I spend a lot of time texting people. Which is hard to imagine that I have time for texting, since I spend in excess of 6,000 minutes a month talking on my phone. I’m probably one of those people AT&T wishes would go away, using up their bandwidth on an unlimited plan with my iPhone. But when I’m not talking, I’m texting. According to the US Mobile Industry, there were over 100 billion text messages sent in December 2009, and over 76.4% of US cell phone subscribers use text messaging.
One of the methods I’m using for the Social Print Experiment is communicating via text message on cell phones. The acquisition cost is very low, and it’s an opt-in procedure by the end user, so it’s with their permission that I’m sending my messages. Text messages are generally limited to 160 characters, which is slightly longer than a Twitter message. There is no cost to the end user to receive your text messages (outside of any cost their carrier might charge them). We also have a keyword to use for our subscribers to sign up with. Our keyword is PRINT, so when you text PRINT to 41411 you’re signed up as a subscriber.
Each time I update my text message box, an alert goes out to the subscribers on my list. My plan is to send out an unpublished promo once a week. The subscription plan I signed up for allows me 100 messages a month ad-free, and I’ll have to adjust my plan as my subscriber base grows if I don’t want their canned message to follow at the bottom of my message. If you don’t mind their ads, you can send out as many text messages as you want. I want to control the message, so I’m paying a premium price for ad-free. It nets out to about .049 cents a text message.
Obviously, you don’t want to send more messages than necessary, and unlike a Twitter account, you’re paying for every message that goes out. It’s a business communication, so you probably don’t want to tell people you’re sitting in a hot tub in Colorado watching it snow (unless you sell hot tubs, and even then it’s not likely the right message to convey to people.)
The testing time for this new marketing method for us will be two months. At that time, we’ll do an ROI on the service and publish our results. If you want to jump in sooner, our Toolbox Info follows.
Implementation Toolbox
TextMarks Service – $9.95/month – http://www.textmarks.com/
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