Text Message Marketing offers 97% Read Rate

What is Text Marketing, how does it work and how can I use it to grow my business?

Text message marketing is relatively new in the USA but has been widely used in Europe and Asia over the last 5 or 6 years as a low cost advertising media with instant results. Our first exposure probably started with TV shows like American Idol allowing us to vote for our favorite singers of the week by texting a singer’s code to a short telephone number called a shortcode.

Today even small businesses are taking advantage of this system using a shared shortcode and web based systems to run their own advertising campaigns at a very affordable cost.

The way it works is giving a call to action in all your marketing efforts. These messages prompt mobile phone users to send a text message to your shortcode number to receive something in return like a access to information, a free gift, etc... The text marketing system will auto-respond with a personalized response. You now have a new contact to send proactive outbound marketing messages.

There are two different types of systems available. One is called a "Shared Short code". The other is a "dedicated short code". In order to benefit from this type of system as a network marketer, I recommend the shared short code system mainly because the cost of a dedicated short code is $7,000.00 for setup and $1,000.00 per month vs getting started for less than most auto-responder email systems with the shared short code.

There are two types of campaign options:

Inbound: This campaign is initiated by a mobile phone user to instantly receive information about your products and services. This campaign also saves the persons mobile number in your contact list for future correspondence. With a shared shortcode this type of campaign is run using Keywords.

For example a network marketer might have an ad campaign to drive traffic to thier lead capture page "Learn how to  fire your boss in the next 90 days" as a call to action so the keyword could be "Fire". The cell phone user word text the word "Fire" to a shortcode (short phone number) like 12345. The cell phone user would recieve a message back that has been pre-set similar to an email auto-responder.

The major benefit here is that statistic show that 97% of all text messages are read. How does that compare to your email campaigns?

Outbound: You can send text marketing messages to a mobile phone user or list of users once they are opted-in to receive text marketing messages from you. For example the propect that requested info from the "Fire" campaign above could now recieve your outbound messages about your opportunity.

One of the very affordable and easy to use systems that I have found is EZ-Texting which has a basic package that is pay as you go, no setup fees, no contracts, & no commitments as well as free trial.