Click the icon to download the FREE Excel Campaign Calculator

What response rate will you get from your Marketing Campaign?

I’m often asked about the relative differences between different marketing communication channels and which one might provide the best return.

Of course, there are many factors that have an effect on the success or failure of any campaign (list, creative, offer, etc.) but there are some well-respected organisations that conduct research on these things and publish ‘industry averages’.

To help you gauge a likely cost and return and compare the differences between SMS, Email, Telemarketing, Fax Marketing and Direct Mail I have built an Excel tool which gives you you the ability to change the parameters of the campaign and see the likely cost and return implications.

A quick video demo’ of how easily it works;

STEP 1

First, you enter how many people you’re going to contact, what is the cost per hour of your staff/agency running the campaign and the likely revenue you’d expect to earn from each response (averaged across all responses).

STEP 2

The areas in green use industry standard figures for costs and response rates across the channels but you can amend these should you have more relevant figures for your industry sector. In particular, if you had a large direct mail campaign, you might want to up the printing costs.

STEP 3

The results are then calculated in the red area (do not change these cells). You will see the estimated total costs & revenue for the campaign and then the likely net revenue received by you.

I hope this will provide some ‘science’ behind making decisions on what type of marketing channel has the most likely chance of success for you.

FREE DOWNLOAD

The Excel Marketing Campaign Calculator is free to download (it’s in 97-2003 format so should work for most people).

What’s “Marketing”!?

Probably one of the most misused terms in business is my first reaction! But, seriously, for the purposes of this article I mainly mean ‘communication’. Business people often say things like, “we need to DO some marketing”. What they mean is they want to blast out something which will get new business. That’s better described as ‘advertising’ really.

In any event. Semantics aside. What we want to look at is SMS Marketing vs Email Marketing. Or, put more succinctly, which of these communication methods is best for your business?

Truth 1: Customers are fickle

No, really. One minute they like your emails, then they subscribe to your twitter feed, then they want a call. The next week, they’re not into email or twitter because they’ve gone off the idea!

OK, this is possibly a person with an extremely short attention span but the point it is true. Any list of people is exactly that, a list of ‘people’. It’s obvious but it’s something that’s often overlooked. Companies segment people into groups to make their communications more relevant and (hopefully) more effective. That’s no bad thing, it’s the right thing to do (in fact, I wrote an article about database segmentation in 2009).
BUT (and here’s the first nugget of the truth) … ‘Customers ARE fickle‘.

Truth 2: Emails & SMS’s are very different in your customers’ eyes

We’re back into ‘human emotion’ here (starting to feel like a psychology article!). This point is important though. I only look at my emails when I choose to. I open up Outlook, hit send and receive and browse the messages I want to. If I get a text message, maybe when I’m out biking, my phone beeps and vibrates in my pocket and I’ll pull over, take off my gloves, get my phone out of my pocket and read the text.

One is passive and one is active. My phone is fundamentally a personal device of mine. If you’re going to send a message to my phone, it had better be relevant. The lesson here is, “does the message I’m going to send out fit with the channel I’m using from my customer’s point of view?”.

Truth 3: SMS’s are opened more than emails

Well, yes, of course. Stat’s vary wildly on email open rates but globally it is said that just 22% of all emails sent are opened vs 98.7% of all text messages.

Truth 4: EVERYBODY HATES SPAM!

(Forgive the shouting) … If there is a person out there that likes SPAM, I apologise. But I don’t think many people will fall into this category!?

The Mobile Marketing Association in 2009 did a study. They found that 90% of all emails received were SPAM! Wow. What about SMS? That was just 1% of messages received.

Because of the incredibly strict laws and controls now in place in SMS Marketing, there is basically next to no SMS SPAM.

I hope you’re thinking what I’m thinking!? ….. The lesson here is the same as in Truth 2 …. “if you’re gonna send a message to my phone, it had better be relevant …. and I had better not think it’s SPAM!” (I hope you weren’t thinking, “cool, plenty of room for spamming then!”)

So, come one then. Which one is best!?

Hold your horses. We haven’t got to the best bit yet.

Let’s roll all these ‘truths’ into a perfectly executed example of ‘marketing communication’

• I buy my groceries online at Sainsburys. Usually it’s a few days ahead of when it’s due to be delivered. After I have gone through the checkout they email me with a receipt of my purchase and confirmation of delivery times. Fair enough, it’s usually quite a bit of shopping and that list wouldn’t fit in an SMS. Furthermore, I actually look for the email to make sure the order went through fine.
• Sainsburys allow you to amend your order up to 9pm the night before delivery day. At 5pm I get a text. “Just to confirm your shopping will be delivered between 3-5pm tomorrow. Don’t forget you can amend your order online up until 9pm this evening”.
• Actually I did need a few other things. Off I go to give them some more of my hard earned.

