downloads/SMS_Marketing_guide.pdf.