The Business Case for SMS Mobile Marketing in 2007

Every business owner has a marketing budget that’s already stretched across print, email and whatever else has earned a line item over the years. The case for adding a mobile line to that budget isn’t that it’s new and interesting; it’s that the economics of text-message marketing are hard to match with anything else you’re currently running.

The open-rate problem mobile solves

Email marketing works, but inbox clutter means a meaningful share of what you send never gets opened at all. A text message doesn’t have that problem. Phones alert their owners the moment a message arrives, and most people read a text within minutes of receiving it. If the channel that carries your promotion is more likely to reach a customer’s attention, that’s a direct improvement to the return on whatever you’re spending to reach them.

The cost side of the equation

Sending a batch of text messages through a short-code provider costs a fraction of what a print mailer or local newspaper insert runs, and there’s no design, printing or postage involved. For a business with a modest budget, that’s the difference between reaching a customer list once a quarter through print and reaching it every week through SMS. The lower the cost per message, the more room you have to test offers and frequency without risking the whole budget on one campaign.

It only reaches people who already said yes

Because carriers require opt-in for commercial text messages, everyone on your list chose to be there, typically by texting a keyword to a short code or handing over a number at checkout. That’s a fundamentally different audience than a print ad seen by strangers who never expressed interest. A smaller list of people who opted in converts at a rate a much larger list of cold contacts rarely matches.

It closes the gap between message and action

A print ad or a radio spot asks a customer to remember an offer until they happen to be near your store. A text message can be timed to land right before a decision, a lunch-hour reminder about today’s special, a last-call alert before a sale ends tonight. That immediacy is hard to replicate in any channel that isn’t sitting in someone’s pocket already.

What it costs to find out

Testing mobile marketing doesn’t require replacing anything else in your budget. A short-code campaign can run alongside your existing email and print spending, tracked separately so you can see the redemption rate against what those other channels produce for the same offer. Most businesses that run this test for a full quarter find the numbers make the case on their own, without needing to be talked into it twice.

The bottom-line argument for mobile marketing isn’t that it replaces what you’re already doing. It’s that, dollar for dollar, a message that reaches an opted-in customer within minutes and costs a fraction of print is one of the higher-return additions available to a marketing budget right now, and the businesses testing it early are the ones who’ll have the list and the experience built up before it becomes obvious to everyone else.