
The prospect of launching your first mobile marketing campaign can be downright scary. Mobile is a new platform, with new conventions, new language, and new metrics. Perhaps you’ve read a white paper in the past. It was probably dozens of pages long and filled with incomprehensible jargon. It discussed mobile marketing campaigns that promised paradigm shifting results. The only problem with the paper was that the campaigns it spoke of were dauntingly complex, and they seemed to rely on technology that has yet to truly arrive. Moreover, they were expensive, and they necessitated that you put your business in the hands of an expensive marketing firm.
We understand where you are coming from. And that is why we put together this Ez Guide To Mobile Marketing With Text Messaging. What makes this paper different?
Ready to learn how easy it is to launch your first mobile marketing campaign?
Since 2006, Ez Texting has led the mobile marketing industry in providing a simple, affordable text messaging platform for small to medium-sized businesses. We proudly offer the only US-based turnkey online solution that allows clients from all industries – education, hospitality, religion, politics, non-profits, technology and more – to develop and execute a text messaging campaign within minutes.
Own a fast-food franchise and need to send instant coupons to hungry customers? Organizing a weekly soccer league for your kids and want a quick way to communicate with fellow parents? Looking for a way to capture incoming leads for your sales team? Look no further.
Using our powerful platform, clients can setup SMS alerts, voting, contests, polls and much more. Get instant feedback from your members right to your Ez Texting inbox with our true 2-way messaging capabilities. And with the easy-to-remember shared short code 313131, setting up keywords is a breeze. We also offer advanced API and dedicated short code options.
Ez Texting currently supports messaging to the US and Canada for a rapidly growing client base of over 40,000 users.
A few years ago, the term “mobile marketing” was a concept far too esoteric and technical for businesses to grasp, let alone attempt to implement in-house. Ez Texting offers a web-based mobile text messaging platform for businesses. Here’s how it works: You connect to Ez Texting online, tap out a message and then it is sent out to your intended audience (customers, organization members, employees, etc). For marketers, customers on the receiving end can choose to either ignore the note or respond to the promotion.
When a local sales team from Jostens, the yearbook and class ring company, recently used Ez Texting to remind students in the Puyallup, Wash., area about payment due dates, the number of people who paid for the company’s graduation products ahead of schedule rose by as much as 40%. Because of that success rate this Jostens team scrapped its direct mail campaign, saving it roughly $1,000 in postage.
We love helping people reach that “Aha!” moment. So many clients come to us with ideas they can only conceptualize. It’s rewarding to present them with techniques that can help their ideas evolve into real results.
We also love educating customers about what exactly mobile marketing is, how they can use it and showing them what kind of results they can expect. That’s a big feat for a small team of people, but we have managed to help over 40,000 customers and continue to do so every day.
- Shane Neman
CEO, Ez Texting, Inc.
Mobile Marketing is, simply put, the practice of extending your marketing efforts to mobile devices. Today ‘mobile devices’ primarily means mobile phones, including smart phones such as the Blackberry and the Apple iPhone. In the future we will likely see full-fledged mobile computers, with persistent connections to the Internet. Such devices will offer a rich media marketing platform. However, those services are not yet here on a meaningful scale. For example, less than a quarter of Americans have ever browsed the mobile web And this represents the fundamental conundrum facing your firm when you consider whether to launch your first mobile marketing campaign. You’ve heard that mobile marketing is the future of advertising, but just not yet.
Only that’s not the case.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Mobile Marketing is here, and savvy firms, from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, are already running successful mobile campaigns. SMS Text Messaging is the key to this puzzle.
Nearly every phone in the United States supports text messaging. Over half of all
Americans have sent or received a text message. The average mobile phone subscriber sends nearly 200 text messages every month. When you look closer, at the prized 18 – 29 demographic, the adoption rate is even higher, edging toward saturation at 85%. Among those 30 – 49 years old , the adoption rate is at 65% and climbing
So Americans are clearly texting. But what do they think about being marketed to via text message? In a recent Direct Marketing Association survey, 70% of the sample revealed that they had responded to a marketing text message. To put this in perspective, the DMA adds that only 30% of those surveyed responded to a marketing email.
Why are consumers so eager to respond to marketing text messages? The answer reveals the value text messaging offers to both you and your customers:
Mobile Marketing comes in many different flavors. For the vast majority of businesses, we think that text messaging is the best way to reach your consumers. In order to give you a quick overview of your options, below we walk you through the forms of mobile marketing other than text messaging that are available, explaining their pros and cons.
If your firm does decide to build its own WAP site, you can easily integrate it into your text messaging campaigns.
As you can see, all of these marketing formats have serious drawbacks. We would not be surprised to see them become more viable in the future. For now though, none of them offer the reach, the simplicity, and the low cost of text messaging.
As this is the Ez Guide to Mobile Marketing with Text Messaging we hate to complicate things, but we do need to help you understand an important difference between the two common types of text message marketing campaigns. Don’t worry – the difference is simple, but as you will see, the steps that you will take to get started will vary based on the type of campaign that you are planning.