Spot on Sainsburys.

You emailed me when it was relevant, after the order and because it contained a lot of information.

You texted me when it was relevant because it was a short message to confirm my delivery (sometimes I forget!) and contained a timely piece of information about amending my order by 9pm if I wanted to (I probably would have missed the email).

So, is there a conclusion anywhere in the offing!?

The ‘truth‘ is that SMS is ‘best‘ AND Email is ‘best‘ (collective groan!). What can that possibly mean?

Do I not understand you can only have one ‘best‘!?

Well, each is ‘best‘ when it is most relevant to the communication in question:

• I’m happy to get a monthly email newsletter from my local restaurant but I’d need a text if they had a special deal on tonight
• I’m happy to get my train tickets in the post but I’d need a text to confirm an order code if I’m travelling in 2 hours time
• Email me confirmation of my entire order but please send a text if anything’s urgent about my delivery
• …. and so on

As with a lot of things the answer is then, “it depends”. An SMS will hit the phone instantly. It is almost guaranteed it will be read. Just make sure it’s relevant. An email is going to be an altogether more hit or miss affair (with only around 22% getting read).

When deciding which to use, I always ask myself, “would I like to receive this on my phone”, “is the time of the day relevant” and “does it come across ‘spammy’ at all”.

If you want to find out if you’re customers are happy to receive text alerts, try a bit of Customer Research by SMS first.

It’s very easy to add contacts to your address book and it means that as the email responses come in from people, their name will be displayed in the conversation history as well as their mobile number.

Here’s how it works;

Step1. We send out a text campaign to 2 of the contacts in our address book to confirm if they will be coming to the meeting tomorrow.
(Note: You do not have to use the Send to Address Book screen for this feature to work but your contacts’ names and numbers must be in the Address Book for their names to appear on email replies. Otherwise, only their mobile number will be displayed.)

Step2. We can see that both Henry and Anne have replied. Their name is shown in the inbox as well as the conversation history in the email message itself.

Step3. Henry has said he can’t make it and asked for information on the next meeting. We can simply reply to the email and that will go back as a text message to his phone. If he replies again, the full conversation history will be shown on subsequent emails.

Related information:

• The txtUs Virtual Mobile Number system
• How to use the Address Book function in your system
• Reducing costs and increasing enquiries with txtUs

The Address Book feature in Text Marketer accounts – Video Instructions.

Uploading Contacts to your Address Book

Go to GROUPS | MANAGE ADDRESS BOOK

The Manage Address Book screen

You’ll see 2 ways of uploading contacts. You can add them 1 by 1 under the title ‘Add’ and then clicking the + button or you can ‘Add Many’ by copy and pasting in a CSV formatted file of your contacts.

Copy and paste the CSV information into the Add Many box and press the + button to upload

You will now see there are 3 contacts in your Address Book by clicking Show All

Formatting of the CSV

CSV (comma separated values) is the most industry standard of file types for data. We do not know of a piece of software that cannot export contacts as a CSV file.

Very simply, your CSV file must be formatted with the fields in the same order as they are shown on the Manage Address Book screen.

Here’s an example of a CSV file with 3 contact records in. You would copy and paste only the records (last 3 lines), not the column headers;

Mobile,First,Surname,Company,Email,Free Text
44777123456,Rich,Smith,XYZ Ltd,test@test.com,nothing here for now
44777123457,Jon,Smythe,XYZ Ltd,test@test.com,nothing here for now
44777123458,George,Jones,XYZ Ltd,test@test.com,nothing here for now

If you’re unsure about this, try copy and pasting the last 3 lines of the above into the Add Many box and press the + button. You’ll see 3 new contacts added (which you can delete at your leisure).

If you are unsure how to export contacts from your software as a CSV file then ask your IT department or developer of your software – it will be a 2 minute job for them.

Searching/Viewing/Editing Contacts

Go to GROUPS | MANAGE ADDRESS BOOK

Once you have some contacts in your Address Book, you may wish to view, edit or delete them. From the Manage Address Book screen you can click ‘Show All’ to list all your contacts or use the search field to find specific contacts. You will then be given options to edit or delete them.  Make sure to hit the submit button after any changes to save those changes.

Sending a message to contact/s in your Address Book

Go to SEND SMS | SEND TO ADDRESS BOOK

Simply select the contacts you wish to send to and complete the SMS Campaign information in the normal way

Although this screen has all the same functionality of the other send screens, the majority of space has been dedicated to selecting contacts from your address book.

Simply tick the box/es next to the contacts you wish to send to and then set up the campaign in the normal way.
There is a handy select all/deselect all link at the top of list. This is great if you want to send to almost everybody in your Address Book apart from a few. Simply click select all and then manually untick the few you do not want to send to.

