SMS marketing is catching up with marketers and small and medium business owners. But before you start on a campaign it is important to know the language of Mobile marketing. Let me start with something simple. ‘Single Opt-in’ is a term used mobile marketing parlance that refers to a mobile subscriber who has agreed to receive your marketing promotion sms. Marketers who adopt an opt-in program are more likely to see success than a random sms campaign. Very close to single opt-in is double opt-in where the marketer asks a subscriber to opt-in twice before starting any sms campaign. This is a sure-shot way to ensure that subscribers are not unhappy with your sms campaign and in fact they have shown their interest to receive information about your product. Confirmed Opt-in refers to a process of verifying a subscriber’s intention to subscribe to the sms campaign and give the marketer an explicit agreement from the subscriber.
You should also be aware of the ‘level of permission’ that a subscriber has given for receiving marketing content. A little more than what has been agreed might put-off the subscriber killing your marketing objective. A short code is the most important part of a campaign. It is a short 4 to 6 digit code used by marketers to receive responses from subscribers. You must have seen an sms message which says “send in your replies to 7755 and win great prizes”. This 7755 is the short code. A dedicated short code is a number that is running for a single service at a time. Say ‘7777’ is only used by a Reality show for getting viewer ‘votes’. The Response Capability of the subscriber refers to the user’s capability to respond to an sms message based on the functionality of the device.
Let us understand some more terminology which will make us more familiar with mobile marketing. Mobile content refers to news, sports information or entertainment content which is not hard marketing. It can be a prelude to your marketing efforts. Premium content on the other hand is fee a based service for which the subscriber has to pay a certain amount of money. It is a revenue generating source for marketers. Now, without loading you further with sms marketing jargons I will share few tips that you need to know before starting an sms marketing campaign.
Starting a mobile campaign requires approval. It is important to ensure that all services that you want to package in the campaign is in the approval document. It is ideal to cover as many services you can think of in the approval. Get the prospect data from your CRM system and ask your marketer to integrate it with the marketing interface. Last but not least have your customer support in place and launch the campaign with confidence.