With TeleSign’s SMS app, Dynamics 365 for Marketing users can seamlessly send SMS-based marketing campaigns including alerts, reminders and notifications to increase engagement, usage and brand awareness.

TeleSign’s SMS app allows anyone to build real-time communications into new or existing web and mobile applications, and scale their usage as needed. These messages can take the form of alerts, reminders, notifications, invites, two-way communications, promotional campaigns, and other marketing messages sent directly from TeleSign’s SMS add-on within Dynamics 365. This differentiated customer experience leads to increased user engagement, higher satisfaction rates, stronger customer lifetime values (CLV) and faster growth.

“It’s projected that 80 percent of business will be communicating with customers via cloud communications by 2020,” said Aled Miles, Chief Executive Officer at TeleSign. “Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers now have the power of TeleSign SMS to easily add messaging capabilities and connect with their customers the way they want to be engaged.”

Sona Venkat, General Manager, Microsoft Corp. added, “We’re excited to have TeleSign offer businesses the ability to provide timely, personalized information to their users via SMS, enhancing the customer journey and enabling digital transformation. We’re confident these scenarios will drive tremendous value for our mutual customers.”

With TeleSign’s SMS app, Dynamics 365 for Marketing customers can communicate more effectively with their audiences and provide a critical customer touchpoint throughout their lifecycle using SMS.

To learn more about TeleSign and its communications offerings, click here.

The post SMS Messaging Innovator Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

While, for the most part, unscrupulous companies are to blame for robocalls and robotexts, there are times when respected brands can find themselves lumped into the same category if they inadvertently send a communication to one of the nearly 45 million U.S. mobile numbers that are reassigned to another person each year.

Now, two leaders in telecommunications and information services are bolstering their solutions to make it easier for organizations utilizing automated messaging for permission-based customer engagement to comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which protects consumers from the harassment and annoyance of uninvited and repeated communications from companies.

Infutor, the consumer identity management experts, has signed a two-year agreement with iconectiv, an authoritative partner of the global communications industry, to incorporate iconectiv® Right Party Verification for Messaging data into its solution. Right Party Verification for Messaging provides real-time monitoring of mobile number ownership and can identify which numbers have been recycled so that marketers can more easily halt sending messages to those numbers.

Separately, iconectiv has made its Right Party Verification for Messaging offering even more robust by incorporating Infutor data into it. The inclusion of this data further helps ensure the highest degree of accuracy in determining when a mobile number has been reassigned.

“The stakes are high for brands and telemarketers looking to engage consumers via mobile communications – a single text to a wrong number could trigger a fine,” said George Cray, Vice President, Information Solutions, iconectiv. “By integrating Right Party Verification for Messaging into their solution, Infutor can deliver an even more powerful tool for brands that want to ensure only opted-in customers get the messages they want.”

The post First Look: Telecom and Information Services Leaders Team to Help Brands Reduce Misdirected and Illegal Robotexts appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Ever since the industry’s inception in the late 90s, users of business SMS services have always been charged for all messages they send, even if a proportion of them haven’t been delivered.

By contrast, SMS providers are not charged when a message is undelivered, so there’s an additional margin that almost all providers are taking advantage of.

With the average non-delivery rate standing at around 18%, there’s a significant hidden, additional profit that the industry has been enjoying for the past 20 years or so.

Business SMS provider, The SMS Works, is challenging this pricing policy by offering an SMS API service where any undelivered messages are refunded back to the customer.

“For too long the SMS industry has been unfairly charging its customers for undelivered texts. We think it’s time this changed”, said Henry Cazalet, Director at The SMS Works.

This new offering may cause rumblings of disquiet in the SMS industry which will be uncomfortable with a spotlight being thrown onto its opaque charging strategy.

“SMS Providers have always charged for failed messages and they’ve always struggled to justify this to customers. 

SMS companies don’t pay for failed messages, so there’s no reason that customers should have to. We’re offering a much fairer and more transparent approach to pricing.”
The Bristol based company attracts customers who need a reliable business SMS API service at a low cost and believe their service is amongst the lowest priced in the industry.

To back this up, they have published an SMS price comparison table, so customers can compare prices from over 22 companies.

The post Calls for SMS Industry to Rein in 18% Overcharge appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

We’re told that Talkspace will work with Magellan to bring messaging therapy in an accessible and convenient format to Magellan’s employer clients.

Through Talkspace, individuals can seek behavioral health therapy by connecting directly to a therapist in a web or mobile environment, including secure text messaging.

