Txt2Win and Short Codes

In their Darwinian struggle for attention, marketing agencies are creatively employing advanced technology, including mobile form factors such as cell phones, iPhones and Blackberries with text messaging (SMS) or multimedia messaging (MMS) communication tactics. MobileMarketing (2007, p 1) considers TXT2WIN one of the most effective ways to collect mobile phone numbers. Prospects or customers participate in a contest, which has a meaningful reward or accolade, by using the text function on their mobile phones. Say and Southwell (2006, p 265) relate how successful they were in their use of Txt2Win for not only capturing mobile phone numbers but also for increasing “new Internet banking registrations” by 576%.

Often used in conjunction with Txt2Win are short codes, and Say and Southwell used those in their campaigns as well (p 265). The Common Short Code Administration (2007, p1) manages short codes in the United States. They are 3, 5 or 6 digit, easy to remember numbers that are associated with the longer 10 digit numbers. The 3 digit numbers are only usable within your own wireless provider, while the 5 or 6 digit numbers are inter-carrier. Short codes can only work with mobile communications technology because with mobile, the phone number is collected on the client and then sent all at once to the carrier. With the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), it could not work because telephone numbers are sent one digit at a time to the carrier.

Becker and Hanley (2006, p 3) say their case studies show that mobile is the preferred channel for certain segments including youth and ethnic groups. MMAGlobal (September 22, 2006, p 1) cites research that indicates Hispanics are more comfortable using their cell phones in more advanced applications. They also report that mobile was pivotal in a creative marketing campaign conducted by Tylenol and it “provided a unique communication mechanism connecting Tylenol with Hispanic football fans anytime, anywhere.”

A winning concept used by ELLE magazine here in the United States was based on mobile phones and MMS. MMAGlobal (2006a, pp1-3) explain the case study and its great success. This offer for was based on a sweepstakes. It used cross channel media, advertising in the magazine, and a direct response using mobile messaging. The sweepstakes had readers spotting advertisements in the magazines, and replying to a short code with a picture they snapped using their camera phone.


References
Becker, Michael and Michael Hanley (August 18, 2006). Engaging the “Connected Customer.” Retrieved on September 2, 2008 at http://mmaglobal.com/modules/article/view.article.php/535


Common Short Code Administration (2007). The Market for Common Short Codes. Retrieved on September 1, 2008 from http://www.usshortcodes.com/csc_about.html

Duncan, Tom (2005). Principles of Advertising and IMC. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

MMAGlobal (September 22, 2006). Tylenol tackles Hispanic football fans (The Hyperfactory). Retrieved on September 2, 2008 at http://mmaglobal.com/modules/article/view.article.php/549

MMAGlobal (May 21, 2006a). ELLEgirl Magazine (Mobot). Retrieved on September 6, 2008 at http://mmaglobal.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=406

MobileMarketing.Net (2007). Mobivity TXT2WIN. Retrieved on September 1, 2008 from http://www.mobilemarketing.net/txt2win.aspx

Say, P. and J. Southwell (Jan-Mar 2006). Beep, beep, beep, beep, that’ll be the bank then – Driving sales through mobile marketing. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice.
Spiller, L. and M. Baier (2005). Contemporary Direct Marketing. Pearson/Prentice

Say and Southwell

In their article Driving Sales through Mobile Marketing, authors, Say and Southwell (2006, p262) imply that mobile direct marketing, especially text messaging can be ruinous because “the mobile phone is almost certainly the most personal electronic consumer device.” In support of this warning, another researcher Alan Chappell (2006, p1) cites a study that found 80% of cell phone users would consider ‘mobile spam’ a reason for switching carriers. Direct Marketers who fall short with mobile etiquette risk bad public relations, hardship in the mobile media, and Say and Southwell believe that ultimately it can degrade a brand (p 262).

On the other hand, de Lussanet (2003, p1) in a Forrester Study, reports solid growth in SMS marketing in Europe. Even in the U.S., Unwired Appeal in the SMS marketing section of their Web site reports on numerous, wide-ranging and successful SMS campaigns. The Say and Southwell article is a study and report about their experiences as pioneers in text message direct marketing for financial services in the United Kingdom. There is real potential in direct marketing text messaging and the article dispels the myth that customers always resent text-based marketing to their mobile form factors. Three case studies of work by their organization demonstrate the application of key success factors in the real business world.

