SMS Text Messaging for Easy, Targeted and Responsive Online Marketing

It is no secret that advertising is not trusted that much by consumers. Sure, it works, but what is the response rate? Banner ads are lucky to score a 1% click-through rate nowadays. And even then, the person who clicks through walks in cautious. They do not trusting that the advertiser speaks in the best interest of consumers. Ads have poor click-through ration and low sales conversion ratio of about 3-7%. So what is the solution?

Easy. Have the consumer market to the consumer. When your friend tells you ‘hey, you should buy this product, its great!’ you are highly likely to believe him and likely to consider buying it. When an advertiser tells you the same, you may not even hear the message – you have learnt to block out ads unconsciously. You probably equate them to noise.

While click-through ratios of ads are about 1% or so, friend-to-friend recommendations can have a click through as high as 64%, according to a survey I once saw some time back. And what about sales conversion ratios? Well, direct marketers have known for years that an endorsed ad can convert as much as 30% or more.

There are many ways to get people to tell their friends about your products and services. Many web sites now have recommend-to-a-friend links. These use email to get a person to send the recommendation to a friend. That is good, but not enough. Have one of those; but also have something else. We now need a method that is novel so that the person can feel a thrill when they send a recommendation to a friend. We also need a method that is more instantaneous than email, and one more personal than email. What is that method?

It is SMS text messages. SMS text messages are those short 160 character text messages that you can send from your mobile phone to another mobile phone. It is like email through mobile phones. You can send any text to any phone. Before we look at how to send SMS text recommendations from your web site to people’s friend’s phones, let us briefly look at how popular SMS is. Here we go: There are over 750 million mobile phone users worldwide. Contrast that with about 500 million email users only. Out of the 750 million, about 550 million can send and receive SMS text messages on their phones. That is bigger than the email market! And it is growing faster than email or the web. There are about 18 billion SMS text messages sent per month worldwide. SMS is now the biggest profit generator for telecom companies around the world and it has a higher usage rate than voice calls especially in the consumer market. SMS may not be as big in the USA as it is in the rest of the world, but it !
is growing rapidly even there. OK, now here is where it gets real good for you: you can send an SMS text message from your web site to any phone anywhere on this good planet called earth for less than $0.05 per message! Anywhere on earth! The cost is the same whether you send one to your neighbor or to a guy in Vladivostok. And it will instantly reach the recipient wherever they are. It will not get lost in some big email inbox and probably get deleted. No, it will be read when it gets there, given full attention. At $0.05 a message, that is about $50 for a thousand messages. You can get this figure down if you send in bulk. At less than $50 CPM, it costs less than many banner ads or ezine ads, and you get to contact people in an instant, very personally!

So what is the idea? Well, what you need to do is have a short form on your web site, on each page of your web site, inviting people to send a free SMS to their friend about your site. Of course, so that they do not go about sending their own messages that have nothing to do with your site, you would pre-write your advert and make it unavailable for change by the site visitor. So all you ask your visitors for is their mobile phone number and their friends’ mobile phone numbers. That is all. When they enter this in your form on your web pages and click send, a script sends your pre-written ad to their friend. Of course, you have to write it in a ‘friendly’ manner so that it does look like a ‘personal recommendation’ to the recipient. You can show the sender what the outgoing message will be but don’t allow them to change it or else they will just type in their own personal story about the dog at home – at it will still cost you $0.05. It is that simple.

Many people love to send and receive SMS messages so this is a very fresh and engaging way for you to advertise. And you know you are hitting the right target because most people will not recommend something to their friend unless they like it and know their friend will like it. So you pay for good targeting. You also get good response because people trust their friends more than they trust you. So do remember to ask the sender for their mobile phone number because that is how the receiver will know that it came from them. You may also ask them for their first name and their friend’s first name and insert them in the pre-written recommendation you send out.

Now all you need is to implement this. What you need is a company that has set up a ‘SMS gateway’ that has worldwide roaming. Open an account with them. You then send your SMS messages to that company and they will transmit it for you. It is all done easily via scripts. Some of the best companies out there for this are Simple Wire and Deltica (see http://www.imagesofone.com/articles/reviews.asp for updated links to gateway companies and service providers). These companies will give you a starter kit that includes sample code that you can modify to implement what we talked about. You can implement this easily if you have some experience with CGI scripts or perhaps ASP or PHP. If you don’t, you can get someone to do it for you at www.elance.com for a small fee.

What have you just done? You have enabled your consumers to talk to each other about you in the most personal and rapid way. This is where the future of marketing lies. And you can get in on it right now. I wish you all the best and hope to get an SMS from your site one day.