“In today’s busy world, we recognize the importance of offering mental healthcare when and where consumers choose to access it,” said Gus Giraldo, president of commercial markets for Magellan Health. “Whether you are in the coffee shop, lying in bed in the middle of the night, or working at your desk, a licensed therapist is available to communicate with you in a private, secure setting.”

Talkspace will be offered through Magellan’s comprehensive Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which supports working families by helping them take control of their emotional wellness at home and in the workplace. Talkspace is the cornerstone of the app in the app ecosystem that Magellan is developing, which also includes Clickotine, a smoking cessation program, as well as other virtual care solutions. These apps are designed to engage working families and allow them to choose different modalities to help each family member improve their mental health and emotional wellbeing.

We’re told that Talkspace’s online therapy platform has over 1,500 licensed therapist who undergo a comprehensive vetting process.

“We’re excited to introduce more consumers to our service through our new collaboration with Magellan Health,” said Oren Frank, CEO of Talkspace. “Companies recognize the impact that emotional well-being has on their employees’ personal lives and productivity, and they are looking for solutions that can help their employees feel and perform their best.”

To learn more about Magellan Health, click here.

The post Talkspace’s Messaging Therapy Tapped By Magellan Health appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

MMW has learned that the app is the first of its kind to offer full platform functionality on a mobile device.

“Mobile messaging is the most effective communications and marketing tool in part because recipients are highly mobile and have their cell phones on hand at all times,” said IRIO CEO Russell Davis. “For the same reason, it’s important that the people managing mobile messaging have complete access to send and manage messages from anywhere at any time.”

SMS messaging has become consumers’ preferred communication channel with a 98 percent read rate compared to 20 percent for email. Users of the IRIO SMS/MMS messaging platform include property managers, account managers, store owners, or anyone tasked with managing subscribers and sending messages to a desired audience.

“As a General Manager always on the go, IRIO’s app gives us the ability to manage alerts to residents and respond in real time to new prospects. That speed and ease makes all the difference in many situations,” said Brian Smith at The Woodlands of College Station.

To learn more, click here.

The post First Look: IRIO Launches Mobile App for its SMS/MMS Messaging Platform appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Flowroute, a provider of cloud communications, recently presented findings from a nationwide survey examining the communications channels that consumers prefer to use when engaging with businesses.

According to the report in question, here are the takeaways to note:

• 95 percent of the business emails respondents received were “not at all” relevant to them and indicated a clear lack of understanding from businesses and retailers about how to effectively reach their audiences.
• More than half of consumers surveyed said they would view a business more positively if they offered SMS as a communications channel
• 82 percent read text messages from businesses within five minutes.

To learn more, check out the Flowroute report online here.

The post SMS Tops Email in Consumer Preference When it Comes to Business Interaction appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Brandon Brodie, Mobile Engagement Expert and Program Manager at SmartStory.

According to Gartner, text messaging, also known as SMS, has open rates as high as 98% and response rates as high as 45%. This is in contrast to email – where there is much more noise to cut through – and open rates are closer to 20% and response rates are as low as 6%. So why is email still the preferred method of consumer engagement when there are better options out there?

With SMS capabilities maturing significantly in recent years, marketers now have a much larger toolbox to craft award winning campaigns from. For those in healthcare, there are solutions that are now HIPAA compliant. For retailers, SMS is now connected to mobile wallets like Android Pay and Apple Wallet. SMS is a capable channel for anyone wanting to do lead gen, lead nurturing, personalization and/or capture VOC without having the end user leave the native text experience (i.e. download an app or register on your website).

It’s time for marketers to start leveraging SMS to its full capabilities and think deeply about mobile engagement opportunities because consumer behavior has already shown significant adoption.

To help you better leverage these capabilities on your next SMS campaign; below is a framework you can use called LeadTerracing.

I used it to help a regional group of big brand automotive dealers create a scalable text based CRM solution for cultivating local sports fans as customers over time.

The LeadTerrace Framework:

1. Choose the target audience and outcome

Segment your audiences, develop personas for each and map against strategic outcomes tied to the bottom line. You do not want to target everyone, so prioritize based on total addressable market and lifetime value.

2. Locate your target audience

Find out where your segmented audiences hang out in both digital and physical environments and identify all SMS promotional opportunities for on boarding. Don’t overlook text code on boarding via digital experiences. In one campaign, I saw 50% of Facebook fans choose to get out their phone and text in, rather than click a link to a landing page.

3. Capture their attention and take their temperature

Once you know where your audience “hangs out,” identify unique and personalized hooks for on boarding and install mechanisms for data collection as a requirement for SMS opt-in. This informs follow-on messaging so you can treat “cold” traffic differently than “warm” traffic and “warm” differently than “hot”.

