Recently I was in a retail store, and the conversation turned towards the benefits that they discovered with mobile marketing and how they found footfall increased after sending a broadcast. Asking what service provider they used, I was told that they have an in-house solution, which sounded impressive initially. However on hearing the details regarding their system I felt compelled to offer some advice which may be prudent to share on this blog post.
Their SMS marketing strategy involves a person sporadically sitting at a desk with a prepaid phone sending out to lists of mobiles. It could take up to 2 to 3 days to achieve the entire subscribed mailing list, but they were fine with that. And it is not the first time that I have heard of such ad-hoc systems.
Some issues to note though, which are encapsulated as the 6 Cs:
- Clock; a group broadcast could be sent within seconds using an online mobile marketing group service or indeed sending SMS from an email application. This requires just one individual with minimum input or even the mobile marketing agency handling the broadcasts themselves.
- Consistency of Content; one instant of the message is required to contact the entire group by using a mobile marketing specialist, not re-sending, or worse retyping, the message which could be slightly different.
- Containment; the replies to the message, such as vital customer queries, are stored just on the sending phone’s SIM using the store’s current system and are both hard to synchronize with a CRM system or indeed can get lost. I believe they write them down then transfer across to a document type environment or some other mechanism such as this. Whereas, they should be automatically stored within email software, within a CRM or stored/displayed online for filtering.
- Contacts; it is almost impossible to build up a genuine contact list by not aggregating mobile subscriber replies or opt-ins.
- Compliance; this store was not providing the mobile subscriber with a clear method to have an opt-out mechanism by excluding any form of opt-out in the messages, which is mandatory for a marketing message and left them exposed to potential costly penalties. I suppose they were happy with people ringing them. This was not a deliberate oversight, they simply were not aware of the current legislation. It never occurred to them to include a means for people to text a “stop” request (familiar story of simply focusing on the perfect marketing message for the business in order to grab a person’s attention and hopefully cause a prompt to action). They stated this will now be attached to every marketing SMS. It is basic oversights like this that can cause a mobile strategy to stumble, or create ill-will/disgruntlement with certain customers.
- Cost; pulling somebody off their regular duties to attend to this sending task, as well as the cost of the prepaid messages themselves adds up. The store told me that they wouldn’t use a service provider as they feared the costs, without factoring in the expense to the business by not using a dedicated provider. Nor the advantages of bulk buying large amounts of text messages in advance, which a dedicated mobile marketing service provider can offer.
Thus, the conclusion of this mini-blog post is to weigh up all factors within a SMS campaign. While businesses can run effective marketing SMS campaigns internally, there are distinct disadvantages both in areas of expertise and expense that only a dedicated mobile marketing service provider can facilitate. There are cost, clock and compliance type benefits that far outweigh the perceived negatives that make a business consider sending via in-house means.
Using Text Messages/SMS/Mobile Marketing in Business 