SMS Marketing – The ONLY rational choice
Mobile Marketer, a wonderful site found at www.mobilemarketer.com, featured an interesting article today by Jay Highley, CEO of Tetherball, a mobile loyalty specialist.
The article dealt with a simple fact: if you really want to reach a mass audience with your marketing message via their mobile phones, it had better be by SMS.
Jay starts: “We’ve all seen the news stories and articles touting the revolution of mobile coupons that allow customers to simply wave their phones in front of scanners at their favorite retailers and magically redeem offers and coupons. Sound too good to be true? Well, it is.”
On the practicality of using high tech apps: “The last thing any retailer would want is my wife, who is admittedly technology challenged, holding up a long line of in-a-hurry customers waiting to check out while she fumbles around to find a coupon that was sent to her mobile phone… Bad experience for everyone: Customers (even the tech savvy ones), retailers, cashiers and our whole mobile marketing industry.
Jay recognises that although iPhone apps are currently all the rage with the marketing community, that many people are suffering from a form of “bright shiny object syndrome” and forgetting the practical side of things.
“The retail brands and clients that I talk with everyday are interested in reaching 100 percent of their target audience with their marketing programs, as opposed to the four or five percent they can reach via the iPhone. In fact, the minute you commit your mobile loyalty program success on a downloadable application, you have immediately eliminated 90 percent of the mobile users”
Jay summarises his views on the matter by saying “The ubiquity of SMS makes it the only rational solution on which to base your mobile program if you want to reach the masses.”
And in case you think he is an anti-iPhone nut: “By the way, I am an avid iPhone user and totally love the device”
