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.

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.

The following is a guest contributed post from Matthew Winters, CEO at Veoo.

SMS message marketing has become an increasingly popular communication channel. If you haven’t tried this yet, it may be because you have the wrong idea about SMS marketing. When used properly, SMS marketing allows for extremely precise targeting, and can be an effective tool to reach an elusive but lucrative demographic: the younger generation. If in doubt, just take a look at the stats:

• 90% of mobile phones are SMS-capable
• The open rate of text promotions/offers is a whopping 98%
• 8% of all texts are read within three minutes of being received

Granted, just because a message is opened and read, it doesn’t mean that your consumer is going to convert. To achieve success you have to be very particular about where these messages are going and how often you’re sending them to potential customers. If executed correctly SMS marketing has the potential to grow your business.

Here are 6 top tips to bear in mind when setting out to create an SMS campaign:

1. Be Clear and Concise

When it comes to the content of your messages you want to ensure you are clear and to the point. Any message that is over 160 characters will be broken up by the phone company into multiple texts, which could cause a variety of problems including making the entire message undeliverable and incurring extra fees for the business owner.

Make sure you include a call to action (CTA) so readers know what is expected of them and what steps they need to take next. A phone number or URL are great examples of effective CTAs.

Avoid slang, but be creative; you’re not the only business using SMS marketing so you want to make sure your texts stand out.

2. It’s All About Timing

You definitely don’t want to send messages too early or late in the day, but you do need to make sure that you are giving your customers enough time to act on your message. After all, no one wants to receive a coupon after they’ve already made a purchase; consider writing the message in advance then sending it later.

Also, be sure to think about the frequency of your messages. You don’t want to overload consumers with messages so they get annoyed and start to ignore, or worse, delete them upon receipt. Most businesses we work with only send one text per week, some even as little as one every two weeks, and still get quite a few bites.

3. Variety is Key

Always make sure you’re updating your messages. Unlike other tactics where you can send the same message twice (social networks primarily), you should never send someone the same text message twice. Change things up to keep it interesting.

It’s also important to make sure what you’re offering through SMS marketing is different to all other promotions you’re conducting. Consumers will have no reason to opt in to SMS if they can get the same deal through email or social media. It must add value.

4. Reaching the Correct Audience

SMS would not be successful if you didn’t have anyone to receive your messages. But, you can only send text messages to those who have opted to receive them. The best thing you can do is give your customers the choice to receive your messages by asking them during a subscription process online or asking them to text a certain term to your company number.

Be sure that you tell them exactly what they can expect from your messages. In the end, asking permission will help ensure that your messages are going to people who are interested and not annoyed.

5. Allow Subscribers to Opt-Out

By law you have to let people know how they can stop receiving your messages and this will only become more important with the introduction of GDPR next year. In most cases you can just put directions in your message. Something like “text STOP to opt-out” works great.

It’s also very important that you monitor and analyse all of your results so you make sure you’re sending the most relevant information to a relevant audience. Keep track of metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, number of subscribers as well as those who choose to opt out of the service.

6. Be Mindful of Your Database

Mobile phone numbers get changed and deleted all the time so it’s important you check regularly to make sure you’re sending your messages to the right people. This happens more often than companies realise! If your database is running low on contacts, make sure you’re advertising SMS on any and all promotional materials, both online and in print.

Company newsletters or flyers should include your shortcodes. Send them out via email, print them on business cards, and don’t be afraid to mention them verbally to consumers in store for example.

If your business requires a practical, easily implemented solution for connecting directly with a highly receptive audience, you couldn’t do much better than sending an SMS! Find out more about the services we can offer via www.veoo.com

The post Op-Ed: 6 Tips to Succeed in SMS Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Steve Murphy, CIO of 3Cinteractive.

It’s definitely no secret that the word mobile phone might be a little misleading today. When we think of a mobile phone we now often think texting before voice calls. It’s no wonder here, especially with the proliferation and popularity of messaging apps such as WeChat, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Text messaging is certainly popular, but users want to do more with their messages in addition to “text”. As such, the world of mobile is now adopting technology called Rich Communication Services (RCS), where data connectivity is used to deliver next-gen messages.

