The invasion of Bulk SMS

Who hasn’t suffered the wrath of companies using bulk Short Message Text service to flood their ideas to hundreds of thousands of random cell phone numbers? But Omar Moeen Malik, VAS Product Development (Commercial Division) at Telenor explains about how SMS can actually be used for effective, tangible marketing.

In the last 10 years, explains Omar, we have seen a lot of new things come up in Pakistan. “The explosive mobile phone growth stands at nearly 90 million SIM cards and almost every person in an urban location, has one, with growth happening just as fast in the rural areas. SMS is a key Value Added Service because it is economical, addictive and well, almost preferred by most people in Pakistan.”

Can you share stats on how popular SMS text is in Pakistan?
SMS texts are very popular. In fact, they are the most popular VAS after voice calls. It is estimated that on average there are more than 2.5 billion SMS messages sent on all the mobile networks in a month. That’s more than a 1000 SMS per second. Than again, the SMS penetration in Pakistan is very low. Only 50-60% of the people in Pakistan with mobile phones use SMS regularly. The main reason for this low penetration is extremely low literacy rates in the rural areas.

How do you feel service providers can better use the SMS gateway more efficiently?
Operators should open up easy interfaces to their messaging systems and offer flexible charging to service providers on their networks. At the moment, integrating with a mobile operator to send SMS messages via their gateway is still a fairly complex job and is only being done by a handful of service providers.

There is much need to better grow the utility of SMS in Pakistan. Customer education, maintaining competitive SMS rates, preventing SPAM on the networks and offering advanced SMS services (e-mail, forwarding, blacklisting, signature, and other services) should all be looked into since SMS still promises a lot of revenue and growth.

More details on this service can be found online at: http://www.telenor.com.pk/services/coSMS.php

How is it different than anything else out there?
The key USPs for this solution are based on the following:

(1) Not all mobile operators offer a bulk-SMS solution  for organizations to use

(2 )Our solution has more features being offered than     any other bulk-SMS solution. Urdu SMS, Long  SMS, APIs are unique features that we have  developed and not available with other operators

(3) Our solution is flexible and can be used on any  Prepaid and Postpaid account. Furthermore, we  offer flexible charging options where the amountis  directly debited from the account balance.

What would you suggest are some creative ways to use SMS marketing and get the maximum ROI?
Having said that SMS messages are the most cost-effective marketing channel, the ability to send your message to your customer for a few paisas is much cheaper than direct mail. It is more effective than e-mail, which suffers from low web penetration, and it has instant results.

What adds more power to SMS marketing is when we also have access to a customer’s demographic information – their likes and dislikes, and personal preferences. Using this information, ‘targeted’ SMS messages can be sent to customers. For example, McDonalds can send a bulk SMS to all teenagers within 500 meters of  their restaurant, using Location Based Services, if they discover that they have food which could be wasted if it isn’t purchased within 4 hours. This isn’t an instance where a marketing campaign can be planned because the sales decision is immediate, as is the ‘campaign’ to get the people there.

Speaking of ROI, do you think the SMS text marketing campaign really gets a company the ROI it invests into the campaign?
No question about it. Mobile operators have turned away from conventional marketing channels and started using their SMS gateways to send targeted bulk-SMS messages to their users. This is why customers receive more information on new services from their mobile operator than they see on TV, billboards or even on the web.

How would you recommend that the SMS campaign “integrate” itself into the rest of the campaign? Any advice? Any examples?
Any marketing campaign would have multiple channels in use. Television, Print Media, BTL, SMS and other avenues. It is important to use all the channels to extract the maximum ROI from the total campaign itself.

Care must be taken not to confuse target audiences. For example, when marketing a new Cooking Oil, you want to target the people who purchase cooking oil, or have the decision making power when purchasing cooking oil. The target audience is mostly housewives, but would also include hotels and restaurant owners. Housewives can be targeted with a TVC between their favorite soap dramas on TV at night, but since they are not going to go marching off to the nearest store to buy cooking oil at night, you would need to reinforce the message with outdoor branding near retail stores which they may frequent. With hotels and restaurant owners, you would need to use targeted SMS messages.

There is a very fine yet distinct line between “Spam” and “Marketing” – How do you ensure that your solution is used for legitimate purposes?
If I get a SMS message at two in the morning announcing that “Brand X is the best baby food”, this is spam, particularly because I didn’t sign up or ‘opt-in’ to give this brand permission to approach me. I might not be fond of that brand, might not even be their customer, and at that ungodly hour of the morning, will probably want to plan vengeance against their brand strategy. Sending such a marketing message has virtually no ROI. In fact, a message like this will probably lead to me switching my phone number or my mobile operator.

The most important thing to understand is that spam is a big problem regardless of the platform. We take precautionary measures ensure that a customer’s mobile phone does not turn into a hotmail account with daily spam from various sources. At Telenor Pakistan at least, our policy is to disallow spamming. If an instance of spamming is reported, a Corporate SMS account is closed down immediately.

At Telenor Pakistan, spam messages on our network might earn us a few additional paisas, but earns us an infinitely bad reputation. In such a competitive environment, the last thing we want is our customer leaving us for another operator.

It is extremely important to have the customer’s opt-in or register for the receipt of any marketing messages. When having customer opt-in for marketing messages, customers have to be offered incentives such free airtime, or free SMS or MMS messages. This also presents us with a legitimate opportunity to collect customer information which can be used to send out targeted SMS messages.

What are some tips people should be aware of when using your solution?
Our Corporate SMS is a very powerful solution if properly used. It is also very cost effective and is designed to be extremely user-friendly. We have a whole bunch of organizations in different sectors using it differently. Airlines, Retail Shops, FMCGs, Schools, Hospitals, etc.

In addition to this, we are able to customize our services to match the needs and requirements of our corporate customers. For a free demo and more details on the service, please send an e-mail to: corp.sms@telenor.com.pk

You can learn more about the Bulk SMS solution that Telenoroffers at:telenor.com.pk/services/coSMS.php•

Poll:
What if your opinion of Corporate SMS Solutions as an organization? As a customer? Send us your feedback at feedback@ciopakistan.com or comment on this article online and let us know what you think!