mobile marketing Archives - Omni-Channel Messaging Platform

Remembering the Do’s and Don’ts of SMS Marketing

We may have the best practices and tools for SMS Marketing at our disposal, but without remembering the following do’s and don’ts, we could go wrong.

Don’t bombard your customer’s inbox: SMS is a ubiquitous medium and has 98 percent higher open rate compared to other channels. But that does not mean that one has to keep sending messages to stay in customer’s mind space. Your visibility doesn’t depend on how frequently you drop an SMS to the customer, but what is it that you are delivering. If there is nothing useful to convey, choose a staggered time plan for delivery.
Don’t miss your CTA or Call-to-action: A call-to-action is vital across all forms of media. After you are done conveying a message or presenting your content, what is that you would have the audience do? Don’t leave them confused after delivering a marketing message, do ask them to take the next step!
Avoid regular sales pitches: If you always attempt to promote a new product, most people would stop opening your SMS. Add a personal touch to your message because they are real people seeking genuine solutions to their problems.
Avoid abbreviations and slangs: Not everyone can recognize short forms and slangs. Your customers may belong to various demographic categories and your smart attempt to make the most of limited space could fall flat. Avoid using abbreviations as much as you can and remember that SMS marketing, like all other fields, demands its code of professionalism.
Highlight the value offering: Begin your messages with words like DISCOUNT, SPECIAL OFFER, SALE, etc. that would quickly grab the customer’s attention. Find something useful that you can offer to the user.
A reliable Bulk SMS solution: Choose a reliable and scalable Bulk SMS Portal to support your campaigns. With Kirusa Konnect’s bulk SMS solution, you can send hundreds of messages to your audience and keep track of delivery and ROI at the same time.

Konnect also has a built-in Do-not-disturb or DND filter that identifies the numbers of those who have unsubscribed from receiving SMS messages. It also offers SMS tagging, a unique feature that piggybanks on the extra space in transactional messages. It allows the user to include promotions and advertisements alongside a transactional message for greater mindshare.

Bust these Five SMS Marketing Myths for the Sake of your Enterprise

SMS is a crucial part of Marketing, yet over the last few years, several misconceptions have been woven around it. These myths have led to quite sweeping assumptions including the misbelief that SMS is becoming redundant. Rather than dismissing a potential tool altogether, how about making an informed decision by banishing the following myths?

Texts annoy customers: What annoys your customer is an irrelevant promotion. There are tons of brands that make the mistake of sending unnecessary SMSes in a single day without offering any incentive. Hence, apart from making the content interesting, it is essential to keep track of your leads and look out for those who have not signed up for promotions. Bulk SMS Marketing service providers like Kirusa Konnect have DND filters (Do-not-disturb) to prevent enterprises from sending promotional messages to people who have opted out officially.

Low Conversion Rates: Conversion rates should not be an issue if you are initiating a two-way interaction and encouraging CTA or call-to-action. In fact, with 98% higher open rates, SMSes offer greater opportunities to pitch your promotions. However, do not use it in isolation, engage with your customers via different communication channels to boost presence and familiarity.

SMS Marketing is Expensive: False! It happens to be one of the most cost-effective channels of enterprise communication. If we compare the direct outreach and opening rates of SMS compared to other platforms, it is indeed, an excellent ‘value for money.’Several platforms offer affordable bulk SMS service but watch out for the ones that promise scalability for your ever-changing needs.

Not Enough Space to Convey Your Brand Voice: The best message does its job by saying less. As marketers, we must innovate ways to engage our audience without taking too much of their time. Similarly, to make the most of SMS marketing and the limited character space, integrate URLs and codes to initiate a call-to-action. Another way to increase engagement is by availing the extra whitespace in your transactional SMSes. Transactional SMS messages are essential in this regard because they tend to have higher impression rates – making it a valuable component of enterprise messaging.SMS Tagging from the Konnect CPaaS suite is a novel product that enables enterprises to boost engagement by leveraging higher impression and mindshare of transactional SMS and use them for promotional SMS marketing.

SMEs or Small Businesses Do not Benefit with Bulk SMS: On the contrary, small and medium-sized enterprises mostly benefit from localized campaigns. Bulk SMSes area useful tool for small companies to generate personalized engagement with their customers. As long as, you are invested in working on a region-specific database, expect enormous advantages with SMS marketing.

An Affordable High Deliverability Bulk SMS Service

Bulk SMS is a powerful tool to boost your mobile marketing campaign. With almost 98% open rates surpassing other forms of marketing across email or social media, SMS continues to be the most ubiquitous methods to reach out to users.

The reasons are as follows:

Bulk SMSes are the most convenient and cost-effective means to reach out to your audience without hassles. By signing up with a reliable bulk SMS provider, one can send hundreds of messages with the click of a button.
Owing to its higher open rate compared to any other medium, SMSes have more chances of being read.
With SMSes, you have better chances of implementing a clear call-to-action or CTA and generate better response rates.
Almost everybody owns a mobile phone whether they have an interconnect connection or not.
SMS gives you the chance to keep it short, concise, and simple. You can get the message across in a few words without taking the reader’s time.