Not long ago, Forrester Research indicated that roughly six billion text messages are delivered every day in the U.S., resulting in about 8.6 trillion text messages in a single year. This figure has most certainly changed since then. But that texting traffic has been running on an technology that is due for an upgrade. Although Mobile carriers have upgraded their networks to keep up with demand for data and smartphones, the SMS technology infrastructure also needs to evolve in order to enable new functionality in the messaging experience.

Definition of RCS

RCS is essentially the evolution of SMS and MMS. It’s important for businesses to recognize the difference, because leveraging the full functionality of RCS messaging can be beneficial to engage with customers on a deeper level.

In order to use RCS, the carriers, the mobile phone and the messaging application all need to support the technology. In many cases, RCS’s capabilities extend beyond messaging. The technology could integrate with the device’s address book, to see who else in a peson’s network is utilizing RCS. Furthermore, it also enables a person to share media as well as their location even during a telephone conversation.

It works with images and video, in addition to text messages, and can be used to deliver both individual or group text conversations. While it is just now starting to see broader availability, RCS was first deployed in the US by T-Mobile as Advanced Messaging.

The Evolution of the Technology Itself

Millions of people use over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger and Skype. For the user, RCS is an improvement over OTT because it will exist on every phone once the carriers have fully deployed it. There will be no need to download a specific app or join a new network to create an account in order to use it. Also, since it is based on an open standard, OTT apps may also choose to integrate it into their clients and make the RCS capabilities available within their applications as well. This ubiquity will enable consumers and marketers to connect to everyone. Having the carriers involved, who already manage enterprise messaging solutions designed to protect consumers from Spam and fraud, will help ensure that consumers can trust the messages that they receive.

Conclusion

Industry leaders agree that rich phone-based messaging remains central to the future of communication. New forms of mobile communication are delivering increasingly robust capabilities, including chat, photo sharing, payments and video calls; all of which will enable businesses to connect with their customers in new and exciting ways.

The GSMA, in partnership with leading mobile development companies, is now working to enable mobile operators and enterprises to use the RCS advanced communications platform to engage with customers through rich media content. This will enable businesses to use these services to seamlessly engage and transact with customers via a ubiquitous and reliable communications channel that connects everything from information to customer service and purchases.

The combination of ubiquity and standards based should allow RCS to provide all the capabilities of OTT applications with the reach of existing SMS, all through one app that will already be on the phone.  For businesses, that means they will be able to have rich interactions with all their customers, and not have to constantly invest in supporting new types of services.

The post RCS Messaging: What Do We Do With It? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Matthew Winters, CEO of Veoo.

Of all of the promotional tools available to brands and businesses today, such as online advertising, content marketing, and social media, few have as big an impact as text messaging. According to a survey by SAP, 70 per cent of people feel that SMS marketing is a good way for an organisation to get their attention. In fact, according to research by The Wireless Association, the open rate of text promotions/offers is a whopping 98% while the open rate of emails is a mere 22%!  Despite these numbers, when it comes to brands reaching consumers, email marketing is still the more commonly used tactic even though text message marketing — which includes coupons, special offers, and participation in loyalty programs — is redeemed eight or more times frequently than email.

If you are not leveraging SMS in your marketing mix it might be time to reconsider. Whether you are a small business or a major consumer brand, you can implement successful SMS marketing strategy.

Here are six reasons you should take advantage of SMS marketing today:

1. SMS marketing is more effective than email

As stated earlier the open rate of text is a staggering 98% compared to the email open rate of just 22%. While an email might sit in a customer’s inbox all day, people’s phones will sit in their pockets or even better in their hand. Therefore a text is read within minutes, making it a great channel for flash sales and same-day promotions.

2. Reach a highly-engaged audience

Consumers opt into mobile programs making a careful decision about which text campaigns they choose. This differs from email campaigns where consumers subscribe more generally to brands they may only be temporarily interested in. Because according to The Wireless Association, users limit themselves to brands they truly care about when opting into SMS promotions, therefore brands are able to market more directly to a captive, and loyal, target audience.

3. Build your brand conversation

While email communication is a one-way street, people can actually reply to an SMS promotion and engage with the brand through two-way SMS dialogue. By opening the doors of conversation between brand and consumer, and creating customer engagement, marketers ultimately create a stronger relationship and build brand trust.

4. Sell more and drive awareness

Unlike email, which tends to drive online sales, text promotions drive engagement to bring consumers in-store.

Once in-store, the consumer is then more likely to buy other products. According to TimeTrade research on the State of retail 2015, a consumer’s in-store basket size is on average three times larger than if you drove their purchase online.