Scan this with your phone's QR Code reader and watch it magically form a text message to our 88802 number starting with the INFO keyword.

QR Codes are a great way to get response from your mobile marketing adverts and even from web sites.

Although they are mostly used to embed to web/mobile site link, did you know they can also preformat an SMS or an Email message, send Geo information and much more.

For example, if you’re using a keyword on our shortcode service, you could create a QR Code that preformats a text message with the number and your keyword – try our example.

QR Codes are free to generate. Simply go to BeQRious’s QR Code generation page, choose what sort of action you want the code to do, enter the details and download the code, all free of charge.

Price was always going to be a major factor in the decision making process as budgets are squeezed ever tighter. The quality of the sms service itself was also a crucial consideration and several sms service providers were trialed during the tender process.

Text Marketer’s platform got the seal of approval for being the easiest sms service to use. From the moment the user logs in, the simple menu structure makes sending bulk sms campaigns delightfully straightforward. SMS campaigns of any size can be sent from just one screen in just a few seconds and the full delivery reporting tools allow users to track their campaigns right to the users’ mobile phones.

Text Marketer’s sms service has evolved over 12 years to be one of the most widely used in the UK.

Find out how easy Text Marketer’s sms service is to use by setting up a free account. All accounts receive 10 free text credits, so you can test out the sms service before spending any money. Text Marketer’s costs are also very low. and you’ll find a handy price comparison table that shows you what many other bulk sms service providers are charging.

As well as providing great tools at low cost, Text Marketer’s experienced staff are always on hand to help you put your mobile marketing strategy together. Please feel free to call us on 0117 2050202.

We’ve built a system to get around this and it’s launched today.

You can now buy keywords on our shortocde or txtUs dedicated virtual mobile numbers and we can simply invoice you so you can pay by BACS in the normal way. Then, when a renewal is due, your system will automatically email you another invoice for the next period at which point you can either choose to cancel or pay that invoice to extend the term of the keyword or txtUs number.

IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE?

The main difference is that you can only choose renewal terms of 3, 6, 9 or 12 months using this system (you can pay month by month using our automated card subscriptions system). As you can appreciate, this has to be done to cover the additional administration cost of handling non-automated payments.

SETTING UP A KEYWORD

• Log in to your Text Marketer account.
• Go to INCOMING SMS | ADD A SHORT CODE KEYWORD
• Enter the keyword you want to check it is available
• Click PLACE ORDER BY INVOICE and complete the details for the invoice
• We’ll send you the first invoice for payment and once paid, your keyword will be set up

SMS Campaign Delivers 600% Return on Investment

Text Marketer works with a number of bike shops who use sms as a way of communicating with their customers. There is simply no more effective way of getting service reminders or sales offers to customers. Unlike email where you might expect around 30% of the messages to be read, with a bulk sms campaign, 98% of texts that land on mobiles are read and the vast majority within 5 minutes or so.

Response rates to sms marketing campaigns are also around 5 times higher than any other form of direct marketing. (Source – Mobile Marketing Association.)

Swinnerton Cycles in Stoke On Trent has recently use Text Marketer’s SMS software with remarkable effect. With the onset of Autumn, most cyclists start to think about gearing their bikes up for winter to make sure they’re as safe as possible. With this in mind Swinnerton Cycles sent out a bulk sms campaign to its customer base with a simple, low cost gear and brakes service offer.

“Winter Service Check – 1 Week Only – Starting 19/9/11, Brake & Gear Check only £20.00 Book now on 01782747782. Only 100 Spaces Available. Swinnerton Cycles”

It’s a simple offer that was surprisingly effective. Within a couple of days of the message going out, the workshop had booked 42 services, generating a minimum of £840. On top of this, customers will be spending considerable sums on accessories such as lights, batteries, jackets etc. So the total spend  figure will be significantly higher. The total cost of the text campaign was just £126 so for every pound spent on text messages, an absolute minimum spend of £6.66 was generated. (We’ll update these figures when we have the results from accessories sales.)

Try SMS marketing for free – Send 100 texts at no cost

Why not find out how sms marketing might work for your business and set up a free account? Use the code CYCLE in the promo code window and your account will come with 100 free text credits.

We’re always on hand to help if you need anything, so please call us on 0117 2050202, we’d love to hear from you.

How could you use SMS?

There are countless ways that you could use sms marketing to generate business, here are few examples.

• Great value service offers.
• New range of bikes now available
• Offers on clothing and accessories
• Ice warning alert for commuters
• Your bike is now ready to be picked up
• Workshop opening hours
• Event notifications

The survey questioned consumers about how they prefer businesses to communicate with them.

