Welcome to a new era for SMS marketing
By Jason Probert, General Manager: Digital Services, MTN South Africa
Ever since the first SMS marketing campaigns were launched 22 years ago by Nike and Pontiac, SMS has been a powerful mobile marketing channel.
Its key advantage is its ability to allow marketers to reach almost every customer due to the ubiquity of mobile phones – as anyone with a mobile phone can receive an SMS.
However, the emergence of multimedia mobile marketing channels like the Mobile WWW and social media apps has made SMS, with its simple text and 160-character limitation, seem outdated for many marketers.
This has been exacerbated by the widespread abuse of SMS as a channel, with many marketers choosing to spam customers.
Fraudsters also frequently use SMSs, and there is a lack of proper due diligence around opted-in customers and data privacy.
Enter VideoSMS
The launch of VideoSMS, combined with a more sophisticated approach to SMS marketing, has the potential to change the game.
VideoSMS is a new technology which allows marketers to include a graphic or video in a standard SMS message.
It’s neither an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), the mobile industry’s first unsuccessful attempt at enabling multimedia messaging, nor is it RCS (Rich Communication Services), a multimedia messaging technology being rolled out by Google (and currently not widely available in South Africa).
Both MMS and RCS have significant challenges, and despite having been around for many years, neither has cracked the market.
SMS remains a powerful channel, and VideoSMS is different in several key respects:
- Availability
VideoSMS is available on almost every smartphone device without customers having to switch it on.
Multimedia messages are delivered to the handset’s standard SMS inbox, giving it the most widespread reach of almost any marketing channel.
- Security
VideoSMS is sent from a secure, branded bind rather than an anonymous phone number.
This provides customers with the security that the VideoSMS is indeed being sent from the business claiming to have sent it.
- Targeting
VideoSMS can be targeted at specific customers fitting the profile of potential customers by using MTN’s extensive opted-in and anonymized telco data to target by ASPU, location, device type, etc.
Marketers can also use VideoSMS to target customers with their opted-in first-party data.
- Pricing
VideoSMS is priced far more competitively than other multimedia messaging services in the market.
Viewing a video in a VideoSMS is completely free to the user, as the marketer pays for the data as part of the price of the VideoSMS campaign.
Combined with a 10x improvement in conversion, this makes VideoSMS a very powerful and cost-effective tool in the marketer’s arsenal.
Use cases
VideoSMS has multiple use-cases outside of customer acquisition. In fact, its most powerful use is probably in customer retention and engagement.
Abandoned cart/checkout SMS messages sent by e-tailers are already a powerful conversion tool, with the average click-through-rate of Abandoned Checkout text messages at over 10.1%.
According to Attentive, Abandoned Cart messages are at over 24%.
In fact, cart abandoned messages have the highest CVR of any message type at 24.6%-39.4%.
VideoSMS can also be effectively used to provide post-sale information to customers like short product guides, and respond with richer customer care information to queries and issues.
MTN’s VideoSMS will be a game changer in the world of mobile marketing.
The ability for marketers to send a multimedia message – targeted with rich telco data, branded by the business, and with rewards that can be tracked – promises to transform the humble SMS into an even more powerful mobile marketing tool.
To find out more about VideoSMS and MTN Ad’s other innovative mobile marketing solutions visit ads.mtn.com or contact Denvor Daniels on [email protected].
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