SMS Integration

Best Practices in email marketing

sms integration

WhitePaPer DECEMBER 2011

© Mailigen Ltd. All rights reserved 12/2011. Mailigen Email Marketing Solutions

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© Mailigen Ltd. all rights reserved 12/2011. Mailigen email Marketing Solutions Phone: (+1) 718 303 1864

The way we interact and share information is changing rapidly, with mobile technology leading the way. So, the way we market must also change rapidly with more tools for reaching a mobile audience. It’s no secret traditional advertising has been undergoing a shift from offline and mobile advertising is quickly becoming the most effective way to reach target audiences anytime and anywhere. Consequently, the provision of information to mobile devices is one of the most effec-tive marketing methods currently available.

The rise of mobile marketing means savvy marketers need to be more effective than ever at integrating their marketing tools. Smartphone market penetration is estimated to be just under 30% today, but SMS can reach both smart and stan-dard mobile phones. This makes it one of the most effective mobile marketing tools available today. Additionally, SMS marketing allows companies to reach all consumers at a very low cost. Software company STRATA, a company engaged in media buying and selling, polled marketing agencies about their customers preferences for the first quarter of 2011. 25% of agencies polled said they are working with clients who are asking for SMS capabilities and advertising creative. That’s up from 15% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

With mobile adoption on a rapid rise, nearly every mobile phone user in the U.S. is capable of sending and receiving text messages and SMS has become increasingly important in developing countries where the number of feature phones far outnumber smartphones. In September 2010 eMarketer forecast SMS would be the biggest single mobile advertising format in the most immediate future, with a 38% share of mobile advertising spend in 2011. Will 2012 be the time when SMS saturation reaches your target market?

Building SMS into your integrated marketing campaigns requires several considerations: Location based marketing, Mo-bile marketing, Social, CRM and Email marketing. A common misperception of proponents of each of these tools is as they grow, they replace the other. Not true. These tools work beautifully together to deliver vibrant campaigns and en-gage customers.

Will 2012 Be the time When sms saturation reaches your target market?

in september 2010 emarketer forecast sms would be the biggest single mobile advertising format in the most immediate future

http://www.mailigen.com/?utm_source=howto&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=ListManagement


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smsAccording to Deloitte, SMS text messaging remains the num-ber one use of mobile devices and in a study by Prosper Mo-bile Insights on smartphone usage, they found:

• 27.6% text more often than call;

• 44% say smartphones make communica-tions more impersonal;

• 46.8% use smartphones to receive text mes-sages with offers;

• 42.2% use their smartphones as a coupon;

• 31% want to receive text message coupons on their smartphones;

• 67% find location based coupons on smart-phones useful.

Couple this with data from Microsoft Tag stating over 1 bil-lion of the world’s more than 4 billion mobile phones are now smartphones and 3 billion phones are SMS enabled. As con-sumers increasingly use their smartphones your brand must become more fluent in the use of SMS to reach segmented target audiences. Integrating your mobile advertising and working with more marketing media types will provide the most timely delivery of your call to action, inspiring the con-version you desire.

Dunkin Donuts created a mobile interactive ad campaign in Italy, resulting in a 9% increase in sales in the first three weeks of the campaign. Using SMS marketing, customers received coupons for Dunkin Donuts by responding to ad-vertisements displayed throughout the country. By sending a short message to the published numbers, users received an immediate reply with a coupon.

sms + location BaseD marketing

The number of location based mobile marketing cam-paigns being created has doubled since 2010 because location marketing tools are an easy way to step into mobile advertising. Typically location based marketing tools have low cost to entry and a potential for high ROI. Combining SMS with location based marketing can help you quickly build an email and SMS list of customers and extend the reach of your business. Often integrating location based marketing tools with SMS can help you generate new sales and profit levels.

SMS campaigns featuring easily redeemable coupons or store location information with a click-to-call option are practical and extremely effective. Use them to grow the list of mobile subscribers, maintain engagement, or drive foot traffic and revenue at store locations.

sms + social marketing

The Deloitte study also found 90% of smartphone users send one or more text messages per day. Compare that to only 40% of smartphone users that use the biggest social media networks like Twitter and Facebook one or more times per day. If you are waiting to start integrat-ing your marketing platforms, the time is now. Develop-ing your integrated marketing strategy should include integrating platforms and using social media along with SMS to connect with your customers. When comparing to email, social media or direct mail lists, text messaging provides the immediate open and read rates that are cru-cial to successful a marketing campaign.

During 2012 smartphone use will continue to climb. Even with social network adoption communicating through SMS text messaging remains the number one way to communicate due to the ease and immediate nature of sending and receiving messages. One way to integrate the two platforms is to promote your mobile marketing campaign on social media sites to collect more opt-in subscribers. Then, since your customers are already en-gaging with you on these platforms, move them to a SMS list. This will facilitate communication with them in mul-tiple ways, ensuring they see your messages and have a greater chance of responding to your call to action.


