TextMagic puts awesome power into the hands of your business. You can send an SMS to everyone on your opt-in list in moments, telling them about up-to-date offers. Alternatively, you can use TextMagic’s SMS API to integrate texting into your sales or sign-up process.

But, as with any business strategy, you need to think carefully about how you use text messaging, and implement a strategy rather than just rushing in. In particular, you need to be careful that you’re not annoying your customers by sending them too many texts, or texting them too often at inappropriate times. Your customers will be on your SMS list because they have chosen to be there – if you annoy them they will start to opt out and your list will shrink.

Here are some strategies for keeping your customers happy when you’re spreading your business’s message via SMS:

1. Get the frequency right
This is the single most important thing is to make sure you’re sending the right number of messages at the right intervals. If you’re running a rolling marketing campaign, about one message a week seems to be the “sweet spot” for maintaining customers’ interest without overloading them with texts.

Obviously, if you’re running a one-off campaign or using TextMagic to send SMS alerts through the API, then frequency will be affected by external factors. In that case, it’s a good idea to monitor the customer’s experience to make sure that nobody is getting too many messages. A good way of doing this is to put yourself in the position of a customer, and set messages to come to your own phone – does the number of texts seem reasonable, or is it starting to get annoying?

2. Keep it short and sweet
Even though TextMagic gives you the power to concatenate (i.e., join several texts into one to send longer messages) it’s a good idea to keep your customer messages relatively short. When you send a customer a text you are, in effect, “demanding” their attention – it’s a marketing message they can’t ignore.

Make them work too hard by sending long or complicated messages, and they’ll soon get annoyed. Keep messages short, sweet, and above all useful. If every SMS helps your customers in some way (e.g., by promoting a special offer their demographic data tells you they are very likely to be interested in) and doesn’t take too much of their time, they should stay happy and loyal.

3. Send out of hours
Sending SMS to customers in the middle of the day can be risky – if they are hassled, busy with another task or on the move they are not going to thank you for distracting them. If, on the other hand, you send messages in the evening, early morning or at the weekend you’re less likely to be an unwelcome intrusion – and more likely to catch your customers at a time when they are relaxed and receptive to your message.

4. Personalise
Personalising sales messages is a very old marketing tactic – and one that works. If the customer feels you are talking directly to them, they are likely to be more responsive to your message. You can use the TextMagic web interface to personalise messages quickly and easily by selecting the “first name” attribute and entering it into the body of the message you are sending:

This picks up the customer’s first name from the data in your contacts list and drops it right into the email. You can also access this feature via the API.

5. Get feedback
The best way to find out how much your customers like your campaign is to… ask them! It’s very difficult to decide in advance how different consumer groups will response to SMS marketing, because different generations and economic groups have different attitudes to texting in general. Consider offering a small incentive for feedback on your campaign, and use the feedback to improve and refine it further.

Increasing numbers of people are using Apple’s popular iPad as a convenient device for working on the move – or even just working, checking emails and browsing from the comfort of the sofa.

If you’re a TextMagic user, you can use the iPad’s built-in browser to visit TextMagic.com and use the web interface to manage your SMS messages. However, to make texting from your iPad even easier, we’re pleased to announce SMS Magic for iPad, a simple, elegant, easy-to-use app which operates in conjunction with your existing TextMagic account. With SMS Magic for iPad, you can send texts from your iPad wherever you have a web connection!

Why is this useful?

Apart from the issue of convenience, more and more people are using iPads as mobile productivity devices when they are on the move. Smaller, lighter and will a longer battery life than most laptops, iPads are fantastic for working on the train, in planes and in hotels – especially if used with the separate lightweight keyboard Apple offers as an accessory.

Using SMS Magic on your iPad means its easy to stay on top of your text messages while you’re out and about with your iPad. Everything – including personal messages and business-related bulk SMS – can be handled from the device. Apart from a one-off low cost for SMS Magic in the Apple app store, you only pay regular TextMagic fees for SMS messages that you send – which are often much better value than regular carrier rates, especially if you’re texting while travelling abroad, or sending SMS to people in other countries.

You don’t need an iPad 3G to use SMS Magic. All you need is basic internet access, for which a standard WiFi connection on a non-3G model will work just as well.

How does it work?

It’s easy to use SMS Magic for iPad. All you need to do is sign up for a TextMagic account and buy some credits so you can send cheap text messages through the TextMagic system.

When you first launch SMS Magic for iPad, you’ll see a dialogue screen that looks like this (image taken from iPod touch edition):

At this stage, it can be useful to leave the “reply #” field blank. By doing this, you tell the app to pick up your default settings for sending replies to your phone, email or your TextMagic inbox. You can change these easily by visiting your account area at TextMagic.com.

Sending and receiving messages using SMS Magic for iPad is easy. The only slight difference is that you need to remember to add a “+” sign when entering international numbers. If you send sent to numbers that doesn’t have an international code, SMS Magic will try to send it to that number in your home country.