Goods-delivery services are improved by text messaging, with 97 per cent of participants saying that they prefer to buy goods from companies who text them with a time and date for their delivery.

The survey also found that 87 per cent prefer to deal with businesses who use SMS to remind them of details of their appointments, and 88 per cent of respondents said they would be more likely to attend an appointment if they received a reminder via text message.

Just under 50 per cent of participants said they would be willing to pay the standard text message charge for certain items, such as travel tickets, to receive updates.

This latest research shows the number has increased since February 2010, when it showed two thirds of Brit’s wanted texts from companies they dealt with.

Make it relevant and memorable

Make sure you choose a keyword that will make sense to the customer. You could choose your product, company or brand name. Or you might choose to go for a word describing your product like the TV ad here. Avoid trying to do something too clever, you’ll risk confusing people and the likelihood is that you’ll alienate your target market.

Keep it short

The longer your keyword, the more likely people are to text it in wrongly. If our text response service doesn’t recognise the keyword because it’s spelt incorrectly, then the sms response will not be allocated to your account and will be lost. We recommend keeping it to between 4 and 8 characters. The aim is to make it as easy and quick as possible to respond. Don’t make your customers work.

Let predictive text take the strain

Infuriating though it often is, most of us use predictive text. You can take advantiage of this feature to make it even easier for people to respond to your text response campaign. By choosing a predictive text word, your customers will save precious seconds and are less likely to make a typo.

Can I capture more information by asking my customers to text additional information?

Yes. The golden rule here is that as long as the keyword is at the start of the text and followed by a space, then the entire text is captured. Be careful though. The more information you ask for, the more likely it is that people will make texting errors or not bother because it’s too much like hard work. We’ve found that asking for an address for example is a step too far. Think of the hassle of toggling between letters and numbers to input a post code; fine for smart phone users (about 35%), but tedious to say the least for the rest of us.

Asking for an email address is often a great idea though. You’ll capture vital customer data at the point that they are most interested and you can also take advantage of our automated email responder. So a user texts in the keyword, followed by their email address and receives a full html email immediately by return. This additional service is free to all Text Marketer customers.

Set up an account

Setting up a text response service is a simple process and you can get the whole service up and running in just a few minutes. Stage one is to set up a free account. Once you’ve logged in, go to Incoming SMS – Set up a short Code Keyword.

We’re alway available to advise if you need help, so please feel free to call us on 0117 2050202.

Make sure that all your tables are getting a reserved sign.

This guide will show you is how to achieve a 1,351% return on investment in around 15 minutes – but crucially, sustain increased business for the long term.

Let’s put that into context with a couple of recent examples;

- Papa Johns pizza – 33% increase in sales
- Bistro Live – achieve a 1,694% return on investment

That really is the norm! It’s just that most restaurants are either not doing mobile marketing or doing it badly.

If you follow our simple How to do … guide for restaurants, we can almost guarantee you’ll achieve these success rates for a relatively tiny cost.

Step 1 – Your existing customers are like gold, treat them like it

Almost all restaurants have an existing database of mobile numbers. But, don’t just text them an offer because you want sales today! Their mobile phone is a personal device and you must ask their permission to ‘use it’ (this is not a legal requirement because they are existing customers, this is about respect and courtesy and ensuring your mobile marketing works in the long term).

So step 1 is to ask your customers if they are happy for you to send them infrequent offers or news. Usually it goes something like this, “Hi. As a previous diner at Garlucci’s, we’d like to keep you informed by text of any offers or special menus we’re doing. Don’t worry, we won’t bombard you! If you’d rather not then please text GARL to 88802 now or any time & we won’t text after that. Kindest regards.“

It’s simple, pleasant and to the point. It also leaves a little anticipation in the recipient’s mind, especially talking about ‘special menus we’re doing’, i.e. it’s not just the usual sales offers, this will be useful information.

We also say, ‘text now or any time’ for the stop code. This communicates to the recipient they don’t have to unsubscribe ‘right now’, they have the power to do it at any time. So, most will probably wait and see what the first few messages are like.

All Text Marketer accounts come with a free unsubscribe tool and system which acts as a stop list, so once someone texts your stop code to your system, you never send them another message. (You can read more on this here).

Step 2 – Ask the same permission from new customers & build your list

Now that you are a restaurant that does ‘mobile marketing’, you’ll want to add new customers to your list. Depending on the type of restaurant, this may be best achieved by simply asking them as they pay the bill whether they would ‘like to be included’ in hearing about special offers or menus by text. Then you can simply keep a note of these numbers and add to your list by uploading them every week or so.

