Sunday, November 14, 2010

Text Message Marketing – How It Works

Text message marketing is an effective way to reach out your desired demographic. It always has competitor and opened to a new way of promoting certain products or services. SMS marketing is among the easiest, fastest and most cost effective methods to reach your customers.

Mobile marketing is built on the concept of building a database into that the customers can choose to join. For this, you will need to research traditional ads such as radio, commercials, newspaper ads, booklet and posters stick up near your business place, to persuade your customers to join in your database. Your customer will text a message and send it to the number you have chosen. In short, they could just text JOIN and send to a 5 or 6 digit number known as a shortcode.

Once the message has been sent, their cell phone numbers are added to a database that restrict the customers who have sent their permission to access text message marketing of contest, polling, discounts and other marketing announcements that will stunt you are maintaining for your business. Your business via sms marketing will gain close access with your targeted customers. Of course, the text marketing will opt the customer to turn off message alerts by sending STOP message.

The greatest advantage of text message marketing via mobile phone is that it allows you to catch up and access to your customers who are want to know more about your products or services. Mobile texting is not always working for all people, but it works well for all retail-based businesses, schools, clubs, clinics, and for real estate agencies.

It allows you to control when you want to send notification to your customers, wherever your customers might be. It is guaranteed that they will receive the sms marketing message as long as their number is real.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Choosing a Text Message Marketing Company

When choosing a text message marketing company there are several considerations you must make. The company you choose to help with your SMS campaign can determine the outcome of your advertising and marketing.

First, look for a company with experience and a track record to support your marketing needs. About a year ago, it became feasible for smaller companies to get their own short code and beginning a SMS company. There are a lot of fly by night computer companies that started text marketing businesses, but the have no real world marketing experience.

Text message marketing is not a one size fits all approach to marketing. Each business has different needs and the SMS company you choose to work with must be able to relate their experiences with past campaigns to suit your business needs.

Make sure the company has a text marketing free trial available so you may test the system on your customers and staff before having to make a buying decision. Again, what works for one business in one city, may not work for another. Text marketing is one of the few try it before you buy it marketing systems out there. Take advantage of this. Also get a real trial. 15 messages and 7 days won't allow you a real test period. You need at least 30 days and 500 test message credits for your business to properly build a list and test a couple mass text blasts to your subscriber list.

The SMS company should also have the ability to send bulk text messages in a short period of time. You don't want to time your text blast for 10 am, so your customers may take advantage of a lunch special and then find out your list didn't get the message until 2 pm.

Be sure the company not only collects the cell numbers, or opt-in through the SMS channel, but also sends the messages through the SMS channel. This is easy to determine. You want their to be a small charge, usually a couple cents, for each outgoing text message. If there is not, the messages are being sent through SMTP and are likely to get buffered by SPAM filters.

Pricing levels are all over the place. Make sure the pricing of the text message marketing company matches your advertising budget and provides the ROI you need to make profits.