Hi.
My name is Derek Johnson.
I'm the Founder and CEO of tatango.com.
At Tatango, we've been doing text message marketing for 10 plus years now.
It's a lot of years and a lot of experience in text message marketing.
So what I wanted to do is a quick video and tell you my top four SMS marketing tips which
can really help any type of business with their text message marketing campaign.
So number one.
This I think is the most important tip, is follow the rules.
It's so essential.
There's actually two kind of components to the rules.
There's best practices and then there's actually federal law.
Let me start with the federal law side.
Federal law is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, TCPA.
It essentially says you cannot send text messages to people without their consent.
So if you send text message spam, you can be sued by consumers anywhere from $500 per
text message to $1,500 per text message.
So you do not want to violate that rule.
It's not even a rule.
It's a law.
Now, on the other side, you have the CTIA.
They work with the wireless carriers to figure out the rules and regulations of using a shortcode.
A shortcode is a five to six digit phone number, used by brands to send and receive marketing
messages.
If you violate their rules, then you can have your shortcode suspended or shut down.
If you have your shortcode suspended or shut down, that makes the text message marketing
campaign pretty useless.
So you really want to follow rules in text message marketing because there's some really
big consequences.
Number two is offer an incentive for new mobile subscribers.
What this means is, when someone is opting into your mobile campaign, to grow the list
faster, you always want to offer some sort of incentive that they get when they opt-in.
So how this would look is, you know, text "join" to 55555 to receive 20% off today and
join our mobile club.
So that's an incentive.
They get the 20% off today but they have to give up their phone number and join your SMS
list to get that incentive.
So a study was done and it said that, a list will grow 520% faster, 520%, if you offer
an incentive over just saying, "Please join my list."
So that's essential.
That's number two.
Number three, is send valuable and unique offers.
There's actually two kind of components of this.
First one is valuable.
I'm giving up my mobile phone number to a brand.
I want to receive things that are valuable.
I do not want to hear that it's really nice outside today.
If I'm giving out my mobile phone over that's a very valuable piece of information.
The brand must be sending me valuable things.
That can be offers, coupons, advice, tips, things that would be worth me opening up the
text message and spending my time looking at.
Remember, text messaging has a 99% open rate.
So you can pretty much be assured that anybody you send a text message to, they're going
to see it.
Now, the second component of that is unique.
This one's really important.
So if I have a offer and I send it out to my text message subscribers, but then I also
post it on TV, I post it on a billboard, I post it on Facebook, on Twitter, that doesn't
make the offer unique to my mobile subscribers.
And if you're a marketer, you know, especially with 99% open rates, a mobile phone number
is really one of the best pieces of information that you can have about a consumer.
So if you get that mobile phone number, you have to really respect it and you have to
treat them differently because really they've given up one of the most private pieces of
information, maybe even more private than like a Social Security number.
So if they've given up that information, they don't want to receive the same offers that
just everybody else does that hasn't given up that info.
So always send valuable and unique offers to your mobile subscribers.
That would make sure that you keep those mobile subscribers.
Number four, the last one is measure results.
So in text message marketing, you can measure everything.
You can measure clicks, how many people are getting them, how many people are responding.
You can really measure anything.
What I really encourage text message marketers to do, is measure everything and then use
that information and modify the campaign, update it, send different things, try different
things.
Because I think what happens with a lot of text message marketing campaigns is they send
out one message, it seems like it works, and they just continue to send messages like that.
What I really encourage text message marketers to do, is send out different kinds of campaigns.
Then measure the success of those campaigns and use the components that are working and
build new messages that are similar to the messages that are working, and then get rid
of the stuff that is not working.
But the only way you can tell that, is to actually measure the results of every single
message that you're sending to your subscribers.
So there you go, 10 years of text message marketing, all combined into one video.
And that's my top four SMS marketing tips.