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!

When you work in the mobile telecoms business, you get pretty used to the occasional news story announcing the decline of SMS as a telecoms tool, especially in the teens/twenties demographic.

We’ve been reading predictions like this for half a dozen years now, but text messaging just keeps growing in popularity – in our view because it’s simple, easy, elegant and cheap.

Now SMS has had yet another boost in the form of Facebook announcing its new Facebook Messages service. The new service will collate updates and messages from email, web, mobile app and SMS sources into a streamlined, simplified messaging and information system designed for younger demographics who find email too formal or unwieldy. And if Facebook’s past experience is anything to go by, technology aimed at the kids will soon be taken up by their parents (and grandparents!) too.

Facebook’s stated aim is to make online communication “more like a conversation” – something that flows in a pretty natural way between friends and groups of friends. SMS – which is about as neat, spontaneous and fast as telecommunications can get – is a natural fit for this kind of philosophy.

The new Messages service will be built around a so-called “social inbox” that collates communications and stores them in threads in a way that’s a little reminiscent of Google Wave. It’s pretty certain, however, that because of its enormous userbase (500m+), Facebook’s attempt at this kind of unifying telecoms technology is going to be much bigger than Wave.

Facebook sees the new technology as a way of allowing users greater control over their personal communications. In his blog post announcing the rollout of Messages, Facebook software engineer Joel Seligstein said, “this kind of message control is pretty unprecedented and people have been wanting to do this with email (and phone calls) for a long time. Messages reverses the approach to preventing unwanted contact. Instead of having to worry about your email address getting out, you’re now in control of who can actually reach you.”

How does TextMagic fit into this? Well, whichever way you look at it, network providers are going to charge for SMS messages. If the Facebook Messages model goes ahead as planned (and it’s still being rolled out, so nobody’s entirely sure), TextMagic will allow users to interact with Facebook Messages quicky and easily – from their desktop, mobile device or email application – at a lower cost than they would have to pay if sending SMS via their regular mobile provider.

We’re very excited about Facebook Messages, and not just because it’s an exciting new way of communicating in itself. It proves, once again, that SMS is an effective, trusted and reliable technology that’s likely to be around for a long time to come.

A great way for small businesses to develop new marketing techniques is to copy and adapt methods used by major players.

This holds true for marketing basics such as the design of your webpage (can you learn something about positioning and prioritization from the way Amazon lays out its pages?) through to demographic placement, market segmentation and campaign methodology.

Why is copying the big boys a good idea? Simple: they employ top agencies and research groups to help them formulate strategy. They spend millions on focus grouping and customer interaction to help them learn lessons. Look carefully at what they do, and you can benefit from all their research for absolutely nothing.

It’s interesting, then, to find out that 38% of major retail businesses in the UK have used SMS as part of a marketing campaign at least once. The research, carried out by mobile transaction firm mBlox, suggests that major high street operations are seeing the benefits of contacting their customers via SMS – a topic we discussed in our last post.

If anything, it seems likely that SMS marketing is likely to grow even further: Andrew Bud, founder of mBlox, says: “as our research shows, adoption of SMS by retailers is certainly off to a good start. However, with more than 56 million people in the UK regularly using text messages, the potential is enormous.”

Other interesting research that has recently come out of mBlox suggests that SMS can be particularly valuable to businesses that deal with customers on an appointment basis. A whopping 59% of Brits state SMS as their preferred contact method when being reminded about yearly appointments – whether it’s to have their cars serviced, their chimneys swept or their teeth checked out at the dentist.

Interestingly – and in line with much industry research – mBox found that SMS take-up and acceptance among US consumers is still lower than it is among Europeans, a legacy of the later introduction of nationwide SMS functionality on that side of the Atlantic. However, it seems that SMS marketing is growing in popularity and acceptance in the States, with take-up accelerating: “Businesses in the U.S. are now learning about the break-through effect of text messaging as an effective communication channel for their customers. Businesses in the U.K. have a few years head start in this respect and that is reflected in these numbers,” says Brian Johnson, mBlox’s Senior VP for sales and marketing.

Where does this leave TextMagic customers? Well, it’s a great reminder that it pays to keep an eye on major market players if you’re operating a small business – and to learn from their strategies. If you’re a TextMagic user, you also have access to one of the world’s sophisticated and reliable bulk SMS marketing technologies, meaning you’re in a great position to exploit both those markets that are already booming (the UK) and those which seem to be on a steep growth curve (the US).

Although mBlox’s research found that increasing numbers of companies are also using mobile apps for marketing purposes, it seems that SMS is likely to remain a popular technology for a long time to come: as well as being beautifully simple and easy to use (especially if you’re managing your SMS marketing through TextMagic!) it has worldwide reach and is completely platform independent – the ideal solution for marketers.

We’re getting to the point in the year when business and technology experts are looking ahead to 2011 and what it will bring – what are going to be the best strategies to pursue and the trends that will need to handled or exploited?

Right now, a very common theme in these discussions is how 2011 is going to be the year when mobile computing – and, by extension, mobile marketing – really “comes of age”. During 2009 and 2010, the large scale adoption of smartphones by the consumer market has solved many of the problems that had previously plagued mobile, such as small screens and relative lack of interactivity. In fact, because of the rise of apps, mobile has very quickly become a force that is actually shaping the way the online world works and how companies are using technology to reach their consumers.

So mobile is settling down to become a standard part of the technology landscape and an essential part of the marketing mix. What does this mean for SMS?

In considering that question, we have to think about the major benefits of SMS as a communication form. It is:

1. Fast
2. Cost-effective
3. Easy to use
4. Direct

We also need to think about how it compares with the other main mobile communications technology – mobile email – in each of those areas:

1. SMS is as fast, or faster than email. Because SMS messages are distributed via commercial comms networks they don’t have to rely on large numbers of third-party, intermediate servers that can slow down, delay or just plain lose messages. SMS is also faster and simpler to create than email: recipients only expect (and, indeed, only want) short messages, which isn’t always the case with email.

2. You might think that SMS will always lose out to mobile email in terms of price. But that’s not necessarily true: for someone away from their home country, for example, sending and receiving SMS might be cheaper than dealing with emails on a data roaming tariff. Additionally, there’s the concept of getting what you pay for: mobile email might be superficially “free”, but it eats into data allowances, takes longer to send and receive and suffers from a lower degree of reliability than SMS. There is a slightly greater up-front cost for SMS, but in many situations – especially where mobile marketing is involved – its increased reliability is well worth the (highly marginal) extra cost and actually represents better value for money than email.

3. On smartphones, SMS and email ease of use is about the same. But what about people using standard mobiles? For them, it’s much easier to receive and send SMS than email.

4. Both SMS and email are direct in a mobile context in that they go straight to the device in the recipient’s pocket or bag. But even users with push email alerts set up on their phones are more likely to pay immediate attention to an SMS alert, simply because text messages are less common, and likely to be more personal, than email messages.

With that it mind, it seems likely that SMS is going to not only remain a key technology, but actually increase in importance as mobile marketing becomes part of the mainstream. In particular, the rise of the mobile app seems to be driving an increased use of automated messaging for marketing purposes – something TextMagic customers are well placed to exploit with our bulk SMS gateway API.