Last week, we covered the key benefits of mobile marketing and why SMS & MMS marketing campaigns bode well for Singapore.
Your SMS campaign must provide real value to your recipients
SMSes are by their very nature more intrusive than other forms of marketing. If you're going to push your way into your customers' personal space, you'd better be providing something they'll find useful -- whether it's an exclusive invitation to an event or a special discount available only to those who flash the SMS.
Respect your audience's privacy
In the same vein, try not to contact your customers too frequently, as this can lead to fatigue and annoyance. You should also only be contacting customers who have opted in to your list, and not your entire base. It's easy to aggravate people who continually receive messages they never asked for, thus entrenching a negative opinion of your brand in their minds.
Familiarise yourself with what you can and cannot do
The intensely personal nature of marketing via SMS has led to concerted efforts by regulatory authorities to protect consumer rights. Before you embark on an SMS campaign, ensure you're familiar with 2007's Spam Control Bill and the new rules and regulations that now govern such campaigns. These include having to mark advertising messages clearly with "ADV" before the message begins, identifying your company, and clearly providing opt-out or unsubscribe info within the same message. There must also be clear contact information for recipients who wish to get in touch with you.
Time your campaign right
As with other marketing campaigns, timing is important in an SMS campaign. Depending on the nature of your business, there are optimum times to reach your customers -- the end of a work day for bars advertising happy hour promotions, or on a weekend for retail outlets to catch customers who might already be out shopping. Either way, it's a delicate balancing act -- too early and you risk customers forgetting your message, too late and they won't be able to change plans to take advantage of your offer. Rigorously tracking and analysing all your campaign results and statistics will enable you to continually fine tune your approach for maximum results. Remember that mobile marketing does not stand alone, rather, the most successful campaigns leverage traditional media such as TV, radio and print for maximum impact. It's proven that cross-media integrated campaigns are keys to success.
The future: MMS marketing
As mobile phones become more sophisticated, with multimedia capabilities becoming standard, the focus has inevitably begun to shift to MMS (multimedia messaging service) marketing. MMS marketing presents many more features and capabilities for marketers, one of which is the ability to send richer content and improve interactivity.
MMS has been slow to take off due primarily to the disparity in levels and types of technology available to consumers, especially with telcos being slow to support standards such as 3G.
But in recent years, several brands have been able to exploit the medium with reasonable success. Visa, for example, sponsored the Vindigo City guide, a directory of places to eat, shop and play, designed to be used with PDAs and mobile phones and targeting its high-end Visa Signature cardholders.
Volvo's pan-European campaign for the launch of its new S40 was similarly successful in its aim of raising brand awareness and driving traffic to its website. Integrated with its popular TVCs centred around "The Mystery of Dalarö", the campaign invited users to text "MYSTERY" to the campaign's short code to receive a teaser trailer and more information about the story. Software immediately detected the sender's handset type, determined an appropriate video format, and sent it to the user, along with a link to the campaign website where they could view a documentary about Dalarö and learn more about the Volvo S40.
The campaign results were staggering, with an estimated 49 percent of recipients downloading the video -- especially impressive when you consider the technical considerations involved in having to keep track of different country-specific short codes, mobile standards, and available handsets!
SMS and MMS marketing hold potential as effective marketing channels particularly when integrated with traditional media. The key again is in understanding the media and its limitations.
This article is written by 8rewardsroad.
