12 Mobile Marketing Strategies That Work
Twelve concrete mobile marketing tactics from the SMS and WAP era of 2009, and the reasons each one either paid off or wasted budget.
Mobile marketing in 2009 meant something narrower than the term suggests today. Most phones in customers’ pockets were not smartphones, screens were tiny, mobile browsers rendered full websites poorly if at all and the primary channel was still the text message. That narrowness is useful: it forces clarity about what worked. Here are twelve tactics that produced real results for businesses working within those limits, and why.
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Build an opt-in SMS list the honest way. Ask at the point of sale, on receipts or through a simple “text JOIN to [shortcode]” call to action. Lists built through purchased numbers or vague consent got flagged as spam and burned the sender’s reputation with carriers.
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Keep messages under 160 characters and make every one worth reading. A text costs the recipient a glance whether it is useful or not. Businesses that sent a coupon or a timely update kept subscribers; those that sent filler lost them within a month.
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Use SMS for time-sensitive offers, not general updates. A “20% off today only” message drives action. A generic newsletter squeezed into a text message reads as noise and gets an opt-out.
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Design for WAP, not the desktop web. Any link included in a mobile campaign needed to load fast on a 2G or early 3G connection and fit a small screen. Sending customers to a full desktop site from a text message was a near-guaranteed bounce.
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Get a short code or shared shortcode, and register it properly. Carriers were cracking down on unregistered bulk messaging in 2009. Legitimate registration protected deliverability and kept a business off carrier blacklists.
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Pair mobile coupons with a simple redemption method. Showing a text message at the register worked because it required no app and no barcode scanner most small retailers didn’t have yet. Complexity killed redemption rates.
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Use click-to-call more than click-to-web. A tap-to-dial link in a mobile email or ad converted better than a link to a page the phone might render badly. If the goal was a conversation or a booking, a phone call was often the shortest path.
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Test message timing around real behavior, not office hours. Retail and restaurant offers performed best sent an hour or two before the relevant meal or shopping window, not at 9am when the message would sit unread.
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Segment by geography where possible. A national SMS blast about a local sale wasted the message on everyone outside the delivery radius. Even simple area-code based segmentation improved response rates noticeably.
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Track redemption, not just delivery. Carriers reported delivery rates, but the number that mattered was how many recipients redeemed the offer. Businesses that only watched send counts kept running campaigns that looked healthy and weren’t.
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Respect frequency limits. Two or three messages a month was the ceiling for most audiences before opt-out rates climbed. The businesses treating SMS like email, sending daily, saw their lists erode within a quarter.
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Make opting out effortless. A clear “reply STOP to unsubscribe” line wasn’t just good manners, it kept complaint rates low with carriers, and a high complaint rate could get a shortcode shut down entirely.
None of these tactics required a big budget. What they required was restraint: fewer messages, better targeted, tied to something the customer wanted to know. The businesses that struggled with mobile marketing in 2009 were usually the ones trying to replicate their email strategy on a smaller screen instead of respecting how differently people treat a text message landing in their pocket.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2009 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