Alternatively, you may prefer a more automated system which allows people to text in and join your list. This is easily achieved by getting a keyword on our shortcode number. Perhaps a keyword that is your restaurant name. Then people simply text this keyword to 88802 and automatically join your list. (You can read more on this here).

Step 3 – Your database is in place & cleaned of unsubscribers …. now, what do you send them?

Regular contact with your customer base will generate long term, sustained business.

The golden rule is to talk to your customers as if they were stood in front of you. This will of course vary depending on the type of restaurant you are and the clientele you have.

The second rule is ‘most people don’t like to be sold to’. All this means (especially in the first few messages to avoid high unsubscribe rates) is to give people information that they would find useful (we’ll look at a few examples in a moment). Again, this depends on your market but people will be interested if you have a new menu, if you have live music next week, if there are some new wines to try, etc. etc. Although discounting and vouchers have their place, there’s nothing that ‘sells’ better than giving someone some information they want to hear.

You will know your customers better than anybody and what to tell them but here are a few examples of types of messages that work really well:

• “Hi. We’ve sourced a new local supplier for our organic meats and will be trialling them this Thu & Fri. We still have some tables left if you would like to join us?”
• “Hi. It’s just been confirmed that Blue Juice will be playing live at our restaurant on saturday night – the best Blues band in town. We have 8 tables left from 7pm if you can join us?”
• “Hi. We’ve secured 200 bottles of this season’s freshest Beajoulais Noveau and it will be available from tonight. We anticipate it will have gone within the week! We hope you’ll consider dining with us before it does!?”
• “Hi. For the next couple of days we’ve got XYZ and ZYX on the specials and they include a free ABC. We hope you can join us and try one.”
• “Our new chef has created 4 completely new pizzas! We’ve all tried them here and unanimously agreed to trial them on the menu. Please call to find out more about them.”

Of course, the above will have to be tailored to your business but you can see the style.

Step 4 – Regularity of contact

How regularly should you send messages?

Happy diners make happy chefs which make happy owners.

This is very much bespoke to your customer base. If you’re a pizza takeaway restaurant (you might want to read our SMS Marketing for the Fast Food Industry article) it might be relevant to send weekly deals. If you’re an expensive Michelin starred restaurant, the frequency of visit would probably be much lower and only seasonal messages might be.

If it’s practical, it’s often best to give people an idea of how often you send messages when they join your list. Again, this avoids excessive unsubscribes if people believe they are going to be ‘bombarded’ with messages.

Costs and Return on Investment

Here’s the great part. If you follow these simple steps, there is no reason why you shouldn’t expect a 50% increase in overall business within a matter of months. Obviously you might be able to expect the same if you put a TV advert on in your local area – but! – that would probably put most restaurants out of business on cost alone!

Mobile Marketing is the most responsive and the most cost effective marketing medium available today. Full stop.

Let’s say you did all the recommendations in this How to do … guide for restaurants, it would cost (on a per 1000 basis);

• £37 per 1000 customers you contact (see our Bulk SMS Prices per message)
• £25 per month for the optional keyword for people to text to to join your list
• That’s it!

If you take a pessimistic average of a 5% response rate (often text campaigns achieve 20% or more) to a well-worded text message to a person that has verified they want to receive messages from you (as per steps 1 & 2 of this guide) then you’re looking at 50 bookings per 1,000 messages sent – which cost you £37 (plus a bit for the optional keyword) ….. so multiply your average profit per customer by 50 and see if it is more than £37!?
An average restaurant will make at least £10 profit per customer so that would be £500 profit from a £37 spend …. or  1,351% return on investment!

How to get going … How to achieve a 1,351% return on investment in around 15 minutes

Another great thing about Restaurant Mobile Marketing is that it’s very easy and inexpensive to trial. At Text Marketer we provide the lowest cost messages in the UK and our software for running all of your activity is free, automated and available online. You run the whole thing yourself.

There’s no software to install, it’s a simply a web-based system. As long as you have a computer connected to the internet and a web browser, you can do it!

How to achieve a 1,351% return on investment in around 15 minutes;

1. Get a Text Marketer account (use this link and we’ll give you 50 free credits on sign up so you can test it out) – 2 minutes
2. Watch the instructional video of how to use the system (visit the Help Centre for further FAQ’s) – 7 minutes
3. Buy as many credits as you need in your account and proceed to Step 1 above – roughly 6 minutes

Enjoy a huge increase in business, sustained, for the long term.

Optional additional links/reading:

• How to use the keyword system for people to join your list
• Consider using a txtUs longcode as a bespoke mobile number for your restaurant
• The Fast Food Industry & SMS
• SMS Marketing ‘Toppest’ Top Tips
• SMS Marketing Videos

From what I could gather, we were about the fourth or fifth business sms company that he’d called that morning, so he’d already got a good grasp of what was on offer in the industry.

