Marketing to mobile phone users is about to get easier

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 April 2007 11:46

Your IT - Home IT

Marketing to mobile phones is about to ramp up to a completely new level if the expectations of UK SMS response mobile marketing company, Txt4 are realised.

It has just secured agreement from industry bodies and carriers to launch a trial enabling advertisers to invite potential customers to respond by sending an SMS to their normal 13 response number, such as 13 DELL. These messages will be charged at whatever rate the customer pays for SMS to a mobile number.

At present advertisers have only two options for soliciting SMS response: a premium 19 number or a standard mobile number and, according to TXT4 both of these are inhibiting the uptake of SMS response channels by advertisers.

According to Anthony North regional director of Txt4 "a long code [standard mobile] number wil not be acceptable to the top 200 advertisers. It is too long and it looks wrong: it is like advertising an 02 number. It is what the plumber does."

19 numbers present another problem. "The amount of customers that cannot access19 is incredible," North said. "Eighty percent of Vodafone customers, those on prepaid capped plans, cannot access them. Nor can Telstra corporate customers. When you buy a Hutchison phone they ask you if you want premium rate services enabled. And it is impossible to get the exact percentage. It could be as high as 30 percent. And even the carriers don't know who can and can't access them."

The initial trial of SMS to 13 numbers will enable only customers of Telstra, Optus, Virgin Mobile (an Optus owned MVNO) and one or two smaller providers to send SMS to 13 numbers, but according to North this is around 80 percent of the total, and probably more than can send to 19 numbers.

Txt4 director, John Edwards, said: "We believe that the marketing proposition behind a single short code [13] number for voice and SMS is a very strong proposition and Telstra is 110 percent behind this." He added that Vodafone and Hutchison would "observe the trial and decide later whether they should participate...Hutchison have a very specific strategy in the mobile content space: they have built their own portal and want to attract people onto that. However that did not work in the Internet boom and I don't see it happening in the mobile environment."