SME Guides to Mobile Marketing

SMS Marketing for Health & Leisure Clubs…

The health club industry is fast paced and highly competitive. As a business owner you have many priorities and attracting and retaining customers is key. SMS marketing can help you to:

  • Create a simple campaign to acquire new members
  • Target offers to retain your existing client base and grow sales during quiet periods in the business
  • Provide better service by text messaging bookings for personal training/facilities bookings etc. to your members
  • Provide a substantial return on investment compared to traditional forms of marketing – email, newspaper ads or radio.

SMS marketing is great for busy business owners to target their busy customers. A short and ‘to the point’  message takes seconds to read and can generate a response just as quickly, whereas traditional means of marketing communications; emails and newspaper advertising, even a telephone campaign, take a great deal of time to organise and can be costly too.

From around 4p per message, texting is also by far the cheapest means of communicating with your new or old members. Take email for example. It will take someone time to create a great email marketing campaign. Unfortunately, only 25% of aquisition emails are read compared 95% of text messages.

As well as driving more people into your club, you can also use your SMS system to manage your bookings if you have personal trainers or a booking system for courts or certain equipment. The benefits of this are that it looks very professional, and you can reduce the number of costly no-shows to your business.

Is texting right for my business?

The simple answer is that SMS/text marketing can be beneficial to any club. The real advantage of SMS marketing is that it’s cheap and scalable; anyone can do it and to any number of contacts so it really doesn’t matter how big or small your club is, texting can benefit you.

Acquire more business

  • SMS your old members, offering no joining fee if they sign up this month
  • Offer extra incentives for referrals – SMS new members offering a gift when a friend joins
  • 10% off all treatments in the spa on quiet days
  • Send birthday messages to lost clients offering a free spa treatment when they re-join

Improve your customer service

  • SMS personal training/equipment/tennis court bookings to reduce no-shows
  • Generate feedback and measure service – give your members the opportunity to fill out a feedback card and leave their mobile number. This will help you measure service and you could then offer 10% off the next visit for members who may have had a bad experience in the club.
  • Tell your customers about new equipment or events happening in the club

Knowing what to write

Text messages can only be 160 characters (including spaces) long, so there’s no room for waffling.

It’s important that you get to the point quickly and that the client understands exactly what you’re

offering them. As a rule, you should make sure that once you have created your message, it answers

these three key questions;

  • Why you are contacting them – e.g. what offer are you making?
  • When should they act? – e.g. is there a closing date for your offer or promotion?
  • What do they need to do next? e.g. call or visit your club

It’s important to keep the style of your messages friendly and chatty but at the same time, your message is clear and concise. Here is an example;

Example booking reminder message

“Hi Dave, you have a personal trainer session

booked with us on Friday at 8pm with Alan

Looking forward to seeing you then!

Fitness Plus Club 01234 567891″

Once you have decided on how you want to use texting in your club, and the content of your texts, you can determine how often you will need to contact members and what your average usage of text messaging will be.

How much is too much?

Your members may not be so pleased to hear from you if your messages start to become too regular. We recommend contacting them not more than once per month with offers or promotions in addition to your

everyday reminder texts and booking confirmations. For the majority of clubs, one promotion or special offer per month is enough to satisfy the sales targets set within the business.

Protecting your client data

Because texting is very personal, it’s important to gain permission before running a campaign. As a guide, if you keep your members personal details on file you should ask them to sign the file and you could insert a small paragraph asking for permission to send SMS messages there.

The final thing to consider before you embark on an SMS marketing campaign is: who should manage your SMS marketing? Who in your club should be given the responsibility of maintaining your client database and ensuring the right messages are sent to the right people?

In truth, there is only really one answer to this question. Your member contact database, in particular the mobile numbers it contains should be be highly protected. Only the club manager should be able to access this and they should have the final say on the content of messages and when and who will receive them.

 

SME Guides to Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing for Small Business – A Guide…

Did you know?

“Amongst the top 10 business users of SMS are recruitment agencies, clubs and bars, internet service providers, couriers, hair salons, dentists and charities.”

Where can mobile marketing take my small business??

The question is where can’t it take your company? From increasing communications with your clients on a first name basis, to sending them targeted coupons or offers using LBS lookup services to hit their phones when it matters, you can count on mobile to be at the cutting edge of technology for years to come.