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moBile commerceMobile Commerce, or mCommerce, is the ability to conduct commerce using a mobile device, such as a mobile phone, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), a smartphone, or other emerging mobile equipment. According to comScore, 38% of smart-phone owners used their phone to make a purchase at least once this year.

While purchasing through mobile is relatively new, the personal nature and timeliness of SMS makes it a great tool for making purchasing recommendations and sharing purchase information. Consumers will likely open a text message with product information from someone in their personal network. Knowing this, retailers should integrate SMS with their mobile com-merce sites enabling consumers to share, sign up for mobile loyalty programs or remind users of abandoned shopping carts.

Brands such as Gilt Groupe, Amazon, Best Buy and Target are already embracing this integration by encouraging custom-ers to share purchase information through their integrated SMS feature within their mobile commerce solution. With Gilt Groupe, shoppers can click to recommend a product and share the information through social media, SMS or email.

SMS can also integrate with mCommerce to share pre and post purchasing links to a product and drive traffic to mCommerce sites since the link can be texted back to the consumer by the retailer. Using this type of integration, SMS can be a tool for signing up for loyalty programs, opting into alerts or pinging the customer who didn’t complete their order.

38% of smartphone owners used their phone to make a purchase at least once this year


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sms + crm + emailWith businesses of all shapes and sizes using SMS to grab customers or audiences, not many know how to integrate SMS as part of a concerted marketing or CRM strategy to grow their business and generate ROI. With the right partner, integrating CRM and SMS allows you to send SMS to leads, contacts and accounts either manually or through identified workflow. Some great integrations with CRM trigger SMS reminders for appointments, events, sales prospecting, voting, polling, surveys and registration.

Many CRM systems are not built with SMS in mind as they tie the system to a landline rather than preference to mobile devices. Therefore it’s important for you to give your customers a valuable reason to give you their mobile number. A great example of well executed CRM and SMS integration is airline use of SMS to update customers with flight numbers, gate changes and checkin/boarding reminders. With SMS marketing, it is important to build a list of your own customers while using sign up tools and keyword management to cast a wide net and capture potential customers who will use it to visit your business for the first time. In response to the rapid growth of mobile marketing we created our branded version of opt-in SMS integrated with email marketing. Leveraging the best technology solutions, our SMS allows customers and prospects to subscribe to email marketing lists via text message.

Treat your SMS lists just like you would email marketing lists. The more you know about your email subscribers and what they are interested in the better you will be able to send content appealing to their interests. Use SMS subscriber segmenta-tion tools to segment new subscribers or allow subscribers to self segment. Segmentation offers you the ability to find out who your subscribers are and what they are interested in, offering greater personalization to your messages. If you have your email and SMS solutions integrated, you can use previous email campaign data to create segmented lists. Take a look at how often your subscribers want to hear from you, what type of information they care about and how they like to receive content (HTML, SMS, etc.). Once you gather the data, you will be able to customize your messages and frequency to the subscriber’s interests and behaviors.


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Summary

For businesses thinking of starting their first SMS marketing campaign, integration with other marketing platforms has never been easier. If you are a small business having a hard time reaching your customer base with traditional marketing methods, SMS may help bridge the gap. SMS text messaging is known as one of the few marketing channels where you are almost guaranteed your customers will read your offer. When you send an offer, it is opened and read no matter where your customers are. As the popularity of SMS grows along side other mobile channels, communicating through SMS with those who do not respond to email or have a smartphone is a great way to reach a wider audience. Will 2012 be the time when you invest in SMS to reach your target market?

aBout us

Mailigen is an emerging leader in email marketing. As one of Europe’s leading providers of web-based email marketing software, the platform works for any size business, organization and indi-vidual looking to enhance their marketing programs. Mailigen’s mission is to make email market-ing as easy to use and cost effective as possible. Mailigen provides intuitive and very easy to use email marketing service to all sizes of businesses with a cost-effective web-based solution. The solu-tions provided by Mailigen are sophisticated and similar to features that typically cost much more. For more information, please see www.mailigen.com

sms + google analyticsClick through rates are an effective measure of SMS campaign success. The volume of clicks you get is an indicator of how valuable your message was to the list of subscribers. If you are using SMS to market, then you should integrate this effort with Google Analytics so you know how your campaigns are performing. With SMS tracking you’re able to learn more about the subscribers to your texting campaigns. You can view and segment which subscribers did or didn’t click on your links and then provide more relevant follow-up text messages.

Because you’re driving the subscribers to a mobile site, you can track even more data about their behavior. Click tracking al-lows you to further segment your subscriber lists because you gain insight to the click habits of your audience. Then you can send content best suited to each person. Integrating SMS and Google Analytics for site tracking allows you to gain more infor-mation about which devices your subscribers are using to ac-cess content so you can optimize the appearance of your offers. Use this data to follow user behavior from the text message to purchase and measure the campaign ROI. Use funnel tracking to improve your conversion process.



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SMS Integration