Therefore, a few tips to remember before you begin shooting out your promotions:

Include incentives for the user. Why would anybody bother reading your messages unless they are getting a discount or an offer?
Do not go ballistic with the messages on a single day. Constant messaging and promotions irk your users, and it should be moderate, exclusive and personalized. Hence, it is a good idea to update the client database, and see how each user differs based on their age and location. Make efforts to customize what you are sending and do not copy your competitors all the time.

Try Kirusa Konnect’s Bulk SMS Service, where you can customize messages while also keeping track of the delivery and ROI metric.

If you regularly send billing or transaction details to customers, you have an excellent opportunity to initiate a clear call-to-action using the extra whitespace. Just make sure that the codes, keywords or offers blend well with the transactional message and do not lose their importance. You may even look up quite a few SMS marketing services that enable this.

Kirusa Konnect has a feature called SMS Tagging that lets the company insert messages and codes within transaction SMS and billing details. Transactional SMS tend to have a higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to promotional SMS because they contain personalized information about the client’s account and transactions.

Most people scroll through apps and social media accounts before noticing SMSes. Social media trends and updates significantly influence our buying decision and promotional SMSes act like a ‘final push.’ Hence, it is a great idea to integrate WAP links into your SMS that direct people to your site or app.

Kirusa Konnect is an affordable provider of Bulk SMS service, which apart from boosting SMS marketing and keeping track of your success metrics, offers tools to evaluate the ROI of bulk SMS messaging campaigns.

4 Common SMS Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Lately, Tamara has been receiving a lot of unsolicited messages from some new bakery on the block. They apparently have the best dough balls and serve the most delicious chocolate brownies, but she needs no reminding every two hours.

It is not like Tamara is indifferent to brownies. She loves them, and garlic dough balls are amongst her favorites. Plus, the bakery is only 2 kilometers away.

In fact, she has attempted ordering a few times, but the experience has been unsatisfactory. They keep transferring her call and never give a discount. In short, their messages have been unreliable.

On top of that, the abbreviations are enough to put anybody off, and some messages are just blank texts. Tamara decides to dismiss them and moves onto another bakery.

Classic Mistakes

Our bakers were making the classic SMS marketing mistakes that we take no notice of sometimes.

NO CTA: There were hardly any clarity on CTA or call-to-action in the promotional SMSes that Pristina bakery was sending to its customers. While they introduced discounts and coupons, nobody knew what to make of them because there was no mention of time and day. A typical message from them went: “Hi. We been missin u. Come by. Grab a discount on your next order.” They never mentioned on what and when. Poor Tamara chose the wrong day.

Unorganized SMS List: First of all, you do not say you miss somebody on the first meeting. Pristina Bakers made this blunder. Perhaps Tamara did not notice, but many of us would realize that the bakery was sending uncustomized generic messages to every person on their database. Considering that she had never bought anything from them, “we been missin u” was highly inappropriate.

Forgot to Keep a Clock: Nobody needs to remember croissant and donuts every two hours. Not during dinner, in the middle of a meeting or before going to bed. The bakers did precisely that. They kept sending uncustomized messages to people too often without any profound CTA. Also, they did not give their leads the option to unsubscribe or opt out, causing many of them to dismiss the promotion.

Isolated the Campaign: People scroll through food delivery apps and social media accounts even before noticing any SMS. Social media trends and updates influence our buying decisions, and promotional SMSes act like the “final button.’ Plus, one can integrate WAP links into SMSes that direct people to their site or app. Pristina Bakers had done none of that and made a leap of faith with SMS marketing. They seemed like intruders.

In conclusion, no matter how convenient or cost-effective SMS marketing may be, one has to tread carefully. It needs extensive research much like any other form of marketing. Part of the effort will also involve choosing a credible SMS marketing service provider.

Despite best measures, marketers often fall short, and it is safe to have an SMS marketing system in place to assist in the implementation.

Missed Call Marketing: Unravelling the tale of a Sleeper Hit

Do you know that the idea for missed call marketing originates from a very general practice of ‘leaving missed calls’? A habit that millions of people have acquired ever since mobile became commonplace.

Although we all leave missed calls now and then, emerging markets like India and Africa have invented their unique codes to convey messages via missed calls.

For a significant number of the populace, talk time rates are still unaffordable and leaving missed calls is a recognized mode of communication.

However, little did we know that a purely price conscious practice would become one of the most widely-used inbound marketing tools.

In this article, we will do our best to explain what missed call marketing is, what it isn’t, its unique benefits and ways to leverage campaigns.

Let’s begin!