7 million Brits now access the internet on their mobile every day; this is a huge amount of people who are happy to surf on their mobile instead of their PC. That’s one huge potential shop window you can market your products and services to. If they go on the internet on their phones, then they will want other experiences too, like MMS or App development to give them the next level in the business / customer relationship.

Companies using Mobile as a way of communicating on a one to one, personal basis found that they get a 21% increase in responses. (Source: MDA)

We send over 11 million text messages every hour in the UK every day, your customers are already frighteningly familiar with this channel and what’s even more interesting is that they understand it. They expect to receive offers and service information via their mobiles, they expect it to be personalized where possible and they expect it to be relevant to them…. In short they are extremely savvy users who demand a good user experience.

They also know what they have or haven’t asked for and understand the concept of permission based communications – this means that you have to have their permission or you will lose them as a customer faster than any other complaint they could have about your business.

In short, if you AREN’T USING MOBILE as part of your marketing strategy then you are behind your competitors and need to embrace the future of digital communications.

But remember, there are NO SHORTCUTS TO SUCCESFUL MOBILE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS!

In this series, I will look at the benefits to each type of small business, focusing on the type of SMS marketing that you can do for your type of clientele.

Good Luck!

themobileexpert

Mobile Marketing

Using SMS to complete website signups..

Have a website? Use mobile to inform or market to your customer base?
Have costly resources either external or internal related to Data Management of new signups via the website?

Cut your database costs by using a WEB TRIGGER API…. this method allows data (usually the mobile number) of the person who signs up via your website to be transfered into your SMS account automatically when someone signs up.

Then the account that recieves the customer data sends an automated response to the customers mobile device asking them to text back to finish their opt in process.

By doing this, they have opted in to recieve your communications and have also joined your mobile programme too. Provided your Privacy Policy is up to date you can then start to use these communication channels to market to your customers.

The automation effectively takes the sign up process from a manual one, where the customer signs up on the website and then at some point the database manager recieves the data of new sign ups from the website, adds these into the database and then about a week later he gives these to the marketing or customer service managers to send them the opt in message… the results of which would be far away from an immiediate response.

At 2ergo we have statistics that tell us that when an automated web trigger is used to send an immiediate SMS to gain opt in over 65% of new sign ups complete the opt in process using their mobile device.

Where a process doesnt use the web trigger process and a seperate SMS message is sent up to a week later, then response rates drop to below 40% in general.

For more details on how we can help you achieve seamless integration between your online and mobile channels, please fill in the contact form below.

Thanks

themobileexpert

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Mobile Supplements

Advanced SMS Campaigns

If you have ever thought that an SMS campaign wouldnt be of benefit to you and your business due to the intricacies of your consumer business needs then think again!!

SMS is one of the easiest channels to use for Dynamic Logic based campaigns, using simple text based scripts or lookup tables you can trigger the correct response message from hundreds of possible responses on an individual basis.

For example, you may decide that you will encourage your customers to join a program to recieve weekly updates and offers for your products or services. This program will be a month long program for five weeks and is  free to join and each person who joins will start the program with the first weeks message regardless of what day in the month they join.

This means your campaign will run for a maximum of two months as people who text into the program at the end of the target month will recieve the first weeks message and start the program from scratch.

Example:

The program runs throughout October and I can sign up via a short code and keyword at any point throughout this month (1st – 31st) this means that even if I sign up on the final day of October, then I will start the program and recieve my first weekly message. This means then that I will recieve my last message in the last week of November.
If I have your personal details like your first name or your account number etc, I can personalise aspects of the SMS messages your recieving, to give you even more relevant content.

If there is a particular format of messages required or if the messages are to be sent out in sync, then a simple logic based campaign will do the trick.

If you require a customer to text in a response like age so you can then verify that they are eligible for the content your about to send them, you can use a dynamic script or Smart messaging product to do that. Once your age is confirmed, then you can set up further messages based on the outcome… i.e.. if under age send “Not eligible” message and if correct age send “eligible” message.

If you want to send someone a message that has a time limit on it and have an expiry message set up to send to the customer if they try and join a program and arent succesful then you can do this and in the process send them on a different journey too.

SMS is the most versatile marketing channel around, it allows multiple responses, logic based responses, age verification, automated opt in and opt out programs, subscription programs, dyamic time based messages sent at multiple times of the day and much, much more!!