“What makes Text Marketer different from other companies that I’ve spoken to?” he asked. Now all bulk sms providers are well versed in answering that one, so I gave the chap a brief run down, emphasising that we only use UK networks for message delivery, we have a fantastic system with some really innovative tools, our systems are robust and resilient etc. I was quite pleased with myself, thinking rather smugly that I’d done a pretty good job.

“Yes, but all those things you’ve just mentioned are available with all your competitors,” he replied.“As far as I can see, bulk sms seems to be a commodity and basically I should be buying this type of service on price.” A what? Commodity? We’ve spent years trying to create points of difference and it seems that from this prospect’s point of view, bulk sms companies were no different from gas or electricity suppliers. They’re more or less the same product but priced differently depending on who you speak too.

To be fair, he had a point. His application for bulk sms was very straightforward and he simply wanted a reliable service at the lowest possible price. So we chatted further about bulk sms volumes and discussed the best price that we could offer.

It’s clear that the way bulk sms services are perceived by buyers is changing. It’s becoming harder to talk about the benefits of using UK networks or having reliable systems as if this was somehow unique. If we’re honest, we are all offering a very similar service with similar levels of professionalism, reliability and support. Increasingly, customers will be referring back to the strongest differentiator of all. Price.

Creative Impact – Score - 7.5 / 10

Understated is how I’d describe this mobile marketing campaign. The offer didn’t exactly leap from the bottle nor did the prize itself thrill me to my core. A weekend tour of the Peak District in a Jaguar; sounds pleasant enough but not exactly what I’ve been yearning for my whole life. But I rather like this approach. Offer something rather modest that your target market might enjoy. A very sensible strategy. I was slightly confused about Alastair Cook’s involmement, not being a cricket fan. He didn’t seem to be mentioned at all, so I wondered what on earth he was doing.

Entry Instructions – Score 9/10

More or less full marks here. Clear concise instructions, with added weight and emphasis given to the ‘call to action’. Buxton Water have sensibly recognised that you don’t need to have the full terms and conditions on pack, cluttering and confusing. A simple refenerence to the website is perfectly adequate and doesn’t compromise on the space for the creative.

Easy of Entry – Score – 10/10

Bang on. No purchase necessary so no code required. Simply text Buxton to 60300.

What happened Next - Score 7/10

A few seconds after entering came the following sms alert…

“Thank you for registering in the Buxton Jaguar competition. We will text you back if you are one of the lucky winners.”

I felt this was a bit bland. They should perhaps have told me when the prize draw was taking place. It might also have been a good idea to ask me to do something else, visit the website or go buy some more of the product. It felt like that was it, interaction over, “goodbye random consumer”.

Terms and Conditions – Score 9.5/10

The Buxton legal department have managed to hold themselves back and not insisted that terms and conditions be listed in full in tiny font on the bottle itself.  You are simply referred to the web site which details all the legal stuff. How refreshing.

Overall Score – 43 / 50 – 86%

A modest, non-shouty mobile marketing campaign that is all the better for it. I’ll let you know if I win.

We have therefore built in an ‘auto billing’ option in your account that simply generates an invoice and sends it to your finance department when the credits hit a certain level in your account – decided by you.

Here’s how it works

You set a credits level at which an invoice is generated and set how many text credits should be invoiced. You specify a name and email address to send the invoice to.
As soon as your account hits the credit level you’ve set, an invoice is generated and emailed. Once that invoice is paid the credits are automatically added and the reoccurring invoice trigger is reset.

Example:
If you send 5000 messages per month and know your accounts department take a month to pay invoices, then we would suggest setting your trigger limit at about 6000 which gives your accounts a month to pay the invoice and little extra to ensure you don’t run out!

How to set it up in your account

Go to Financial | Reoccurring invoices and you’ll see the screen below;

Credit Trigger = the level of credits in your account at which you want an invoice to be triggered
Credits Required = the amount of credits to invoice for (the minimum is 1,000)
Purchase Order No. = if applicable but optional
Select Billing Contact = if you have a contact in your account you can choose one from here otherwise simply complete the details below of the person to receive the invoices.

Press submit.

You’ll see the system is now set up and you can also edit the settings at any time.

Once one invoice has been triggered and sent the system will not send any further invoices until that one has been paid – payment of an invoice ‘resets the trigger’.

This setting does not affect your credits alert warning which can be set much lower as a fail safe back up in case the invoice hasn’t been paid.

Invoices generated in this way must be paid by BACS to the details on the invoice. There is no facility to pay triggered invoices by credit card. Should you wish to pay by card, please simply select pay by card in the payment options.

Using texting to invite your customers to recommend a friend is a very powerful way to achieve sales growth as people have been used to forwarding text messages since the beginning of texting itself.