There are two types of text messaging campaigns: pull and push. In a push campaign, your firm starts off with a database of opted in phone numbers. A pull campaign is designed to build a database of phone numbers for future use.
As we’ve already shown you, Mobile Marketing with text messaging is easy. There are other advantages, beyond ease of use, to DIY text messaging:
SMS Text messaging is the most popular and effective form of mobile marketing because it does exactly what it is supposed to do. You can achieve great ROI doing nothing more than occasionally texting your customers with notices, reminders and offers. But, as you will see, there is so much more that you can do. Importantly, for you and for your customers, all of these compelling methods keep things simple.
Do-It-Yourself mobile marketing with Ez Texting’s software is simple. That does not mean that our software isn’t extremely powerful. After spending a few minutes sending out experimental messages, you’ll be ready to try out some of our advanced features:
As we said in the introduction to this guide, mobile marketing with text messaging is already here. Businesses large and small are running campaigns this very moment. Last year, SuperStop USA, a gas station in St. Paul, MN, launched one of our favorite Ez Texting powered mobile marketing campaigns:
SuperStop USA– When gas prices are scheduled to go up, SuperStop USA owner Tony Donatell knows in advance. He believed that his customers would make it a point to fill up their tanks at his station if they were alerted in advance of the price increase. What Mr. Donatell needed was a way to quickly reach his customers with this information.
SuperStop USA found a solution with an Ez Texting powered program called Gas Alerts. To attract subscribers, the station deployed Point of Purchase (POP) displays featuring their CTA, ranging from in-store signs at the registers to promotional posters outside at the pumps instructing customers to text “GAS” to 25827.
Super Stop amassed over 70 subscribers in less than two weeks. They reported a response rate greater than 20% for each text message blast. The program is still going strong a year later.
The following three campaigns were some of 2008’s most prominent and successful mobile marketing efforts:
American Idol– A few years ago, the producers of American Idol and AT&T teamed up to allow Idol viewers to vote on their favorite contestants via SMS. In 2008, fans voted in record numbers, sending in 78 million text messages. In 2008, AT&T expanded their Idol efforts to include “voting reminders, trivia, a TXT-n-Win sweepstakes promising the winner $50,000 cash and a trip for two to the Idol series finale in Los Angeles, and contestant ringtones and video clips featuring outrageous audition moments.”
President Barack Obama’s 2008 Election Campaign – Political historians will be studying Barack Obama’s historic campaign for decades to come. There is one thing that everyone already agrees upon – Obama’s New Media team leveraged the web, social networks, and text messaging in unprecedented ways to communicate with supporters, recruit donors, and enhance get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts. Famously, the Obama campaign announced their Vice Presidential selection of Joe Biden to opted in subscribers via text message. The message went out to 2.9 million mobile phones. The phone numbers went into the campaign database.
Finally, when Election Day came, supporters received text messages reminding them to vote. This was much more than a nifty way to end a campaign that exploited text messaging so successfully – research has found that SMS is more effective than all GOTV methods other than old fashioned door-to-door canvassing. Canvassing may be more effective at turning out votes, than text messaging, but it costs nearly 20x as much per recruited vote.
The American Red Cross – The American Red Cross raised $190,000 dollars in 2008 with its Text 2HELP program. The program is activated during major disasters. According to The Wireless Foundation, “subscribers of participating wireless carriers can send a text message to “2HELP” (24357) containing the word “GIVE.” A $5 tax-deductible donation will be made to the American Red Cross for disaster relief efforts. Donations will appear on customers’ monthly bills or be debited from a prepaid account balance.”
In 2008, the Text 2HELP campaign was advertised across various communications channels, and received its biggest boost when both Presidential candidates called their constituents to action. During the Republican National Convention, Mike Duncan, the chairman of the RNC, asked convention attendants to take out their mobile phones and text in a donation. The Obama campaign leveraged their own text messaging campaign to aid the Red Cross, sending their entire database of subscribers a message asking them to text GIVE to 24537 (2HELP).
About the Author
Since 2006, Ez Texting has led the mobile marketing industry in providing a simple, affordable text messaging platform for small to medium-sized businesses. We proudly offer the only US-based turnkey online solution that allows clients from all industries – education, hospitality, religion, politics, non-profits, technology and more – to develop and execute a text messaging campaign within minutes.
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Open Mobile Alliance $89.22 Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile phone industry. The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: the WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), The SyncML Initiative (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum, the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum. Each of these forums had its bylaws, its decisiontaking procedures, its release schedules, and in some instances there was some overlap in the specifications, causing duplication of work. The OMA was created to gather these initiatives under a single umbrella. Author: Surhone, Lambert M./ Tennoe, Mariam T./ Henssonow, Susan F. Binding Type: Paperback Number of Pages: 108 Publication Date: 2011/04/12 Language: English Dimensions: 5.98 x 9.02 x 0.26 inches |
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