So.. if you think SMS isnt capable of meeting your business needs… THINK AGAIN!

Thanks

themobileexpert

Mobile Marketing

Improve your CTA by adding landing pages into your SMS campaign

When it comes to SMS marketing, if you want a good response to your message, you need to give some value. If your asking the customer to perform a call to action (CTA) then you need to come up with something that is creative and that adds value in order to get them to part with that response.

Given that SMS messaging generally only allows 160 characters per message, without going concatenated, the use of a mobile landing page can allow you to have much more information in your SMS campaigns.

Mobile Landing pages can be single pages containing data capture fields like the one in figure 1 below; or they can be 4 or 5 page mobile websites, complete with ts & cs, privacy and even product pages as an extention to your online presence.

The first thing you need to do when you start to look at creating your own mobile site or using landing pages is what do you want to achieve from it?  Do you need a mobile site and if so why? If you can answer these questions positively then you next need to decide if you would like to hire a company to build you a mobile site or if you believe you have the in house team to do it yourself what software provider you will use.

There are a lot of Mobile Site building tools out there, the only differences between the best and the worst of these are price, consistency and functionality.  One of the best mobile site builder software on the market is Mobile Site Builder from 2ergo.

With multiple page creation, custom functions such as colour pallette,   video and image integration, RSS feed integration, data capture and survey forms to name just a few, you can build a 4 page mobile site including data capture in just 20 minutes once your familiar with the tool. See promo video below;

Once you have succesfully chosen a software supplier, then you next need to decide what the purpose of the experience is and write down what your requirements for the site content will be.  Once you have this requirement then you can start to build your mobile presence and make the most of each of your mobile campaigns going forward.

If you would like to arrange a demo for your company, please fill out the form below and click submit and someone from 2ergo will call you back to discuss your needs.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Thanks

themobileexpert

Mobile Marketing

Choosing your Mobile Marketing platform provider

When you start to choose your mobile marketing platform you will be faced with a number of different choices, there are bulk sms providers who have web based platforms that can provide you with cheap messaging rates for outbound messaging but dont offer an opt out function or inbound responses.

There are also some sms marketing agencies, who use an agregator platform to run their sms campaigns but have to pass the extra cost on to the customer and most still dont offer opt out functionality as standard.

Then there are the aggregators themselves, who own the platform technology your using, have opt out functionality as standard and also have inbound response functionality across a number of other mobile message types like MMS for instance.

One of the best I have worked with is the Campaign Manager Platform from 2ergo plc, one of the countrys biggest mobile aggregators. Campaign Manager is a fully convergent marketing platform and offers the user outbound / inbound SMS, email, vouchers and has optional Mobile Site creation functionality too.  It also has smart messaging technology, to allow the user to set several different responses to each mobile message they send and can manage responses based on a bespoke dynamic logic system.

The platform is built to global standards and operates in many countries around the globe and has automatic opt out functionality via subscription groups as standard.

Message throughput is good and downtime is less than 0.027 % this year, they are also ISO 27001 certified and campaign manager operates on a secure https domain.

Below is a video of Campaign Manager in action;


If you would like to arrange a demo for your company, please fill out the form below and click submit and someone from 2ergo will call you back to discuss your needs.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨


Thanks

themobileexpert

Mobile Supplements

MMS Marketing

MMS or Multimedia Messaging Services are commonly known as picture messages but can have a variety of content in them from videos, text pages, QR codes and ringtones.

MMS was seen as the best way to offer a great user experience prior to 2008, when first the mobile web, WAP push and then mobile applications offered a much better way of engaging with consumers, whilst having much more functionality and many more options for marketers to achieve better results from much more varied call to actions in there campaigns.

Where MMS campaigns were used over traditional SMS messaging, there was a much greater response rate on the campaigns as consumers were drawn to the imagery in the MMS as opposed to the blandness of a traditional message.

However, there are many challenges to using MMS as a regular part of your mobile strategy, the first of which is cost versus gain ratio. The cost of MMS is prohibitive to using it for all your database of consumers, with traditional MMS messages costing between 8p and 35p depending on volume and length of message.

A traditional MMS message is 300k in size, this is a standard size to ensure compatibility with most mobile devices.

Other challenges you will face when it comes to adding MMS as part of your mobile channel strategy are;

Content Adaption and Handset configuration both these challenges relate purely to the types of devices out there and the fact that not every device will be catered for when you create your content or configure your phone settings.

