I recently attended a mobile marketing workshop in order to learn more about text message marketing. The newest and perhaps fastest growing mobile marketing strategy is advertising to your customers through their cell phones, using text message marketing.
About halfway through the workshop, the speaker showed a slide with some pretty shocking statistics. According to Forresters, the average open rate of a text message is about 99%, while the average open rate of emails stays around 20%. That means you are reaching almost your entire intended audience by sending an ad through text message, whereas with email, you aren’t even reaching a quarter of them. After several minutes of excited whispers from the audience, three hands shot up to ask how they could sign up with the speaker’s mobile marketing company. He assured them that this was not a sales pitch, but they could see him privately after the workshop to talk.
How could you blame them? Imagine being able to reach that many of your customers in just seconds for pennies on the dollar. Well, I was more than a little skeptical. As a member of the online marketing industry, I know that you can never look at one statistic by itself; the value comes when you compare it with others. When you do, you’ll see that perhaps text advertising isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
How Text Advertising Works
- Build a list. Start acquiring cell numbers just as you have been doing for years for email addresses. You can add a field to an online form, or you can do it the fun way, through a contest or giveaway. Begin promoting the contest through your other channels like social media, email, and on your website by asking customers to text a keyword to a short-code number in order to enter to win. When they do, they will have added their mobile number to a specific list within your company. That’s the method they used at the workshop, here are the messages I received when I texted “bbjcontest” to 34681:
- Begin creating and pushing out content or coupons to the customers on your list. This works like email marketing, where you create a blast message and send it out to the entire list at once.
- With mobile couponing, a customer then brings their phone into your store, or submits their winning code to your website in order to redeem the prize or special discount. For content or news-based messages, they will read, enjoy, and reply to your message.
Text the Word “Value” to 55555
The most important thing to remember in mobile advertising is that mobile users are a different breed. They are on-the-go, busy, and private. They want to be able to get ads and services that are valuable to them and to cancel anything that is not valuable to them. In text advertising, the first message a user gets when they text the keyword is a standard message from their service provider that tells them they can cancel anytime by replying with the word “stop”.
That got me thinking about how unsubscribe rates are related to the 99% open rate. When I suggested to the workshop speaker that perhaps the open rates are so large because much of the audience is choosing to unsubscribe, he responded that he had no statistics on unsubscribe rates for text ad lists. I also pointed out that of course open rates are high, people have to open a text in order to make that little “1 new message” alert go away. I wonder if there are any statistics out there to show whether or not customers are actually reading these texts or if they are simply opening them only to delete them.
Text the Word “Privacy” to 55555
I must say that when I texted to join the contest for a free Baltimore Business Journal subscription, I wasn’t expected to be added to the news and alerts list. I felt a bit uneasy about the fact that I had entered a contest, but was now part of the BBJ’s ongoing news and alerts list. Knowing that a business has my personal cell phone number is a little unsettling, I only want texts from my coworkers and friends (OK mom and you too). Add to that, the fact that there are no current security measures, spam filters, or limitations in place yet for text advertising. What’s stopping someone from acquiring my cell number, then either spamming me endlessly or even sending some kind of virus?
Text the Word “Cautious” to 55555
There can be no doubt that m-commerce is going to be important in 2011. However, you must still consider the entire picture before you jump into any kind of mobile strategy. Examine your audience demographics, do they want/need weekly texts from you, do they understand what they have signed up for, do the benefits outweigh the risks? Are you just going to annoy and anger your most loyal customers by barraging their personal cell phone with useless news updates? Does your customer demographic typically have unlimited texting or are you going to be causing them to pay for each text ad you send? The fact is, traditional digital marketing like email and social media may not boast a 99% open rate, but they are nevertheless tried and true. That is why I am recommending that businesses embrace text message advertising with a cautiously. Add it to your current marketing mix, but don’t go “all mobile” yet.
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