Example hooks can include sweepstakes, exclusive content or information offers (videos, webinars, white papers, etc.), or my favorite, challenge their topic knowledge in a creative and gamified way.

4. Stack the value

Once you know whom you are talking to, stack on the value with a brand story and attract with a character that matches their persona. Let the character do the heavy lifting of selling. The goal here is to move your audience up the value ladder from “cold” to “warm” and “warm” to “hot.”

5. Call to action

Strategically place personalized CTAs within the campaign that your audience can quickly identify with and take immediate action on. Make sure the action you want them to take fits the environment/setting they are in. Text codes on broadcast TV ads are great because the end user is sitting in the comfort of their home and are more likely to give you their attention compared with someone listening to the radio while driving.

How I Applied LeadTerracing to Automotive Dealers:

The group of dealers I was working with had been investing millions of dollars YOY in local professional sports sponsorships to drive brand awareness. According to Nielsen, NFL fans over-index in their propensity to buy a vehicle in the next 12 months by 20% above the general population.

With this as a backdrop, we decided to create a campaign focused on NFL fans in-stadium attending a game to identify which fans were in-market hand raisers and drive them to digital shopping experiences.

The “hook” was a mobile text-to-win campaign with the additional promise of exclusive video content featuring NFL players who share personal brand related stories. Embedded in the promised experience, we served up personalized vehicle specific shopper videos with strategic offers based on answers from their text-to-win entry (also how we identified cold, warm or hot traffic).

The campaign created a way for dealers to track the path-to-purchase by in-market fans – a digital trail that starts with text-to-win data entry, continues with views of player and shopper videos and concludes with “click-throughs” to a strategic offer page. In addition, the dealers were able to nurture prospective buyers via SMS over-time with additional contextually relevant messaging and retail offers.

For the first time, a sports activation transcended the boundaries of brand awareness to achieve identification, engagement and conversion of in-market shoppers/hand-raisers.

Automotive Dealer Results:

• An incremental spend of 4% of the sponsorship budget on the SMS campaign generated 49% of total contest entries and 62% of all in-market leads.
• Of in-market entrants, over 80% chose to provide vehicle preference data.
• 35% of fans that accessed the landing pages clicked the primary CTA.
• When including secondary CTAs like footer and navigation links, 72% of fans that accessed the landing pages clicked-through.

The post Do Marketers Understand Text Messaging Enough to Grasp The Power at Hand? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

So how can SMS be more intelligently utilized by retail marketers? Check out this new infographic from TextMarketer here.

The post Infographic: How Can Retailers Use SMS Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Brandon Brodie, Mobile Engagement Expert and Program Manager at SmartStory.

According to Gartner, text messaging, also known as SMS, has open rates as high as 98% and response rates as high as 45%. This is in contrast to email – where there is much more noise to cut through – and open rates are closer to 20% and response rates are as low as 6%. So why is email still the preferred method of consumer engagement when there are better options out there?

With SMS capabilities maturing significantly in recent years, marketers now have a much larger toolbox to craft award winning campaigns from. For those in healthcare, there are solutions that are now HIPAA compliant. For retailers, SMS is now connected to mobile wallets like Android Pay and Apple Wallet. SMS is a capable channel for anyone wanting to do lead gen, lead nurturing, personalization and/or capture VOC without having the end user leave the native text experience (i.e. download an app or register on your website).

It’s time for marketers to start leveraging SMS to its full capabilities and think deeply about mobile engagement opportunities because consumer behavior has already shown significant adoption.

To help you better leverage these capabilities on your next SMS campaign; below is a framework you can use called LeadTerracing.

I used it to help a regional group of big brand automotive dealers create a scalable text based CRM solution for cultivating local sports fans as customers over time.

The LeadTerrace Framework:

1. Choose the target audience and outcome

Segment your audiences, develop personas for each and map against strategic outcomes tied to the bottom line. You do not want to target everyone, so prioritize based on total addressable market and lifetime value.

2. Locate your target audience

Find out where your segmented audiences hang out in both digital and physical environments and identify all SMS promotional opportunities for on boarding. Don’t overlook text code on boarding via digital experiences. In one campaign, I saw 50% of Facebook fans choose to get out their phone and text in, rather than click a link to a landing page.

3. Capture their attention and take their temperature

Once you know where your audience “hangs out,” identify unique and personalized hooks for on boarding and install mechanisms for data collection as a requirement for SMS opt-in. This informs follow-on messaging so you can treat “cold” traffic differently than “warm” traffic and “warm” differently than “hot”.

Example hooks can include sweepstakes, exclusive content or information offers (videos, webinars, white papers, etc.), or my favorite, challenge their topic knowledge in a creative and gamified way.

