September 2010 archive

Have you thought about using SMS text messages to market your products or services?
Statistics point out that 94% of cell phone users will read a marketing text SMS and 23% respond to the SMS text.  Now that is effective marketing.

SMS is an acronym for “Short Message Service”, often called text messaging, and is a means of sending short messages to and from mobile phones.

What advantages can SMS advertising have for your business?

1. Cost Effective
SMS text marketing is cost effective, reaches more people and is simple to set up a  campaign  making it the up and coming tool to market your business. SMS makes it easy to implement a cost effective mobile strategy that can grow as your business achieves success.

2.A moving target audience
Get people where they are at the moment.Most people take their mobile phones everywhere – meaning they can be effective for time-sensitive SMS advertising messages

3. Personal touch
SMS advertising can bring a personal touch.Mobile phones have a very personal nature and  even though bulk SMS is sent to a lot of people, each individual will feel the SMS advertising has come to their phone alone.

Text messaging means information can be sent to groups of people quickly and conveniently, making it an increasing popular e-marketing channel.

4 Get Audience Attention
People generally read every business SMS message they get, unlike junk mail, spam or adverts which can be ignored. A personal sms alert gets their attention.

What  you need to start a SMS campaign.

To successfully use the power of SMS advertising,  you will need SMS gateways. A SMS Gateway is your bridge between the Internet and the world of cell phone SMS text messaging.
Through SMS gateways, you can send single SMS advertising messages, or thousands of bulk SMS messages.
SMS gateways should provide a high quality connection so your SMS gateways give you the fastest and most reliable delivery rates. SMS gateways will also  a delivery report.

2 examples of SMS Gateways

EzTexting
A very easy to use, affordable text messaging company that can send texts in the U.S. and Canada. Lots of smart features including two-way messaging.

eNowIt
A solid text messaging company that features an easy to use interface, two way texting, has some unique services like their Trivia application. Perfect for retail businesses who want to do text messaging.

The effectiveness of mobile marketing has increased due to high end mobile devices which have better features, a moving target audience and a younger target group of customers. Innovative ideas are driving text marketing and making it more effective. By simply replying to a text message, customers are getting discounts on anything and everything from pizzas to movie tickets.
As a promotional tool, SMS advertising is hard to beat,So, if you have a business that you plan to take to the next level of success you need to try out SMS marketing. It is one of the most effective ways to reach out to a focused customer group . Mobile is the future of marketing.

How do you measure the  success of your website-ROI?

Looking at your website stats is necessary for figuring out how well your pages or your campaigns are doing. But some of the terms can be confusing.

A question I get asked frequently is:  What is a HIT?  Is it the same as a VISIT?  What is a View?

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

ReCap:   Pages are made up of many items (images, text, etc) and each one of these physical resources are requested by the server for that visit. Each of those is a hit, while a view is the page itself

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

ReCap:  Someone comes to your web site and looks around a bit. They may go to one page, or they may go to 100 pages, but they are still only visiting once.

View – How many pages were seen by that visit

Think of it like a book store. A person goes into the store (visit) and picks up 5 books to buy (views). While he is holding the books, he flips through them and looks at a few pictures (hits). So he would have 1 visit to the store, 5 books handled during his visit (views), and maybe 30 pictures he looked at (hits).

So which value is more useful?

It depends on the use of the information. If you’re in marketing and you’re striving for bragging rights or high activity numbers, use Hits.

If you are using your stats to actually identify trends and the personal impact of your site, use Views and Visits.

Hits can always be inflated artificially, by adding a few more images to a page, for example. Visits and Views, however, represent people coming to your site and the number of web pages they saw, which is much more useful for analyzing usage patterns.

So we are actually trying to track what the visitors do.   We want to learn more about the visitors that eventually become good sales leads or purchase from us.