Text Message Marketing Decoded

Why Should You Use Mobile Marketing?

Ah yes, the all-important question of why. With so many different forms of marketing available, why would a company want to choose mobile marketing over other traditional forms of marketing? Statistics show the superiority of text message marketing over marketing efforts such as e-mail, print, radio/TV, and direct marketing. Business owners should be aware of both return on investment (ROI) and conversion.

ROI- measures the efficiency of your investments for marketing.

Conversion- Consumers that convert advertising to a sale.

The ROI and conversion rates or mobile marketing are far higher than its competition. With e-mail and print advertising in the single-digit percentiles, mobile marketing soars into the 30-60 percentile range. Text message marketing is also notorious for its great delivery time frame and readability rates. Who doesn’t read their text messages? It just makes sense.

The Text Marketing Process and Common Terms

In order to understand the benefits of mobile marketing, one must understand the process. Text message marketing uses other forms of advertising to promote it. It doesn’t stand alone, but rather is a compliment to your other marketing strategies. Subscribers exchange their consent for messages of value. Once doing this, the particular texting application will capture the subscribers’ phone numbers and store them for marketing purposes using texting. The marketer then continues to provide incentive to the subscribers and the cycle continues.

When first being introduced to text marketing, there are many terms that someone can run into that are new. We hope to define such words to make it easier to understand the process of text marketing.

Short Code- A 5-6 digit, shortened phone number. Short codes are provisioned specifically for text messaging and is the medium of delivery for text messages from an application provider such as TXT180. Short codes can either be shared on a system with other users, or a dedicated code can provisioned to a business if they so choose. For most purposes, a shared short code will suffice because many different businesses can be on a short code and have different keywords to distinguish the business. However, there are instances when a company may need a short code dedicated to just there company alone. Dedicated short codes can be provisioned to a business for messaging purposes of their own, but there is a cost involved and a hefty cost at that.

10DLC
10DLC stands for 10-digit long code, or a traditional 10-digit phone number. Most text marketing service providers will be moving to 10DLC in 2021 due to US mobile carriers making the decsision early in 2021 to discontinue shared short codes industry-wide. There are several benefits to using 10DLC.  First, it's your own dedicated number for your business, no risk of having the number shut down due to other users on the same number sending non-compliant material. Second, you can use ANY keyword you'd like, since it's a dedicated number it isn't based on availablity like on a shared short code. Last, you get unlimited free keywords. 

Keyword- A word selected when signing up for a text marketing account. This keyword has a few functions:

1. It serves as the unique identifier of a business on a specific short code or for a particular campaign you're running for your business/organization.
2. It is texted to the chosen text phone number in order to gain access to the specific mobile marketing campaign. It is essential in the opt-in process.
3. On some platforms, such as ours, it is used as part of the log-in process.

Keywords should be short, clear, and specific to what your business is trying to accomplish with text message marketing.

Opt-In- The act of a subscriber giving explicit consent to a business to receive text messages. This process is most often and best accomplished through a subscriber opting-in via mobile phone by texting the keyword to the text phone number.

Call to action- A call to action is central to mobile marketing and invites/instructs subscribers to opt-in to a text message marketing program. Call to actions can be on almost any advertising medium and should be direct and clear.

Opt-Out- An opt-out is when a subscriber chooses to discontinue the receiving of text messages from a business by texting STOP in order to unsubscribe.

All of these terms fit tightly together in defining how a mobile marketing campaign works. Hopefully this article has been beneficial to those of you who are new to mobile marketing and its terminology. If you have questions regarding text message marketing, please feel free to contact TXT180. We are always delighted to help. To learn more about text message marketing, visit our FAQs on our website.

Originally Posted on: September 8, 2021

Posted in: Text Marketing Tips
Tags: mobile marketing campaign, text marketing campaign, text message marketing