In our last post we looked at some of the opportunities your business could exploit by running an SMS marketing campaign through TextMagic. Today we’re going to look in more detail at how to start planning a campaign.

Understand the possibilities
First, it’s important to understand the various ways TextMagic allows you to send text messages to potential customers (we’ll talk about receiving messages in a later post in the series). Take a look at this screenshot from the TextMagic control panel, the interface you’ll see once you’ve signed up and logged into TextMagic:

The four menu items that are important to us here are “new message”, “scheduled”, “groups” and “templates”. You can use the simple “new message” system to send a text message to any mobile phone, as long as you know the number, and it’s in one of the 200+ countries to which TextMagic can send SMS messages.

The “scheduled” option allows you to control the time at which messages are sent to users or groups of users. This is useful because it allows you to send a series of regular messages to customers without being in front of your computer all the time. It also means you can schedule SMS sendings to customers outside your timezone without having to stay up all night! In addition, if you’re dealing with a large and diverse user base, sending all messages manually could be very time-consuming: scheduling allows you to automate some of the process, delivering increased ROI for time spent by yourself or your staff.

You can use scheduling alongside the “groups” option to create a powerful SMS marketing strategy. The chances are, like most businesses, your customers fall into several sub-segments of the same market. The groups function allows you divide up and store individuals’ phone numbers within the TextMagic system, so you don’t have to spend ages cutting and pasting from an Excel file every time you want to send different messages to different types of customer.

Finally, “templates” is another tool to help you save time. You can store the messages you use most often as reusable templates in your TextMagic control panel. Again, these saves you having to write a message from scratch every time you want to send one, or having to keep a separate document with the various messages you use. The templates function has a couple of other cool features, as you can see from this screenshot:

That’s right – templates can contain custom fields that access data from your groups and insert it into individual messages to add personalisation.

Some thoughts about lists
OK, so now we know a little about the potential TextMagic’s SMS tools offer us: we can send personalised text messages at scheduled times to tightly-defined audiences and audience segments.

But where do we find at audience to send our messages to? In this section we’re going to give some thought to the tricky business of developing a list: a database of customers with known mobile numbers.

The most valuable type of list for most businesses is usually one made up of previous customers. Why? Because they have an existing relationship with the business and its product. SMS is the perfect tool for encouraging past customers to become repeat customers. In addition, you may have some existing data about individual customers, allowing you to using the TextMagic groups function to subdivide them by need, interest or their past relationship with your company.

Of course, you may not have a list of previous customers (if not, start keeping one right away!). For example, you might have launched an entirely new business. In a situation like this it’s possible to buy a list from an individual or business known as a list broker. Most list brokers can put together long lists of customers with known mobile numbers who have an interest in your product or service. Crucially, many will also be able to provide specifically targeted SMS lists, so you can be reasonably sure you are sending your marketing messages to individuals who are happy to receive your messages.

A list bought from a broker is “cold”, and you will probably get a lower conversion rate than if you’re sending messages to a list of “warm” previous customers. However, the the great benefit of using a list is that it helps to grow your customer base.

One more thing: when you’re sending SMS marketing messages to prospects, be sure to comply with local laws and regulations in both your own country and your recipients’ countries. Usually this means offering recipients a simple way to stop receiving messages, but it’s worth checking on the particular rules you need to comply with before you launch your campaign.

In part 3, we’ll look at the nuts and bolts of writing and sending an SMS marketing message.

TextMagic has recently agreed to sponsor figure skater Gerli Liinamäe to assist her with preparations for the European Figure Skating Championships held in Bern 2011. This major European figure skating event will take place in Bern, Switzerland, from January 23 to January 30 (event schedule).

She will compete in the Ladies Short Program on Friday, January 28. If all goes well, she will also participate in the Ladies Free Program on Saturday, January 29.

Gerli was born in 1995 and has been skating since she was six years old. In 2010, she won the Estonian Championships and earned the opportunity to represent Estonia in the European Championships in Bern.

Here is a photo of Gerli:

And here’s a short video of her hard at work training:

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish Gerli the very best of luck!

