The beauty of SMS marketing
Published March 18th, 2006 in GeneralThe real selling point of SMS marketing for me is timing. You can deliver your organisation’s message at a precise moment which can enable you to connect with your target consumer and improve the purchase decision at the same time. It’s a great tool for professions like doctors and dentists to remind their patients about appointments, but it has much more potential than that.
For example, in the current season of the Apprentice, contestants have been set a challenge to promote Gillette Fusion, a new razor with five blades in one head, through SMS marketing. After thinking about it for a minute, the first idea that popped into my head would be to send men a SMS message at five to nine in the morning to check if they remembered to shave this morning. I’m guessing that a lot of guys would automatically rub their chin.
Sending that message at night wouldn’t be as effective because it doesn’t fit into men’s natural behaviour when shaving. Then again though, sending that text to women might work at that time if the SMS message checked whether kissing their partner felt like sandpaper.
The only SMS marketing I’ve noticed in Ireland so far is a message from Diageo on a Friday night and the day before Paddy’s day reminding me to drink responsibly. It’ll be interesting to see what innovative campaigns consumer brands can come up with when SMS marketing takes off in Ireland.
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I now refuse to give my mobile phone number to restaurants and hotels following unwanted text messages that I didn’t sign up for. I have already reported two organisations to the Data Protection Commissioner and will continue to do it. I think it’s fine if you explicitly sign up (but for the life of me I simply can’t understand why anyone would)…but any organisation that spams me in the future will be outed in public next time.
Interesting contrasting discussion going on over at the back seat drivers backseatdrivers.blogspot.com
I’d want fairly strong incentives to give out enough personal details for them to build up the required demographics. Mass SMS’ing phone numbers along will just annoy people - to be effective the campaign would need at least to break down men and women.
For me, the holy grail of SMS marketing is consent and disclosure. I consent to certain SMSes from you if you disclose exactly what and when you’ll be sending them. Email is bad enough, but you check your email and defined or chosen moments - the mobile phone is just so intrusive as it’s always with you and SMS is a push technology.
Piaras,
SMSs don’t always get delivered immediately. If the network is very busy, for example, they get delayed. Also, some people - me included - occasionally switch off their mobile phones. So the timing thing is not dependable.
That being said, while I realise you’re a PR man and looking at things from the other side of the gate, so as to speak, as a consumer, there is *nothing* beautiful about SMS marketing. It is an ugly invasion of space.
I do not think that I am alone in this view. It’s a way to antagonise potential customers as well as a way to ram marketing material down their throats.
There are good applications of SMS marketing and I’ve been at the receiving end of them. For example, my gym texted me when my annual subscription was about to expire. I wouldn’t mind if I got something similar from a dentist, doctor or government body reminding me about an important date.
Like Ed said though, it all hinges on consent and disclosure, if they start to send you random stuff then it quickly becomes spam, something which my gym ended up doing.
hehe … the temptation is just too large for businesses … and poor marketers let it get the better of them and end up with no database, or a database of disgruntled customers.
I think you’re wrong about their being any positive applications for SMS ‘marketing’, more often referred to as SMS spamming. The example you cited is actually a service (as when a GP’s office call a patient to remind them of an appointment), rather than an advert per say. Now there’s a whole discussion to be had on the boundary between service and marketing, but where the advert does not contain an implicit service to the receiver - above and beyond the offer of a potentially useful service - it is likely to be met with agitation.
Even in your gym example the text is only a service if you were inclined to resign up, if you were intentionally letting membership lapse, then its unsolicited marketing; which is why opt-in (specifically, not just tick the box, collect the number at the door number collection) is essential.
I agree that there are negative impacts of SMS Marketing if done wrongly, it is a very intrusive medium, but that is the reason when perfectly targetted and relavant that it continues to receive a higher response rate than other advertising.