Can You Use an SMS Gateway as a Marketing Tool?

If you’ve read our last post, “Bulk SMS campaigns that are not spam“, then you may have, just for the briefest moment, clutched at your seat hoping that you’re not doing anything to contravene the Spam Act of 2003. Why? Because $15.75 million is quite a lot of money, especially in fines.

But it does shed light on a different problem: how do you make your SMS campaign explode without getting into trouble? How can you reach even more customers to ensure that every SMS marketing campaign has an impressive success rate. Taking the proverbial leaf out of someone else’s campaign strategy book could provide you with that golden spark of inspiration to improve your use of the SMS gateway.

A Case Study

MacDonalds
Those who live in Bundaberg, Queensland, might recently have heard about a competition hosted by fast-food giant MacDonalds, in conjunction with a local radio station. Listeners, who chose to participate, simply had to SMS in their names and received a voucher in reply, as well an offer to receive further communication. Not only did most entrants opt for further communication, but MacDonalds also experienced satisfactory voucher redemption rates. By combining an efficient marketing strategy with the correct API (Application Programming Interface) to connect to the SMS gateway, you’ll be able to achieve more or less the same results, if not better. Here’s where MacDonalds succeeded:

1. They’ve got a name to associate with each number.
2. Opt-in confirmation means they now have an increased mobile audience to legally market to.
3. They successfully extended their brand.

Make It Work For Your Business…

How can you achieve the same thing on a technical level? It’s all about marketing strategy and effectively employing your API for communication with the SMS Gateway. Would the SMPP API provide you with the functionality needed if you wanted to run the exact same campaign? It could: SMPP allows for the two-way transmission of SMS messages. But then so does HTTP/S, which also allows you to send and receive
SSL encrypted messages. On the other hand, SMPP is a robust protocol intended for the transmission of messages in bulk and will provide you with proprietary software flexibility. In other words, you’ll be able to use your own software to send messages, receive them and extract client-specific details (phone number, message content, etc.).

Once you’ve decided on the appropriate API and are ready to launch your campaign, you’ll simply need a callback in place to trigger the automatic reply to potentially interested individuals. All this with only a bit of marketing strategy and the correct API to communicate with the SMS Gateway.

While SMPP and HTTP/S were only chosen as examples due to their two-way functionality, other API’s exist that will allow you to enable your current technical infrastructure to communicate with the SMS Gateway. They include FTP, SMTP, SOAP, .COM and XML.

Choose your API and use your SMS gateway as an effective tool to ensure a heightened potential of brand reach, brand awareness and, ultimately, growth.

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Tags: mobile marketing, SMS enable, SMS gateway, SMS gateway APIs, SMS Gateway platform