This is the first in a series of posts in which we’re going to look at how to design, run and measure the success of a marketing campaign using TextMagic’s various SMS services.

In this first post we’re going to think about the kind of products and services that work well with SMS marketing. In the following posts we’re going to think about the detailed process you need to go through to make the most of your mobile marketing spend, how you’ll find and use a list of target customers and manage your campaign to get an excellent ROI. We’ll see that the best SMS marketing campaigns are those that are both carefully planned and flexible.

As these posts are focused on marketing, we’re going to be thinking quite narrowly in terms of promotion and sales. Don’t forget that SMS is also a tremendously useful tool for managing customer services and communications with employees and partners. We’ll perhaps look at those topics in further series of posts later in the year.

For now, let’s get focused on selling stuff!

What works?
If you’re thinking of trying SMS marketing, the first thing you need to decide is whether your product or service is suitable for an SMS campaign. At the end of the day, you have to make a judgment based on your knowledge of your product and your customers. However, to give you a bit of inspiration, here are some examples of the type of products and services that can be marketed via SMS.

- Small businesses offering services often do well from SMS marketing. If you’re (for example) a mobile hairdresser or a freelance maths tutor and you have available slots in your schedule, you can text an offer to everyone on your customer list and then receive potential leads in real time right back to your phone.

- Retail operations with a reasonable customer base who offer small or midrange products – jewelers, garden centres, kitchen shops and similar.

- Software or digital content businesses that offer products for download. For example, you could send a text message to your existing customers (or to a bought list) that included a shortlink to a mobile-optimized product or special offer page.

- Businesses that offer service or subscription models. Say, for example, you run a second hand car business – you can send SMS reminders to customers when their cars are due for a service, giving you the best chance of winning the business. Likewise, if you’re running a web hosting business you can win repeat business by reminding customers when it’s time to renew.

- Very similar are businesses that are in a position to offer good value upgrades and special offers – again, web hosting is a good example of this.

Warm vs. cold
One lesson you can draw from the examples above is that SMS marketing is particularly good at driving repeat business – i.e., in situations where you already have a relationship with the customer. Any SMS marketing campaign based on a list of existing customers, if managed properly, is likely to do very well.

That’s not to say that you can’t also do well out of cold SMS marketing. We’ll look at cold texting a little more in a later post in this series. But if you’re in a position where you don’t have a prospect list – or you want to expand your current customer base with an SMS marketing campaign – working cold can deliver results. It’s all about having a great offer, using SMS sensibly and being very choosy and smart when you’re buying a list.

OK, in the next post we’re going to look at specific example of how a small business can use an SMS marketing campaign to grow sales.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

SMS – like many other digital and mobile communications technologies – is all about cutting out middlemen and talking right to your customer, partner, colleague, investor or voter.

His Excellency the President of Cameroon obviously has the latter group in mind, because he has recently used his national mobile phone networks to send a New Year’s message to everyone in his country.

According to Elvis Teke of state broadcaster CRTV, “it’s the first time the first couple is connecting with the masses [by] phone. Since Wednesday, 29th December 2010 mobile telephone service providers in the country have been sending out SMS messages on behalf of the first couple”.

While taking over an entire national network simply to send a text message is rather a dramatic step, it seems that 77-year-old President Paul Biya is in tune with the times; businesses and organisations are realising the benefits of mobile communications when it comes to direct contact with the people they want to reach.

Previously, if you wanted to get a message out to large numbers of people, you had to use some sort of third-party medium: advertising, public relations, journalism, publishing and so on. That added layers of complexity even if (like President Biya) you pretty much controlled your own broadcasting network. If you had to rely on media that lay outside of your control, problems were bound to occur.

Mobile comms give you absolute control over what you say and how you say it, and – best of all – they deliver your message right into the pockets of your recipients.

So, whether you’re running a business, an organisation, an African state – or you just want to keep in touch with large numbers of family and friends – SMS should be among your first choices of technology. And if you want to make sure you’re texting in the most cost-effective way possible, be sure to check out the cost-effective bulk SMS services that TextMagic offers.

Happy New Year!