5. Measuring ad value

With so many customer acquisition points for SMS programs, brands can easily track where users are texting in to join (via in-store advertising, print advertising, etc.) and measure the relative effectiveness of that advertisement. An example of this was Pepsi Max’s “2015 Field of Dreams” campaign which allowed Pepsi to measure consumer opt in value.

6. Send highly targeted communication

Long gone are the days when business owners would send out text messages in the hope that the SMS would reach the targeted demographic of their store or business. Today mobile marketing campaigns are much more effective because you can choose which customers to tailor your promotional campaign to base on the marketing information you have previously collected. You can send messages to those that have agreed to receive communication from your company and to customers who have previously had some form of relationship with the business. This way, you will be sending messages to people who are likely to be interested, and more likely to respond.

Brand marketers know that in order to stay relevant they have to be where their consumers are. And consumers are mobile! Since we know texting is one of the most popular mobile activities today many brands are missing out on a major opportunity by not leveraging SMS based marketing. SMS practices are not just an efficient way to reach today’s consumer but also the most relevant way to engage with them, build brand trust regardless of size, and even track the effectiveness of advertising. If your business is not already engaging with customers via SMS based campaigns, it’s time to go mobile.

The post Why SMS Marketing Makes Sense for Both Large and Small Businesses 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 Report: Consumers Over Prefer SMS to Email and Voice for Business Interaction appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post from Tim Fujita-Yuhas, Director of Product Management and New Product Strategy, OpenMarket.

In 2011, influencers were predicting the end of SMS text messaging, greatly in part due to the app’s growth in the mobile marketplace. Now heading into 2017, industry analysts are reporting that SMS is set to grow from $55.49 billion to $71.60 billion by 2021. As for the mobile app? The average smartphone user in the U.S. is downloading zero apps per month.

While many marketers quickly jumped aboard the proposed app-first era and skimmed over the capabilities of SMS, a few experts saw the writing on the wall—or more accurately, the smartphone screen. With SMS’s convenience and ease of use, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 2016 will go down in the books as the year millennials helped make it the preferred channel for business-to-consumer communications.

To follow-up its trend-setting year as not only a consumer-to-consumer communication channel, but also a business-to-consumer engagement tool, SMS has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Here are the SMS capabilities projected for 2017.

Chat Bots + SMS = A Match Made in Customer Service Heaven

Chat Bots will automate customer interactions for specific self-service use cases like appointment scheduling or responding to payment reminders.  Chat bots and SMS are the two key ingredients to help an organization become king of customer service in 2017. According to a recent OpenMarket poll of over 500 US-based millennials, 60 percent of them prefer the sort of two-way text engagement available through company chat bots. And, with Gartner predicting that by 2019, 20 percent of major brands will abandon their mobile apps, companies are scrambling to implement new and highly effective communication channel opportunities that simplify mobile engagements with consumers.

Voice Will Be Replaced by Text

In 2016, texting became the number one preferred channel for notifications from businesses for millennial audiences. Email came in a close second, but as for voice? It lagged behind in a distant third. On top of this, 72 percent of millennials are currently texting at least 10 times a day and 90 percent of text messages are read within three minutes. The likelihood of reaching and engaging consumers on their mobile devices is getting increasingly higher, and the channel that works the best is leaning much more in favor of SMS.

SMS > Facebook

Despite what may have been forecasted in predictions past, social media is not the best way to reach young adult audiences. While there’s no doubting its pull for networking purposes, that’s where the channel’s power ends. There are simply too many different social media channels –  even Facebook as a company no longer has a single social media solution given the fragmentation of younger users preferring Instagram over Facebook.  They key point is that SMS is a much more valued communication tool for B2C engagement, as consumers prefer it over any other form of messaging channels, including Facebook Messenger.

B2C Text Messages Will Dominate the Inbox

Let’s look even further out for this one. By 2025, 50 percent of text messages consumers receive will be from preferred businesses. As we enter this New Year, companies have a huge, untapped opportunity to use text messaging to communicate with their customers. Currently, millennials are only receiving 0-5 text messages from businesses a week, with 20 percent noting they never receive texts from them at all. As consumers increasingly vocalize preferences, over the next few years companies will be forced to address this consumer demand by implementing SMS— or face irrelevancy.

The post SMS Will Reign King in 2017 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.