Travel Agents in particular have used MMS messaging to great advantage in the past, with some holiday packages to more expensive destinations coming with an MMS message to your phone on booking the holiday showing your room, the hotel you would be staying in and nearby landmarks like the beach for instance. The message took on the effect of a simple slideshow of MMS messages and you can imagine how good this would be from a customer perspective, to be able to recieve an MMS showing you what your room will look like etc…

Due in part to the challenges associated with it and in part to cost of build and deployment, most companies no longer favour MMS as a bulk or mass market communication method, rather it has become a rare and exclusive medium with the vast majority of customers prefering WAP push or Mobile Applications as the cheaper alternative and the  way forward.

If you find that the challenges associated with MMS marketing are prohibitive to your strategy, then dont worry, use a mobile landing page to interact with your consumers instead, make the SMS message content relevant and interesting and add the url in for your page and encourage consumers to click on the link, then you can ask them to perform the call to action you want them to do on your landing page.

In the example below, you can see how a simple text message (1) containing a link to a mobile site or landing page (2) can be ultra effective at giving a positive visual and user friendly experience to the recipient.

The message flow is fully trackeable and you can provide full user statistics on call to action / response rates, sign up rates, click through from the intial message rates and added to the delivery reports for the first message you will be able to show how succesfully the campaign has been almost in realtime.

Mobile Supplements

SMS Marketing

SMS Marketing, and the process of communicating and exchanging information and value with our customers, is changing the way that marketers manage relationships with consumers. Used effectively, it can help you to generate brand awareness, convert prospects to customers, maintain customer relationships and allow you to take your customer care to a new level.

Each text you send is immiediate, with 96% of text messages read within 90 seconds of landing on the handset.

Its personal, with you all the time and generally speaking its always on and it carries with it a built in payment system, extremely accurate user statistics and is available at the point of creative or copy development.

When you start to think about your companies mobile strategy, you may want to use this formula below;

UA + CCO + CC = SMS

The formula contains the three things you will need for a succesful strategy for your mobile campaign.

“understanding audience + confirming company objectives + corporate commitment = Succesful Mobile Strategy!”

If you know who your audience is then you know what they purchase, what services they like, which they dont, what drives them to interact or buy from you etc… you will also know what catergories they fit into which type of customers buy what type of products and why. Make a list of the different type of customers you have, keep it short (no more than 5 types) here is an example:

Segment your customer base, try and put each one of your customers into a particular user profiles, like the ones below;

The Careerist –                    24 – 40 years old  / Has bill paid for by the company?

Early Adopters –                 They want everything first, before their peers get it

Young & Hungry –                15 -29 years old / Want the latest gadgets and are always texting

Over 40s –                             Generally happy with a phone that allows basic texting and calls

In Touch Organizers –          Like to keep connected / 30 – 64 yrs old / Have busy professional and Social Lives and like to organize their family and friends

Only by doing this deep analysis of your customer demographic will you give yourself a better chance of fulfilling their needs and having success with your mobile marketing program(s).

Now lets look at confirming your companies objectives and getting sight of what they actually want to achieve from this marketing channel.  To do this you need to answer the following three questions;

1. Who is my audience?

2. What value do I deliver to my audience?

3. What objectives am I trying to achieve with my marketing and how will I know when I achieve them?

Finally you need to gain corporate commitment decide what your corporate objectives are, consider available resources (Internal / External) and consider the affects on the rest of your business only when you have done this can you gain corporate commitment for your mobile programme.

Once you have gone this far into establishing your mobile marketing programme, you can now start concentrating on the Five Key Elements to any Mobile Campaign, these are below:

  1. Customer Knowledge
  2. Appealing Value Proposition
  3. Development of Creative / Assets
  4. Promotion Strategy
  5. Reporting & Evaluations

The next step is to create something your customers/ prospects will like, something that gets your message across in a simple, easy to understand way, without complicating the process from a technology perspective.

When starting, start simply.  Pick a simple program, one with the broadest reach and ease of use for all concerned; moreover, first focus on accomplishing just one of your objectives; don’t try to do everything at once.

Thanks

themobileexpert

Mobile Supplements

Premium Text Messaging

Premium text messaging or (PSMS) is widely used throughout the mobile industry. It has gained a very bad name in the last 5 years because of people misusing the medium to bill consumers in an unscrupulous  and often illegal manner.