Ultimately, with their approach they avoided the pitfalls inherent with text-messaging marketing and they proved quite successful using the new medium. For a complete review, see Driving Sales at Redmond Review

Reference
Chappell, A (March 19, 2006). Mobile Marketing & Opt-In (Chapell & Associates). Retrieved on August 28, 2008 at http://mmaglobal.com/modules/article/view.article.php/352

Say, P. and J. Southwell (Jan-Mar 2006). Beep, beep, beep, beep, that’ll be the bank then – Driving sales through mobile marketing. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice.

Mobile Marketing for the National Gallery of Art

A proposed mobile campaign for the National Gallery of Art will use QR Codes to integrate National Gallery print materials with its online assets. QR Codes are a special type of barcode that is optimized for use by mobile devices. Smith (QR Codes) echoes the view of many. He observes that QR Codes and mobile form factors link print media with the Internet. By strategically locating QR Codes, mobile readers of Gallery print media can link to the Gallery Web site, getting more in-depth coverage, and the other useful online services.

By using a QR Reader, such as a mobile phone with camera and QR software, one can jump from the print world to the online world. This is unprecedented value for the customers of the Gallery store. As an example of QR Codes, consider Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci. The URL for the web page with the detailed explanation of the painting is Ginervra, while the QR Code for that URL is below.

Gallery print materials for the book store will have QR Code to link to always up-to-date reference materials on the works of art or the artists. By also forwarding users from the Gallery Web site to associated blogs, and community sites further information becomes available and communities of interest can be accessed from print materials.

For a comprehensive look at the potential of mobile marketing at the Gallery, see Redmond Review Gallery

Fractal Art in Mobile Marketing

Fractals provide useful video art for mobile marketing. Large and amorphous patterns crystallize into smaller, distinct shapes. Or the logistic equation can be graphed in reverse from chaos to tipping point to order. The advantage of these as dynamic logos is that a small code module can be downloaded to create them rather than the download of a large video. The downside would be security concerns.

An example is the Focusing Triangles Fractal with code included in this post.

'******************************************************************************************
' This program creates a diffuse pattern and focuses it to a crisp, smaller triangle.
' Author: George Ray
'******************************************************************************************
Option Explicit
Dim iGMR, RandNum As Integer
Dim gmrDenom As Double
Dim gmrAx, gmrAy, gmrBx, gmrBy, gmrCx, gmrCy, gmrPx, gmrPy As Double
Sub Main()
gmrDisplay.BackColor = QBColor(0)
gmrDisplay.Show
Call gmrLogo
End Sub

Sub gmrLogo()
gmrAx = 5000 / 4
gmrAy = 3000 / 4
gmrBx = 4000 / 4
gmrBy = 5000 / 4
gmrCx = 6000 / 4
gmrCy = 5000 / 4
gmrPx = 5000 / 4
gmrPy = 4000 / 4

gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrAx, gmrAy), RGB(255, 0, 0)
gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrBx, gmrBy), RGB(255, 0, 0)
gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrCx, gmrCy), RGB(255, 0, 0)

gmrDenom = 1.5
Randomize
For gmrDenom = 1.2 To 2.2 Step 0.4
For iGMR = 1 To 10000
RandNum = Int(3 * Rnd + 1)
If RandNum = 1 Then
gmrPx = (gmrAx + gmrPx) / gmrDenom
gmrPy = (gmrAy + gmrPy) / gmrDenom
gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrPx, gmrPy), RGB(255, 0, 0)
ElseIf RandNum = 2 Then
gmrPx = (gmrBx + gmrPx) / gmrDenom
gmrPy = (gmrBy + gmrPy) / gmrDenom
gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrPx, gmrPy), RGB(0, 255, 0)
ElseIf RandNum = 3 Then
gmrPx = (gmrCx + gmrPx) / gmrDenom
gmrPy = (gmrCy + gmrPy) / gmrDenom
gmrDisplay.PSet (gmrPx, gmrPy), RGB(0, 0, 255)
End If
Next iGMR
Next gmrDenom
End Sub

If you have difficulty with the code, please post a comment and I will try to help.

The Backend Mechanics of SMS Mobile Marketing

The Short Message Service (SMS) is a network protocol for sending short, usually text messages to wireless devices . Sarah Perez (see Perez on Mobile Mktg),says that SMS is a growing trend in m-commerce. SMS has many features that support m-commerce, which include (see Adobe on SMS)

1. Built-in Authentication
2. Secure Communications
3. Interactive Communications
4. Mobile devices already include the client

Cell phone carriers, such as Sprint or Nextel, provide SMS gateways for the transfer of text messages from computer to mobile phone. These gateways are the foundation of the mechanics for an organization, be it an aggregator mobile marketing service or a commercial business entity, to implement a mobile marketing campaign. As mBlox notes (2006, p 6, see mBlox on SMS), there are over “a dozen US-based carriers to serve all their customers. As such, SMS connectivity provided by any single carrier would be incomplete.”