4. Stack the value

Once you know whom you are talking to, stack on the value with a brand story and attract with a character that matches their persona. Let the character do the heavy lifting of selling. The goal here is to move your audience up the value ladder from “cold” to “warm” and “warm” to “hot.”

5. Call to action

Strategically place personalized CTAs within the campaign that your audience can quickly identify with and take immediate action on. Make sure the action you want them to take fits the environment/setting they are in. Text codes on broadcast TV ads are great because the end user is sitting in the comfort of their home and are more likely to give you their attention compared with someone listening to the radio while driving.

How I Applied LeadTerracing to Automotive Dealers:

The group of dealers I was working with had been investing millions of dollars YOY in local professional sports sponsorships to drive brand awareness. According to Nielsen, NFL fans over-index in their propensity to buy a vehicle in the next 12 months by 20% above the general population.

With this as a backdrop, we decided to create a campaign focused on NFL fans in-stadium attending a game to identify which fans were in-market hand raisers and drive them to digital shopping experiences.

The “hook” was a mobile text-to-win campaign with the additional promise of exclusive video content featuring NFL players who share personal brand related stories. Embedded in the promised experience, we served up personalized vehicle specific shopper videos with strategic offers based on answers from their text-to-win entry (also how we identified cold, warm or hot traffic).

The campaign created a way for dealers to track the path-to-purchase by in-market fans – a digital trail that starts with text-to-win data entry, continues with views of player and shopper videos and concludes with “click-throughs” to a strategic offer page. In addition, the dealers were able to nurture prospective buyers via SMS over-time with additional contextually relevant messaging and retail offers.

For the first time, a sports activation transcended the boundaries of brand awareness to achieve identification, engagement and conversion of in-market shoppers/hand-raisers.

Automotive Dealer Results:

• An incremental spend of 4% of the sponsorship budget on the SMS campaign generated 49% of total contest entries and 62% of all in-market leads.
• Of in-market entrants, over 80% chose to provide vehicle preference data.
• 35% of fans that accessed the landing pages clicked the primary CTA.
• When including secondary CTAs like footer and navigation links, 72% of fans that accessed the landing pages clicked-through.

The post It’s Time for Marketers to Think Deeply About Text Messaging and Leverage Its Full Capabilities appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That’s something Harvard researchers, in partnership with mPulse Mobile, plan to find out. Mobile health engagement leader mPulse Mobile just announced the new effort, which will be tackled in cooperation with researchers at the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School (Harvard).

The research will start with implementation of two distinct programs.

“One program will evaluate whether interactive text messaging helps new members select and visit a primary care clinician soon after enrolling,” explained mPulse Mobile in a media release. “The second program hopes to activate members with chronic conditions, such as asthma, to enroll and engage in a disease management program.”

The initiative builds on a known medical fact: of all U.S. health problems, chronic diseases are among the most preventable. Since chronic disease management accounts for 86 percent of the nation’s total healthcare costs, improvements in engagement with the Medicaid population could pay big dividends.

During the evaluation of both programs, two-way, tailored text messages will be delivered to a population of about 200,000 Gold Coast Health Plan (GCHP) Medicaid members.

While one-way, notification-based text messages have been widely used by healthcare organizations for years, research to determine the effectiveness of interactive text messaging programs tailored to targeted populations is limited. This reason, among others, was why Harvard was eager to work with mPulse Mobile to assess the solutions’ abilities to yield positive results.

“There is a major need for innovation in care delivery and how we can engage patients outside of just the office visit,” said Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH, and program researcher and associate professor of healthcare policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School. “I’m excited about the possibility for mPulse Mobile to engage individuals in their health using tailored and interactive text messaging to improve outcomes and lower costs.”

Part of the beauty of the program is that it will seek to make inroads into solving a real need: helping newly-insured members who may feel overwhelmed when faced with navigating the healthcare system, understanding their benefits, and identifying in-network physicians.

“We offer members targeted strategies for helping manage chronic conditions, working with them to achieve their best possible health,” said Nancy R. Wharfield, MD, the associate chief medical officer at Gold Coast Health Plan. “mPulse Mobile’s solutions are based on its deep understanding of the unique challenges health plans face in managing Medicaid and other vulnerable populations, and it’s demonstrated time and again its ability to design effective mobile engagement strategies.”

Research funding for both projects will be provided by California Health Care Foundation. CHCFs Health Innovation Fund supports innovative approaches to improving care delivery to the benefit of underserved Californians.

The post FIRST LOOK: mPulse Mobile Partners with Harvard Medical School on Texting Program for Medicaid Members appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.