However, without PSMS services, you couldnt give to your favourite charity as easy, nor could you vote for the act of your choice on xfactor or get those goal alerts when your team scores a goal.

When used correctly Premium texts can be very effective at bringing the consumer to content they want, whilst providing the owner of the content with a strong revenue stream.

On a typical £1.5o short code you would make around 90p in revenue, after the network charges and your mobile partners charges are taken off, although this depends on volume of messaging too.

There are a number of legitimate legal and process driven challenges to overcome when setting up a premium service and more information on this can be found at the payphoneplus website here http://www.phonepayplus.org.uk/For-Business/Setting-up-a-premium-rate-service.aspx

Depending on the type of service you want to operate, you may need permission from PPP to do so and there may be more processes you need to complete and guidelines to follow too.

However, generally there are 6 basic steps to starting your premium text messaging service and these are listed below;

  • Find a suitable mobile provider ( Mobile Aggregator or Agency)
  • Achieve setup of a premium rate shortcode and get your outpayment details
  • Find out if you need to register the service and if so, register with PPP.
  • Let your mobile provider know when you have signed up the service with PPP
  • Get your mobile provider to switch your number or code live
  • Advertise it!!

There may be problems along the way, but a good mobile aggregator will tell you how to circum-navigate these and where neccessary they will solve them for you.

Most mobile aggregators will charge between 2% and 6% revenue share on each billed message and will not charge for the actual message send. So you would pay 2% to 6% of your 90p (on a £1.50 short code) to the mobile aggregator who is sending the messages. There may also be a small set up charge for creating the service in the first instance, but shouldnt be a large monthly maintenance fee (£50 to £75 is the norm for a basic campaign with low volumes)

Try and avoid subscription campaigns unless you have a very loyal client or customer or fan base.

Remember always offer people the opportunity to Opt Out of recieving your messages, if you dont, your service wont be active long.  Try and add a stop message into the premium rate message copy you send out, but if you cant, then you need to send a Free2Recieve information message as often as you send the billing message out i.e (one billable message a month = one Free2Recieve opt out message per month) advising people how to stop your messages and not be billed again by you.

Always give value in your content or you will lose customers as soon as you get them.

If you run a competition or a Quiz, make the difficulty of them as general as possible or you will lose a wide proportion of people who dont know the answers so dont play.

Above all, make sure you have Ts and Cs available for the consumer, make sure you clearly tell them what they are going to be billed for and if you send one message per month, dont be tempted to send two or three.. because people will switch off and opt out if they believe your using them as a money train.

Thanks

themobileexpert

Mobile Supplements

Mobile Vouchers

Whilst Smartphone Applications continue to hog the headlines in the mobile consumer space, over 60% of respondents in a recent industry survey said they would be happy to interact with retailers via text.

One large Mobile Operator has taken this a step further, launching SMS vouchers and messages via text to its “opted in “consumers. Using GEO – LOCATION and time based targeting, the messages & vouchers “hit” the consumers mobile as they walk past or into certain high street stores.

Are we seeing the beginning of retailers embracing mobile marketing to conduct two way communications with customers on the move?

Are we seeing plain old text messaging playing an important part in delivering this two way communication?

The answer is YES….

In a recent study by this is money.co.uk website, statistics show that people spend an average of two hours pricing up large household and lifestyle items before buying…and the average adult in Britain uses five vouchers every month to save money on food, meals out and day trips – equaling 239m vouchers used a year, or 8m a day!

The study by promo-codes found that most people believe vouchers and discount codes are more socially acceptable and ‘cooler’ than they were 20 years ago.

Customers are 71% more likely to shop with you if they receive money off coupons first. Traditional methods of doing this, (sending paper vouchers out in the post, downloading from the internet etc) involve links in your chosen message formats and this can lead to traceability issues and lack of understanding of who even opened your communication.
Mobile is totally traceable, from initial send through consumer click through action to a sales end point and it’s immediate!!

More than just a customer driver, it’s a loyalty programme, an interactive catalogue, a coupon or voucher dispenser and a payment device all rolled into one.

As retailers start to realize that the mobile channel is a great way to drive consumers through their “bricks and mortar” stores what will you do this Christmas to increase your bottom line?

Thanks

themobileexpert