I wanted to share with you a video of Ralph Santana, Samsung’s CMO, where he identifies the 3 key criteria for mass brands to find market success with their campaigns: broad reach, meaningful engagement and financial impact. This presentation was made a few weeks ago at Ad Age Digital Conference and made us even more convinced that mobile messaging is a relevant and powerful channel for mass brands to engage with their consumer.
Let me tell you why:
Reach: with over 5 billion subscribers, mobile is today’s most powerful media. Just to give you an idea of how huge this is, there are only 1.2 billion TVs in the world. This turns the mobile into a perfect channel to deliver the reach that all brands are dreaming of. But fancy apps and display banners aren’t the answer to brands who want to address large audiences when we know that smartphone penetration is still below 7% worldwide. The text messaging channel (SMS), however, reaches 100% phones and displayed in an identical way as opposed to mobile banners.
Meaningful engagement. Mobile is unique because it’s personal, interactive, always accessible and yet with mass reach. But what are the options available? I defenc that text messaging has reach but is still very limited in terms of user experience : poor interactivity, poor engagement and dialogue capabilities. It’s a hassle for users to reply to promotional SMS with short codes and new messages.
Banners, apps and videos may be more attractive and interactive but the truth is their response rates are still lower than using SMS simply because they are lacking reach, targeting capabilities and engaging interfaces (have you ever tried to click on a banner on the mobile web if you do not have an iPhone? ).
So how do we remove the trade-off between reach and engagement? By using a messaging channel that is better than simple SMS, Interactive SMS is a new messaging channel that enables easy and fluid consumer engagement, and delivers better response rates. It pops-up on the idle screen and then the user can very easlily start a dialog and answer a question with a simple click pressing “OK” to accept or “BACK” to cancel.
What can you use it for? Many functions like interactive promotion where the user directly selects a coupon in a list, opt-in collection & database qualification, satisfaction surveys and wherever your imagination takes you.
The collected information is fed into the CRM system and used to improved the targeting for new campaigns resulting in higher response rates.
Financial impact. Campaigns delivered with Interactive SMS gets click-through rates (CTR) on average 2 to 10 times higher than the same campaigns delivered with simple SMS. In one mobile campaign in India, a message promoting a sports news service was tested on similar target audiences using two delivery methods: a standard SMS and an Interactive SMS. The response rate for simple SMS, where the customer had to write and send back a text message, was just 0.2%; for the Interactive SMS, where the customer only had to press “OK” on the phone, it was 7.7% – a massive x 38 higher. In Brazil, Interactive SMS campaigns promoting different services from an operator reached CTR way above the industry SMS average of 1%: 17% for opt-in capture, 35% for phonebook service adoption, 27% for pre-paid credit top up, 12% for unlimited voicemail subscription, driving unexpected ROI on all campaigns for the mobile operator.
So the question remains: if SMS usage is still going up everywhere, can you imagine the value Gemalto Interactive SMS could bring to marketers, brands and consumers?”
Therefore we shall not underestimate the power of messaging as a mobile marketing channel, there is still a lot of mileage left in it, no matter how fast smartphone penetration increases.