So, for example, say you have a friend in the UK whose number is 07777 111222, and you are also using a UK-registered TextMagic account. You can contact your friend using SMS Magic for iPad using either:

07777 111222

or

+447777 111222

One of the beauties of SMS Magic for iPad is that you can directly access your iPad’s contacts, which you can sync with your master contacts list on your PC or Mac. As such, you don’t have to laboriously add contacts every time you want to send a message – SMS Magic joins seamlessly with your existing communications data.

The SMS Magic toolbar

It’s easy to navigate your way around the app using the toolbar at the bottom:

The left hand button checks for new messages on the TextMagic server (assuming replies are being sent to the server – if you have your central TextMagic account set up to deliver replies to your phone, that’s where they’ll go). SMS Magic does this every 15 minutes anyway, but the button gives you a good way of staying up-to-date if you’re expecting messages to come in.

The next button to the right is the reading control – press this to read all the replies you have received via the TextMagic server.

In the middle of the toolbar is a contacts button: hit this to access your list of contacts quickly when you wish to send an SMS.

To the right of the contacts button is the “delete” button, which you can use to delete stored messages to minimise memory usage on your iPad.

On the far right hand side is the is the “sent messages” button – tap this to re-read and check the messages that you have sent using SMS Magic for iPad.

…and that’s pretty much all there is to it! SMS Magic for iPad further extends the power of TextMagic, allowing you to use it in mobile work environments or informal situations away from your main PC, Mac or laptop.

In our post last Friday we had a quick look at Pew Internet’s new report on cell phone use among US adults.

One particularly interesting revelation in the report is that around 65% of adults have their phones beside them while they sleep. This has big implications if you’re a business or organisation involved in permission-based texting of your customers or members: if you send them an SMS in the middle of the night, it will probably be the very first message they read when they wake up in the morning.

Let’s consider some of the potential benefits of early-bird texting:

1. You can tie in with products or services (yours or your competitors’) that were featured on TV the previous evening.

2. Your message will reach your recipients at a relatively quiet time of day – their defences will be down and they are likely to give you a little more “eyeball time” than if they were having to snatch a quick glance at your message in the middle of a busy day.

3. Most of your recipients will be at home. So, for example, if you want them to go online and do something they will be near their personal computers – and may have a little time over breakfast to check out the link or offer you are promoting.

Of course, the results you get are going to depend on your product, goal and customer and/or membership base. The Pew statistics are broken down by age, ethnicity, education, income and location (urban vs. rural). Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger phone users are more likely to sleep with their devices next to them than older users, though the practice doesn’t drop off as sharply with age as you might think. 90%+ of people in their late teens and twenties sleep with their phones; the figure for 30-49 year olds is 70%+, for 50-64 year olds 50%+ and is still a healthy 34%+ for individuals aged 65 or over.

The stats are pretty much flat across educational levels (67%, 63%, 66% and 67% respectively among individuals with less than a high school education, a high school diploma, a college degree and a postgraduate or professional degree), but there is quite a high variation among ethnic groups. You are more likely to sleep with your phone next to you if you are a non-hispanic black (78%) or an English-speaking hispanic (75%) than if you are non-hispanic white (62%+).

If you’re interested in SMS marketing, it’s well worth having a look at the full report to see how it fits your target demographic. Bear in mind that the survey is of US adults only. However, as I said in the last post, since mobile/SMS take-up has historically been slightly slower in the US than in other developed countries, these statistics could cautiously be read as a conservative estimate of habits among European/East Asian users.

Looking for an SMS marketing or bulk texting solution? With TextMagic you can send text messages from your PC or Mac, via email, our Messenger application or our comprehensive API. And all you have to pay is a low fee for each text you send. Check out our SMS marketing services today!

Pew Internet published a report yesterday about SMS usage by adults in the US. Over the next few posts we’re going to be digging into the stats to see what they mean for businesses that use text messaging to communicate with their customers.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is useful information even if you’re not based in the States. Historically, SMS take-up in the US has been behind take-up in Europe, thought the the gap has closed in recent years. As such, you can probably treat some of these US stats as conservative approximations to equivalents for adults in Europe and (maybe) East Asia.

Let’s take a look at some headline information from the report:

During May 2010, 72% of American adults sent at least one text message, up from 65% in September 2009. That’s growth in usage of nearly 11% in a just nine months. That stat alone suggests we’re on a sharp climb towards almost total saturation of SMS usage in key adult markets.

Adults who use SMS send and receive a median of 10 texts a day. This is still a fifth of the median figure for teens in the 12-17 range, but it represents a huge increase – and a huge opportunity for businesses – compared to the situation just a couple of years ago.

90% of American adults with children living at home have a cellphone, compared with 78% of those who either don’t have kids or whose kids have moved out.

65% sleep with their phones next to them – so a text message sent during the night is among the very first things they see in the morning.

57% claim they have received messages they would define as “spam” – a reminder of the importance of using SMS marketing with permission-based lists of subscribers.