When you are marketing and selling services anything , you realize quickly that you are constantly experimenting. It may be online, it may be in the real world, it may be in video, print or radio. But you are always trying new and different tactics to see what the impact is to your bottom line. (Note: If you are not doing this then you need to start.) The only way you learn what works and (more importantly) what doesn’t work is by failing. I would really not even recommend that word failing. It is all learning. Learning what works well, and learning what is not worth your time, effort, or marketing dollar.
The Experiment:
We recently tried a 30 day experiment with TextMarks. Text messaging is a huge industry, and it is only going to get bigger. It was a simple experiment; see how many people we could sign up and get to take action based on informational and marketing messages that we sent on a semi-daily basis via text message.
The Result:
In short it is not for us. We had a decent number of signups and we sent out updates on regular basis. But there is so much ambiguity about the messaging going out and the action people are taking that it quickly becomes frustrating.
The Challenges:
The biggest one for me was measurement. I am a fanatic when it comes to measuring my online marketing efforts. I want to know about every inbound and outbound click. When people are coming to my site I want to know from where, when, who and why. When people are leaving my site via a link I created I want to know which link and when. I can easily measure all of these things with our email marketing program MailChimp. We almost have this down to a science. When we were issuing our text messages I was not able to tell very much about what people were doing on my site once they came in – or even if they came in. I cannot directly measure and trace the entire lifecycle of the customer visit.
Now it may be that our marketing and our service does not lend itself to text messaging. This will be the subject of more experimenting in the future. Is it only good when you want people to take immediate action? Do people seem more interested in coupons and sales via text message rather that just information ? Were my links I sent being shown as links on all mobile devices? All of these are great questions that I wish I could have measured.
For now we are going to drop it. But I’d like your feedback in the comment below….
Do you text message a lot? Do you subscribe to any text messaging alerts like we had here? What attracts you to a text message and taking action? What are some good and bad implementations of text messaging marketing systems that you have seen?
We’d love to hear your comments on this.
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