How to Make Sure Your SMS Text Marketing Campaign is Spam Free

On April 7th, the New York Times ran an article noting the explosive growth of spam text messaging. Citing a Ferris Research report, spam text messaging has grown from 2.2 billion spam text messages sent in 2009 to 4.5 billion spam text messages sent in 2011. To put that number in perspective that’s about two thirds of the world’s population. So to avoid your customers throwing the spam label on your company’s wonderful 160 character bits of joy, check out these three text marketing tips, below: 1.Let your customers know that you will be starting a SMS marketing program. SMS text messaging, with its 95% open rate, is a much more effective tool (relative to email marketing) to contact your current customers. Here’s the catch: if they have not opted-in to receive your oh-so-special coupons or secret codes of the day, it’s highly probable that your customers will not be able to receive your message as their mobile carriers will block the message. A blocked message equals complete failure. And complete failure equals wasted marketing dollars. 2.Invest in a long code. As mentioned in previous in blog articles, a long code is a ten digit local phone number that serves as the caller id when sending outbound text messages. As some consumers already have predisposed notions about shortcodes and their association with spam, renting a longcode from CallFire should quell this concern. When the customers receive your text message, they’ll see a ten digit local phone number as the caller id instead of the more prevalent five digit short code. Again, you’ll want to make sure that your customers have opted-in (read, text subscribe to XXX-XXX-XXXX) to ensure successful message delivery. 3.Optimize, Optimize, Optimize: If Henry David Thoreau was a modern day marketer, that would be his slogan. Only send messages when there is something of value that you can offer to your customer. Depending on your business, that could mean one SMS text message per week will suffice, or if that’s too aggressive, perhaps one text message per month would make more sense. And speaking of Thoreau, we’ll leave you with a bit of business inspiration, “In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore they had better aim at something high.”