For example, you could send out a text a few days after a purchase saying something along the lines of, “Thanks for your order. We hope you’re a satisfied customer. If you are, please tell your friends about us and we’ll reward you both with £10 off your next purchase. Your referral code is XYZ123″. (You can use our txtUs reply system for getting return responses).

This types of schemes have to be tailored for the particular business you’re in of course but, esepcially in today’s socially connected world, it can very quickly produce stunning results.

Top 20 tips to getting your member get member scheme right first time.

Offers

1. Reward both parties not just the existing customer or the friend. Both need to see benefit in the offer to make it worth their while.

2. The reward to the friend must be as good (if not better) than other acquisition offers in the market. You can’t disadvantage a new customer because they were referred by a friend.

3. Test different offers for both the customer and friend. Often cash (or vouchers) is king but you can instil relevance by relating the reward to your product eg a free upgrade, free month’s subscription etc. Whatever you go for, keep it simple.

4. Placing a time limit on the offer aids tracking, although consider also having an ongoing lower reward ‘always on’ to capture any ad hoc referrals

Targeting

5. Test the best timing to target existing customers. Try to target them when they’re feeling most positive about your product for example when they’ve just made their first purchase.

6. Target your customers that came through the referral scheme themselves – it’s most likely they’ll be possible about the scheme as they’ve benefited from it

7. Include the existing customer’s name in the text message – this will help reduce the assumption it’s spam

Customer tools

8. Make it easy for customers to refer & provide them with the tools – offer a microsite where they can enter friends’ details, make sure they can do it via their phone, via social media, SMS etc

9. Ensure each customer has a unique code which can be used to link their friends’ registrations to their account. Make sure customers know this code so they can pass it out to friends and don’t have to rely on friends clicking through certain links.

10. In your MGM campaigns remind customers of the benefits of your product or service and why new customers benefit from buying from you. Not all customers will remember why they use you specifically!

11. Keep referring customers up to date about their friend’s progress. They can help to prompt the friend to ensure they complete their registration or achieve any sales criteria to gain the reward.

12. If possible, set up a microsite that provides this progress information to customers. Give them the tools to encourage their friend to overcome any barriers to conversion.

13. Remember you are not able to retain any data about the referred friend, unless you have their consent. Any follow ups should ask the customer to enter their friend’s email address again to avoid any data protection issues.

Tracking & High value

14. If possible track referrals not just conversions – that will allow you to identify key referring customers, even if not all their referrals convert in to customers.

15. Consider rewarding customers for referrals not just conversions.

16. Measure the quality of new customers being referred to you. This allows you to identify customers who are referring the highest value friends.

17. Consider giving high value referrers an additional reward to encourage more referrals of the highest quality

18. Test tying the friend’s reward into more than one purchase – this will encourage repeat purchase and minimise ‘hit and runs’.

Finally…

19. Take a look at Member Get Member schemes outside your own market to see what innovation is going on there and adapt the best ideas for your own customers.

20. Remember to constantly review & optimise your scheme. Don’t just leave it to run itself!

Created by Text Marketer Ltd – Bulk SMS Text Marketing

It makes sense. Text Message Marketing is the most powerful marketing channel available today. It has the highest ROI of any channel and provides instant success. Nothing comes even close.

Decision One

Do you want to manage your clients’ SMS activities or let them run their own campaigns?

We provide the ability to do both.

- If you want to manage your clients’ activities then you simply need a Text Marketer account. Every account has the ability to run multiple databases, multiple campaigns and multiple response keywords. Everything can be labelled so you have full tracking of what’s gone on for billing purposes. In this model, you would be buying higher volumes of SMS credits from us and thus achieving very low bulk SMS prices and can therefore mark these up to charge on to your client.

- If you simply want to introduce clients to our system so that they each have their own account and run their own activities then the reseller option is for you. In this model, you sign up for an account and go to Financials | Become a Partner in your account and get a Partner Code. Each of your clients uses your partner code when they sign up (there is a benefit to them of additional free credits for this) and then you receive 10% commission on all the spend in every account, for the life of the account. (See more about reselling SMS Marketing services here).

Decision Two

Why partner with Text Marketer? Some competitors offer slightly higher commission rates.

In 2 words. Price. Experience.

We offer the lowest prices of any UK premium SMS company. Of course, that means there is a little less margin to share around compared to our expensive competitors.

Here’s a scenario. You put the time and effort into selling text marketing to your clients. Eventually they agree, great! They now type “Text Marketing” into Google and voila, we’re at the top and they come across us as the lowest cost provider. Guess who they sign up with!? Offering your clients the best value makes sense, not only because it shows your client you are recommending the best for them but from your financial point of view as well. 10% of something is better than 15% of nothing.