The solution is to determine the carriers that service the customer publics targeted by the campaign. Their SMS gateways are published and provide the hook for a database driven campaign to reach the customer. For example, Wikipedia has a list of mobile phone SMS gateways by carrier (see SMS Gateways in Wikipedia).

Duncan (2005, p 392), says an important aspect of mobile marketing is that “messages can be targeted not only by individual cellular phone number but also by time and location of targeted customers.” Having a relevant customer database is critical, so that demographic and psychographic characteristics can be used to customize message content and to insure that only customers interested in the message are included in the distribution.

An example data retrieval from a customer database using the ColdFusion language common for Web projects is:

(cfquery name="gmrMobile" datasource="heat")
SELECT
LastName, FirstName, CarrierGateway, Phone, Demographic1, DemographicN, Psychographic1, PsychographicN

FROM dbo.Customer

WHERE
dbo.Customer.SelectCharacterisitic = #CampaignCharacterisitic# and dbo.CustomerOptIn = ‘YES’
(/cfquery)

To send the message from our computer based application to the customer cell phone, we need to combine the cell phone number and carrier to form the correct gateway address. The process using our results above is:

(cfset gmrgateway=" #gmrMobile.Phone#" + “@” + #gmrMobile.CarrierGateway#)

For example,

Assuming my phone number is 800-555-1212 and my carrier is Sprint, the Sprint SMS gateway is messaging.sprintpcs.com according to Wikipedia. So my email from the computer would be sent to the gateway

8005551212@messaging.sprintpcs.com

which in turn forwards it to the SMS client on my cell phone.

A function would be called for each customer record returned from our database call in a loop. The function call looks like:

(cfinvoke component="Your.Component.Name" returnvariable="SendMailSimpleRet" method="SendMailSimple")
(cfinvokeargument name="strTo" value=" #gmrGateway# ")
(cfinvokeargument name="strFrom" value="Your_Name@Your.Company ")
(cfinvokeargument name="strSubject" value="Your Mobile Topic")
(cfinvokeargument name="strBody" value="Your Mobile Message")
(/cfinvoke)

The “your mobile message” in red would be formulated based on the customer demo and psychographics.

The code for the SendMailSimple function above that sends the mail to the SMS gateway is
(cffunction name="SendMailSimple" hint="Send Mail Simple" displayname="SendMailSimple" returntype="string" output="true" access="remote")
(cfargument name="strTo" default="" required="true")
(cfargument name="strFrom" default="" required="true")
(cfargument name="strSubject" default="" required="true")
(cfargument name="strBody" default="" required="true")

(cfmail from="#ARGUMENTS.strFrom#" to="#ARGUMENTS.strTo#" subject="#ARGUMENTS.strSubject#")
#ARGUMENTS.strBody#
(/cfmail)

(cfreturn)
(/cffunction)

References
Duncan, Tom (2005). Principles of Advertising and IMC. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.

SMS Sender

The SMS Sender is javascript that formats an e-mail from your computer for delivery to your phone company's sms-email gateway. That gateway then forwards the email as a text message to your cell phone. On your cell phone, if you reply to that text message, it goes back to the gateway and is converted to an e-mail and sent to your email service.

It shows the mechanics of how a computer can send and receive messages from a cell phone and this is the essence of how sms marketing is done, except this is using your email client for demo purposes.

The javascript code is:

(SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript")(!--
function getLink(text) {
for (var i=0; i(document.links.length; i++)
if (document.links[i].href == text) return i;
return null;
}

function gmrAddr() {
var output = 'mailto:';
for (var i=0; i(document.smsGateways.selectName.length; i++) {
if (document.smsGateways.selectName[i].selected) {
if (output == 'mailto:')
output += '?to=' + document.smsGateways.selectName[i].value;
else
output += '&to=' + document.smsGateways.selectName[i].value;
}
}
document.links[mailtoLink1].href = output;
}
//--)(/SCRIPT)

(FORM NAME="smsGateways")
(select name="selectName")
(option value="@messaging.sprintpcs.com")Sprint Mobile(/option)
(option value="@vmobl.com")Virgin Mobile(/option)
(option value="@vtext.com")Verizon Mobile(/option)
(option value="@teleflip.com")Teleflip(/option)(/select)
(/FORM)

(A HREF="mailto:gmr" onClick="gmrAddr()")Send Mail(/A)

(SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript")(!--
var gmrMail= getLink('mailto:gmr');
//--)(/SCRIPT)