The Best Marketing Channel is
Mobile (MMS & SMS)

Q: What are the 3 things most people never leave home without?

A: Car keys, wallet and their mobile phone.

Mobile reaches a broad audience. Over 98% of the mobile phones in the US and Canada can send and receive text messages. Mobile messages have a 99% read rate. The result is a trackable and measurable solution that speaks to your customer. With 91 percent wireless penetration in the United States alone, more companies and organizations use the medium to reach out to existing and potential customers. What is astounding is that 22.7 percent of the U.S. population is a wireless-only home, meaning they have substituted their mobile phones for a landline. Ninety-five percent of existing mobile contracts have SMS built into the agreement and more than 90 percent of text messages are opened and read compared to less than 40 percent of all email solicitations.

Specifically, SMS Short code campaigns are rapidly growing in popularity
because of their inherent simplicity, ubiquitous outreach, societal trendiness, perpetual accessibility, and unbiased reach. All this results in being the most effective channel for marketers!

Virtually all phones are SMS capable, which means the channel can reach 5 billion subscribers worldwide. A study by ABI Research finds that consumers worldwide will send more than 7 trillion SMS messages in 2011, indicating a huge opportunity for marketers. And, according to Nielsen Mobile, the average consumer sends 600 messages per month compared to using less than 200 voice minutes.

Brands and advertisers can use SMS to:
• Reach customers who do not have a smartphone
• Reach consumers they have not engaged with recently (customer retention)
• Acquire customers who did not even know you existed
• Monetize interactions through incentivized offer paths
• Add new channel to the communication preferences list as more people prefer SMS as a contact mode
• Drive sales through coupons and deals

What mobile strategy makes the most sense for your business? Text messaging, Coupons, Text2Win, a Mobile Website, Mobile Apps or a campaign integrated with your other media?

The result of an advertising initiative by Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium perfectly illustrates the benefits of using short codes in marketing campaigns. To test the difference in response rates, the aquarium ran several TV commercials that directed viewers to a Web site to register for a contest and one commercial that gave viewers the option to enter the contest by sending a text message to a short code.

The short code campaign generated 325 percent more entries than the Web-based call-to-action. While it only ran in 25 percent of the ads, the short code campaign generated to 52 percent of the total entries. The results demonstrate how short code campaigns
make it easy for the consumer to respond to the calls to action while it is still top of mind.

Ashley Furniture HomeStore provides another example of SMS effectiveness when compared with email. The chain held a four-day Secret Sale that was only promoted by email and SMS. After subtracting the discounts from coupons, Ashley Furniture
HomeStore sold $122 dollars (redundancy) of merchandise for every dollar spent on SMS — which dominated the $76 ROI achieved for every dollar spent on email.