We are also the oldest UK bulk SMS supplier, since 1999, with 1000′s of clients. We are proven. So is our technology. It is stable and reliable. Over the years we have built up a massive help centre and even training and promotional videos which means that you can provide your clients with all the material they need with one simple link which reduces the time you have to spend.

The Final Decision

Is it really worth putting the time in to resell SMS Marketing services – it seems low value?

It is a volume business, that’s true. But the potential is huge and is growing exponentially. It is estimated that by 2016 texts sent by businesses will outstrip personal texts sent (there are 4.3 billion mobile phones on the planet!).

What we’re seeing at Text Marketer is that all companies are gradually growing the volume of texts they send. It works for them is why. It’s slowly becoming the default replacement to faxes and emails – and imagine having a small % of that market in the beginning!

Here’s a scenario. One of your customers sends 5,000 SMS’s per month for example. At current rates, that’s only £222 commission per year. But, if they continue to do that for 5 years (as SMS is simply a communication channel so is long term), it’s £1,110 commission. Put the time in to get 20 or 40 of these clients and the amounts soon add up to a substantial and sustained income. And some bigger clients can easily send hundreds of thousands of messages per month!

In Summary

- Get started now. Your clients will be thinking about it or maybe even doing it now (in which case you can offer them our lower prices)
- Decide whether you want to manage activities for your clients or become a partner (being a partner is best as allows you to grow more quickly with less time spent)
- Get an account, become a partner and get your partner code
- Start promoting SMS Marketing to your client base, using your partner code
- Build your client base by making use of our extensive self help material, tips and tricks and videos

If you need any more information please do contact us or simply read more information on reselling SMS Marketing services and see the instructions at the bottom of that page to get going automatically. Best of luck.

Although our accounts are designed to be able to run multiple campaigns, keywords, databases, etc. Sometimes, possibly for admin/accounts reasons, it is desirable to set up separate accounts for clients or departments.

CREATE A SUB ACCOUNT

Go to Financial | Create a Sub Account.

Complete the new account details and press submit.

Notes:
The ‘use this accounts pricing’ tickbox should be checked if you want to copy over the administrator account’s pricing structure otherwise it will be set up at default pricing.
The ‘Promo Code’ box can be left blank or if you have a promo code or want to use your SMS Partner code.

MANAGING SUB ACCOUNTS

Go to Financial | Display Sub Accounts.

Here you will see all the sub accounts associated with your administrator account, their account names, usernames and passwords and number of credits.

There are also quick links on the right to transfer credits from your administrator account, to login to a sub account (useful if you want to change a sub account’s settings or purchase from that account) and to delete a sub account.

Buying SMS databases can be a complicated process and there are many pitfalls to watch out for because the industry is so heavily regulated. This is why we wanted to launch our broker service so you can be sure you are buying from reputable, legal sources.

All you need to do is let us know the criteria for the data you want and we’ll send it out to our trusted list companies and then put you directly in contact with the one that offers the best value for your request.

Although the relative cost of buying SMS databases can be high, the ROI is usually excellent because SMS is so responsive.

Text Marketer are the lowest cost provider in the UK. Currently Salon Iris users are advised to use Text Magic, whose starting price per text is 6.8p per SMS. Text Marketer’s starting price is just 3.7p – a whopping saving of 3.1p per message sent – almost half the price!

I’m a Salon Iris user – how do I swap to Text Marketer?

The process is very simple indeed and should take just a few minutes;

1. Get a Text Marketer account and buy some credits for it then set up your Text Marketer account for domain authentication (option 1 in these instructions)

2. Change your preferred text to SMS provider sending domain to @textmarketer.biz in Salon Iris (their instructions)

3. Simply add two hashes ## to the end of the text message reminder you have set up in Salon Iris (this is to tell our system it’s the end of the message).

That’s it.

You’ll then be saving up to 3.1p for every text message reminder you send in Salon Iris.

If you need any support you can contact Salon Iris here.

We began work on the revised site back in November of 2010 – how time flies! Our objectives were to clean both our branding and the entire site to make it easier to navigate and present information more clearly.

Many of the pages contain the same information but the main new areas are;

• A new SMS Developers Area with all the documentation and code examples for using the SMS Gateway
• A completely revamped Help Centre which is easier to find the help documents for customers
• An expanded customer testimonials page with customers’ reviews of Text Marketer
• An updated SMS Partner/Affiliate area to explain how to resell Text Marketer’s services

Customer’s accounts have all been updated with the new branding but none of the functional side of the systems have changed.

We hope you like the new, cleaner site and that it is easier and quicker for you to use.

As with all these things, it would be great to hear any feedback you have, good or bad.