Today’s topic is mobile marketing and in particular we’re going to focus on text message marketing. So SMS or MMS. So either text, audio, video. That’s the kind of marketing we’re going to talk about. There’s a lot of other avenues to mobile marketing that we’ll talk about in future episodes.
So I want to give you stuff that you can execute rapidly and stuff that’s pretty darn inexpensive. So about six, seven, eight, nine years ago, I wrote my first book called “Marketing in the Moment” and I coined the phrase web three-O marketing. And in particular, the biggest piece of that book was that I started to notice that more and more people were continuing to use their cell phones and mobile devices, blackberries. And in particular at the time, iPhones are becoming more and more pots. So everything was starting to kind of become popular. But there were no businesses that knew what the heck they could do with the mobile device. So I kind of went on a limb and said, this is going to be a trend that’s going to be big in a couple of years and obviously you fast forward and it’s the biggest trend bar now.
Now there are other trends and tactics. I mean artificial intelligence and data marketing and, and things like that. But out of everything, the mobile device is what’s ruling the day because it’s where the attention is and marketing is a game of attention. Whoever has the most attention is going to win at the end of the day. And that goes back to making sure obviously that your content is all over the place and you’re using lots of marketing tactics and methods. But I digress a little bit. So if I circle back to mobile, if I’ve said, well, this is the number one trend, it’s the number one tactic. It’s where all the attention is. My question to you is why then are you continuing to ignore it? Like you’re literally almost blinded to it.
So let’s simplify it and let’s focus on the one tactic that I had mentioned. So how do you actually get started with not just mobile but text message marketing, how do you capture consent? What do you send in, how often? So step one obviously is starting to capture consent and there are a lot of different ways that you can capture consent from people. And if you’re listening to this, let’s call it probably a year, maybe two years, marketing through text message is going to be an everyday occurrence. It’s not that it’s still new, but it’s definitely not as widespread as I expected it to be by now. Most of the businesses, local businesses that are using it are restaurant driven.
So Hey, we’ve got a special today, free appetizer, come in and get a free bagel, that kind of stuff. $2 off a pizza rather than accountants and CPAs, daycare centers, financial institutions, any kind of local business using it. But that’s changing and will continue to change. And this is why it is the absolute best time to jump on the bandwagon and get ahead of the curve. Step one, you’ve got to start capturing permission. So the easiest option is really to have signs up. If you’ve got a physical brick and mortar where they can put in their first name, their email, and their cell phone number, and they check a box that they’re consenting. That’s obviously if you have a physical brick and mortar, you can tie it into an iPad, you can have a URL up on your website, for example. So when they’re in a brick and mortar presence, they can opt in.
The other, other beautiful thing when we talk about, software tools and things like that is with all the different software tools that people can text in. So you’ve probably heard like radio contests in prize to nine Oh two one Oh for example, and be entered to win. So those are the ultimate ways to really capture opt-ins. And again, we’ll talk about do you get a prize away or not? And what does that mean? So step one is really starting to think about where you can start capturing consent. Now I just alluded to a prize. The piece that gets a little bit tricky here is what is the hook that you’re going to use to get them to fork over their email, their mobile number, and their first name. And the reason that it’s tricky is a contest is so darn easy to get people to opt into, especially if the prize is really, really good.
But my little asterisk is that the type of people that tend to then opt in while you’ll get a lot more people consenting and opting in, your opt out rate after the contest expires and or you actually start to send promotional text messages will be substantial. So let’s just say you get 250 people that opt in to win a Yeti cooler, for example, and you announced the winner and then a couple of weeks later you send a promotional taxed about your business. You’ll lose 30 to 50% of those people, sometimes less but often more because the only reason they opted in was to try and win that contest. Nothing else, so I’m very, very leery on contests. My suggestion is you get them to opt in to be part of a special text club, opt in because we’re going to send things that we do not send anywhere else.
We’re going to send them through text, we’re going to send them through text. We’re going to send you one message a week, nothing more, and they’re going to be tips, tools, tactics, promotions, et cetera from our business. You will not find them anywhere else. That is the right way to start to capture consent because you’re getting people that they’re not just opting in for the discount or the or excuse me, the the promotion, the prize, the contest, but rather to be part of something bigger, they want to be part of the community buzz word, community, so you can have that sign up and your brick and mortar. You can have it on your website. You can be asking when you’re taking sales calls, you can have it, any events that you’re doing, you need to start capturing these numbers in quantity and quality, the quality pieces. If you’re being open and honest and transparent about what they’re getting into, not Hey, opt in and we’re going to send you a $5 gift card for free. While that one does work the most effective at anything I’ve ever tried. But it’s also insanely costly if you, especially if you get thousands of opt-ins.
So now that you started the capture people, you need a tool to kind of communicate and keep things organized and you also need a tool. If you want to do any of those texts in. Now it doesn’t have to be texting to enter a contest. It could simply be texting X, Y, Z daycare to 90210.
It doesn’t have to be the contest. It could just be to join our community, to join our tax club. Mobilestorm is a tool that you could look at using, uh, Trumpia is another one there. There’s a lot of mobile SMS tools. I particularly use mobileStorm. Also I use Trumpia. So those are two tools you can take a look at. So as you’re capturing those numbers, you’d be putting them into the tool.
Now the third and final piece of this is what do you send and what are the quantities? So what I want you to do initially is cap it at two to three a month.
Similar to what you do with other tactics, you kind of work your way up. But with text, I would not exceed once a week. And from a sending time, I obviously don’t want you sending these at eight in the morning or six in the morning or anything really early. I tend to try and time it right around lunchtime or a little bit after lunch, unless it’s pertinent to your type of business that it has to go to certain times.
So like I know I get a text message every day from a company called bagel J’s that sells bagels. So like six 30 my phone is dinging. So if I am not up and my phone’s on silent, that’s going to wake me up. I think they’re a little bit insane with sending a daily, but Hey, that’s just me.
So two to three times a month maximum to start with. And only one of those is going to be a promotion. Another one is going to be something fun. The third one is going to be some type of thank you or tying it in with some kind of special holiday or something like that. Now the beautiful thing with text is you can start to build up your text database of other information. So for example, when they give you their phone number, it can automatically send a text message and ask for their email. Now you’ve captured their email. You can ask for their birth dates, maybe they want to send you a fun text or something fun on your birthday? So I want you to start to plan out a couple of months worth of content. But obviously you’ve got to keep in mind that, I mean, these text messages are short.
You don’t have to get complicated and try and do video or audio initially. So that’s MMS. Multimedia messages stick to straight text two to three times a month. That is it, two to three times a month. If you’re an accountant, why not send a helpful tax tip once a month? That’s 12 messages once a month. The beautiful thing with tax, the open rates, 98 to 99% so they’re going to read your message, make every single word and letter count.
That’s all I want you to do for today. Or whenever you deploy this tactic in the future. Start capturing consent. Get your tools set up and program out two to three messages a month. So you’re communicating and building that list because I promise you over the next three months, six months, 12 months and longer, that list will be literally worth its weight in gold. Take some action on SMS and MMS marketing.