What is Missed Call Marketing? Understanding its Unique Advantage

Missed call marketing is an inbound marketing solution where the user leaves a missed call on an advertised number to express interest in a product or service.

It is a pull marketing strategy that draws only interested customers.

With the help of missed call marketing tools, brands can create a new inbound channel for their customers to reach out to them.

For example, Kirusa Konnect has an inbound communication tool calledSnapCallthat helps in creating successful campaigns.

As an inbound marketing medium, missed call campaigns can build high quality leads for the sales team. It enables better recognition of one’s target audience and heightens prospects for a productive brand-customer engagement.

Unlike most other channels that directly reach out to assumed buyers, missed call marketing generates interest without being intrusive. It is the ‘buyer’ who signs up for information because they are aware of your product, which is the point where consumers enter the awareness stage of your marketing funnel.

Hence, missed call marketing has the advantage of pulling a relatively more informed and decisive customer.

How does Missed Call Marketing work?

Missed call marketing is a cost-effective mechanism and starting your campaign is not difficult. One has to remember that it is not a typical brand awareness campaign. Following are the steps that you can execute on an inbound marketing platform.

Start by purchasing and configuring a set of numbers.

Advertise a specific number for people to leave a missed call which is the call-to-action. Remember that the number has to be circulated via other communication channels.

Set up a response SMS as an acknowledgment or confirmation of the missed call being received. Some consider this step optional, but it is highly recommended. Also, enable a mandatory feedback SMS from the customer.

Following these exchanges, you can measure the number of incoming calls and responses or analytics on your inbound platform. Kirusa Konnect’s SnapCall can help visualize and monitor the progress of campaigns in real-

You can use SnapCall as an effective communication platform to supercharge your missed call marketing campaigns. It is a versatile medium to generate awareness of the brand.

However, the utility of missed call campaigns extends beyond general commercial purposes. Following are the various uses cases:

Lead generation – Brands can implement missed call marketing as an efficient way to generate quality leads for their business. Following is a typical example of an insurance agency.

Agency advertises a new insurance policy across various media channels, along with a phone number (this is called the CTA or Call-To-Action).
People who view the advertisement can give a missed call to the number to express interest in the insurance policy.
As soon as the missed call is received, the insurance agency captures the phone number of the caller, which is how a lead is generated.
The agency sales team then reaches out to these leads to turn them into customers.
Examples of brands using lead generation include insurance companies (life insurance, health insurance, home, vehicle, electronics, ), loans, etc.

Contests and voting

During contests or elections, people can leave missed calls on a given number to vote and make their votes count.
Typical examples include voting for your favorite participants on a reality show.
Governments and regulatory bodies can use missed call marketing to gather votes, support and public opinion for socio-economic or environmental causes.
Simply put, missed call marketing can be used for multiple purposes-from extending support to an individual to advocating a particular cause.

App downloads

Brands can increase their app adoption by employing this classical marketing technique. One can leave a missed call he/she wishes to download an app, and will be sent an SMS containing a link.

Service requests

Customers also leave missed calls if they require some service. For example, users frequently request checkbooks from their bank by first leaving a missed call on a given number. This is usually followed by a callback in a defined period or an SMS message.

On-demand information

Bank balance, shipment status, flight details, personalized information, are some of the details that can be gathered via missed calls.

General Awareness

Missed call campaigns can also be applied to generate awareness campaigns against epidemics and natural disasters. Users can leave a missed call and indicate interest if they want further information. For instance, Kirusa Konnect has played a role in facilitating the Ebola Education Campaign to educate Ghanaians on the Ebola epidemic.

What does Missed Call Marketing not Mean?

Conceptualizing a missed call marketing campaign is only half the job done because the exercise is not an end in itself. One must explore and utilize various media/communication channels to generate a robust campaign, including print and electronic media.

Let’s take the example of uniBank which is offering a zero percent payment plan for a comprehensive policy on motor insurance. This message is advertised in print, electronic or social media, TV radio, billboards, etc. A SnapCall number is also popularized with the content to encourage interested customers.

Through the Konnect SnapCall portal, the customer service team of uniBank can access the database of interested people. The team calls back customers to sign them up for the motor insurance policy and other UniBank bank assurance services.

Once the leads are generated, brands become aware of their audience. This is the point where one needs to watch out for conversions and ensure constant communication along with impeccable customer service.

Successful implementation of missed call marketing campaign also requires a regular tracking of metrics and the demography of users. The results can be further used to discover other channels of communication and reach out to newer prospects.

In conclusion, we have learned that missed call marketing is a unique method that assists other forms of advertising for strong marketing ROI. It is an empowering mechanism that makes use of very general practice by letting users reach out at no cost.

The combined effect of auditory/visual communication like Radio and TV with missed call campaigns can inform and educate the buyer. Consumers with limited access to data/internet can make better decisions and understand their needs.

To top it all, the possibilities are limitless, and one can discover innovative ways to further utilize the power of mobile.