SMS Marketing

On Wednesday I saw Matthew Silk of Waterfall Mobile present on SMS messaging at AMPD (Austin Mobile Professional Developers) which is a meetup.com group that corrals at Capital Factory which is that entrepreneurial services shop at the top of the Omni hotel. Mobile marketing comes in many channels and marketers must consider each of them and then make the tough choices about how to split up budget amongst the pieces of the pie chart. Pie pieces range from old school push stuff to truly exotic cutting edge craziness:

1. Mobile-friendly HTML5 web sites
2. Pay-per-click links, banners, and other bits of comparable bait ads also in the HTML5 space
3. Mobile Native Apps
4. Mobile-friendly email campaigns
5. Mobile Messaging (SMS)
6. Location-tagging (This could be of reacting to your Foursquare interactions or any other geo-location-flavored quirks you might imagine. I once interviewed at 3seventy, a competitor of Waterfall Mobile, and learned that there are some services that one may just opt into that will then periodically poll for your location without your manual check in!)
7. Interactive Voice Response ("Would you like to subscribe? If so, press 2 now.")
8. Push (Matthew didn't qualify what shape this takes. It could be any sort of blind campaign where one cannot gauge the positive feedback at the other end of the funnel.)
9. Passbook (iOS6 devices will let you tie into your banking and make transactions from your phone. Matthew didn't qualify how marketing gimmicks around this new sexiness will work. I imagine that when I pay for Starbucks with my smartphone that Starbucks will get some metrics on me with which to send me discount codes or prod me in other ways.)
10. MMS (Multimedia messaging, a richer form of SMS which exists viably mostly in Europe and is supported poorly by American technologies and carriers)

Alright, shall we zoom in on the SMS piece of the pie? Matthew's idea of a good outbound SMS campaign looks like this:

• a potential client gets a new message with
  • content
  • a call to action to text back a few characters to opt in
• the potential client becomes a client by opting in and then
  • comes some legalize including how they may unsubscribe to opt out
  • the client is asked one follow up question, fishing for another bit of data for building a profile on top of the phone number, geo-location, and carrier data their phone handed back on its own
• perhaps a thank you message comes here at the end of the process

McDonald's, paranoid of legal problems, apparently undertook a campaign that had a double opt in of sorts in which a user had to clear two hurdles to join instead of one and this ultimately sabotaged their campaign. Funnel metrics showed that only a quarter of those jumping the first hurdle cared enough to jump the second hurdle without getting frustrated or discouraged. Comparably, a user should only be flagged with one follow up question and not dozens. You do not want to alienate your flock. Another way to drive people away is to over message them or to send them off-topic stuff. As much will drive up an unsubscribe rate. The campaign shown in bullets above takes a slightly different shape upfront if one uses a short code:

• one texts a keyword to a short code and then
  • comes some legalize including how they may unsubscribe to opt out
  • the client is asked one follow up question, fishing for another bit of data for building a profile on top of the phone number, geo-location, and carrier data their phone handed back on its own
• perhaps a thank you message comes here at the end of the process

shortcodes.com is the sole registrar for short codes in America. All short codes are either five or six digit numbers. They cost about $500 a month to maintain and thus there isn't the sort of short code squatting that one expects with domain name squatting. If you cannot afford one there are short code keepers that allow others to set (rent) keywords on their short code which act as a middleman, ultimately routing to the key holder. An example of how the short code thing works: A man wins an Oscar for the film The Cove and during his acceptance speech he holds up a banner that a million people see on TV which says "text dolphin to 44144" to which there is flood of responses. For this to work, something outside of your cell phone has to prompt you to use your cell phone to join up.