by anton | Jun 27, 2014 |
In Part 1 we discussed the importance of acquiring and refining your SMS Marketing subscription list. Next, you have to tackle customer engagement and retention as part of your basic strategy. Engaging with your customers The hardest part – getting your customers’ contact details – is done. But you can’t breathe a sigh of relieve just yet. Now you actually have to deliver on your promises. Naturally, content is King, and the way you present this content is Queen. If consumers don’t like what you have to say or how you say it, they will lose interest fairly quickly. Keeping your SMS Marketing messages relevant and entertaining can be tricky. You only have a limit of about 160 characters after all, thus you have to make every word count. Tip: have a content strategy. Know beforehand what you want to say, how you want to say it and when. Retaining your contact list One of the biggest considerations in your SMS Marketing strategy, is frequency. Too many messages – your customers will unsubscribe. Too few messages – they forget about you. The best course of action you can take is to offer your customers a set option (preferably with their subscription) of message frequency. E.g. they can choose to receive a message twice a week, once a month etc. During an active campaign, you can sent more than one message a week. But if your campaign is over, you want to tone it down until you have something important to say again. Don’t send irrelevant stuff. Along with frequency, goes timing. Don’t send your messages out at inappropriate hours...
by anton | Jun 25, 2014 |
How does a basic SMS Marketing Strategy look? You have to focus on your four main areas: acquiring customers’ contact details, refinement, engagement and retention. Acquiring contact info You need a customer’s permission first in order to send them marketing material via mobile. This is a big undertaking. You need to have a unique and creative plan to do this. A few strategies that have proven useful to obtain mobile numbers, are: hosting competitions, giving away freebies or promising the subscriber exclusivity or something else of value. You have to give very careful thought the content of your messages and there should be no confusion as to the what, how and why of your offering. Once you have decided how you are going to lure your customers, the next step is to determine how to tell them about it. How are they going to receive your “invitation”? This is where your digital and more traditional forms of marketing comes to play. You can alert your customers to subscribe to your contact list by posting it on Facebook and Twitter, sending an email, or placing an advert on a billboard, pamphlets, business cards, corporate stationary etc. Tips: Keep the budget constraints in mind when choosing the channels for your SMS marketing strategy. Give yourself enough time to gather the info – if you rush it, you might get less numbers than you wished for. Refining your list Depending on your SMS Marketing goals, you most likely have more than one type of offering for your subscribers. The golden rule is to always give your customers options, because people’s needs differ....
by anton | Jun 20, 2014 |
Are you unsure if a SMS Voucher System is the way to go when it comes to rewarding your customers? Truth be told, if you are not currently making use of it, you are missing out! Incentivising customers usually serves one of two primary goals: You want to reward existing customers for their loyalty You want to woo new customers into becoming loyal ones A Mobile Coupon can serve both of these ideas very well and it is a good fit for any type of marketing campaign – big or small. Your vouchers can give discounts or enable your customers to redeem freebies. It doesn’t have to be huge amounts or expensive gifts either; the main idea behind this gesture is to establish (profitable) customer relationships. Your strategy will, of course, depend on who you are targeting and what your secondary goals are e.g. getting more followers on Facebook, promoting your website, boosting product sales etc. It might even be that these are your primary goals. Whatever the case, make sure you have a clear plan on what you want to achieve, how you are going to achieve it and how you can measure your success. A SMS Voucher System can also help you to: Get customers to follow through with online purchases According to themarketinglounge.org, about 87% of online shoppers abandon their baskets before completing their purchase. There could be many reasons for it, but a coupon given beforehand will definitely help to combat this problem. Increase customer spending Offering an incentive only if a customer spends a minimum amount on purchases, will encourage consumers to spend a...
by anton | Jun 18, 2014 |
Knowing what to put in your text messages for your SMS Marketing campaign isn’t always easy. Some marketers are so focused on building their contact list, that when the time comes to actually start engaging, they don’t know what to say. How can you prevent this pitfall? It is very important not to write your content as an afterthought – it has to be part of your strategy from the very beginning. Start with rough drafts containing what you want to text during each phase of your strategy. It is much easier to tweak your messages as you go along if you have a draft to work from. It will help you to: Identify problem areas from the start. For example, there might be words or phrases that you can’t use from a legal standpoint. Keep everything tight. Say for instance you are rolling out a service/ product in phases. In each phase your customers will have access to more functions/ items. Now the last thing you want to do is send out a SMS during Phase 2 telling your customer things that are actually happening in Phase 4. The hardest part of content creation for SMS Marketing campaigns, is writing content that will engage the reader. You want your customers to line up to request your mobile communication instead of you pleading for their phone numbers. For this your texts have to evoke emotions (take note, positive emotions) in your customers as well as add some kind of value to their lives. For a consumer, giving away their mobile number is a very personal thing. And you can...
by anton | Jun 11, 2014 |
Network Initiated USSD is basically an Unstructured Supplementary Service Data message that is sent by a network to a mobile subscriber’s phone. This means that WASPS (like Integrat) can facilitate such a session between a company and its customers due to the relationship it has with the customer’s mobile network operator. The message can contain anything the company wishes to relate to their subscribers – usually in the form of a menu that automatically pops onto the receiver’s mobile screen. For example: it can perform the functions of a live consultant by giving the customer the opportunity to choose between product or service options. A Network Initiated USSD message can be sent regardless if the company wants the customer to respond directly on the message or not. In other words, the customer doesn’t HAVE to respond on a message in order for the system to work. This helps to make USSD a versatile marketing tool, because a company has free creative reign over the what, how and why of their content. One of the greatest uses of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data that is often overlooked, is that it is one of the easiest ways to run a competition. A business can have their customers enter a competition by: Purchasing a product with a unique phone number on it Dialling the USSD string from their mobile device And completing a form/ survey/ questionnaire The company will be able to receive a good number of entries (depending on the type of business it can amount to tens of thousands). No messy admin problems and successful brand awareness in a jiffy. USSD...
