May 03, 2011
Tips for choosing a vendor to power text messaging services for your advertisers
In an earlier KDMC article, I explained how news organizations can sell mobile marketing services to local advertisers. Text messaging is a huge and important part of the local mobile advertising market. Even smartphone users send and receive lots of text messages! If you want to sell text messaging services to your advertisers, you’ll need a text messaging vendor. Here are some tips for choosing the right one…
By Kim Dushinski
Why do you need a text messaging vendor? All marketing that is conducted via simple messaging service (SMS) text messaging to cell phones must be provided through a “shortcode”—a five- or six-digit number to which people send text messages to subscribe, unsubscribe, or interact with services provided by marketers or publishers.
For instance, you can text the keyword CHUCK NORRIS to the shortcode 44636 to receive a fun “fact” about Chuck Norris.
Acquiring your own shortcode is too costly and cumbersome for most news organizations. Fortunately, many text messaging vendors acquire and provision their own short codes, and sell access to these codes as a shared shortcode service. Several of these vendors also offer reseller or private label programs—which means you can resell their shared shortcode access to your advertisers.
Once you sign up as an SMS vendor’s reseller, or purchase their private label license, you can start offering text messaging to your advertisers.
What you’re actually selling is the concept and strategy of text message marketing as a way for your advertisers to connect with their current and potential customers. Your SMS vendor provides the back-end software which processes and stores opt-in requests from your advertisers’ customers, and transmits permission-based messages to those lists.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of shared shortcode text message companies—so it’s best to start narrowing your options.
Shortcodes usually work only within one country. So first, focus on vendors whose shortcodes have coverage in the US. That is actually pretty easy to find.
Avoid “free” text messaging services. Some vendors claim to offer free text messages, but these typically use a technology that’s unreliable—carriers often delay or block these messages. More reliable vendors will list their fees for various message packages.
Which services do you want to offer?
You can offer a a variety of text messaging services beyond simply sending messages to a list. Examples include appointment reminders, a series of automated messages sent in a certain order, social media coordination, voting, polling, and more.
Consider what types of text messaging campaigns your advertisers will probably want, and further narrow you list of potential vendors to only those who offer those services.
Reseller vs. private label programs
For most news organizations, this will be a fairly easy decision. Most news organizations will benefit more by choosing a reseller program from their SMS vendor, rather than a private label (or “white label”) program.
In a text messaging reseller program, the clients (advertisers) you sign up will send out to their lists text messages that contain only their own branding. As far as consumers are concerned, the only entity they’re engaging with is the advertiser. This is the simplest kind of service to offer your advertisers.
A reseller program has the advantage of lower up-front costs and built-in customer service for your clients. Your company gets paid a commission based on what your clients purchase. This is a great scenario if you just want to offer the concept of text messaging and receive some revenue for it, but don’t want to really manage everything.
In contrast, in a private label program, consumers would receive messages from local advertisers, but which might be branded by (and thus appear to be supplied by) your news organization. This approach is potentially more lucrative—but it also has some drawbacks.
In a private label program, you’ll pay more up front to purchase the private label license. Then you’ll purchase monthly packages of text messages wholesale from the vendor, and sell them to your client at retail (whatever price you set). This approach offers the ability to earn a greater profit, but it does cost more to get a private label license.
The catch is that your company would be completely responsible for selling and servicing your clients. From your clients’ point of view, your news organization IS the text messaging vendor.
Also, there’s a perception concern: If a given consumer signs up to receive text messages from multiple advertisers, all bearing your news organization’s branding, she might get the impression that your news org is “bugging” her.
Test drive the back end
Every text messaging service works a little differently, once you are logged in online and using the system. Make sure you see (and ideally get to try out) an actual demo of the vendor’s software to see whether it’s easy for you to use. Can you easily figure out what to do in order to implement a text messaging campaign? This is crucial, since you’ll probably need to train local advertisers how to use this software.
Also, check whether it’s easy to create a web-based opt-in form for a text messaging campaign. This feature allows your clients to easily market their campaigns from their own websites—which means it could make or break your sales to local advertisers.
Training and marketing support
Some vendors offer extensive training and marketing resources to help you to get up to speed on their service and start selling. Others are more hands off—they simply offer online tutorials and a customer support e-mail address.
It is crucial to gauge your sales team’s ability to self-educate. Choose a vendor with support resources that support what your sales reps really need.
Suggested vendors
Here some text messaging vendors that offer both private label and reseller programs. This list is offered as a starting point; there are many other vendors out there.
- ChaChing Mobile Marketing: Jay Veniard
- Fanminder: Paul Rosenfeld
- Involve Mobile: Michaela Cristallo
- TextingForward: Riza Ayson
Kim Dushinski is a longtime mobile marketing professional and president of Mobile Marketing Profits (a Denver-based marketing training firm) and also founder of the International Mobile Marketing Business Network. She she was an instructor at the KDMC Mobile Symposium, a traveling program that explained mobile media trends, tools, and opportunities to news organizations and journalism school faculty in Nebraska and Montana.
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