Chapter 2: Planning a Mobile Marketing Campaign

In This Chapter

Counting the costs

Using Common Short Codes

Handling opt-ins and opt-outs

The process of thinking things through before you act usually leads to success. You need to set objectives, and you need to calculate the costs of achieving them so that you can decide whether your ideas are financially feasible and achievable before you spend money and time on them.

You also need a plan to reach the members of your audience — both before you contact them using mobile, because of legal issues with permission, and after you have their permission, because of the wide variety of mobile marketing solutions and communication methods available.

The chapter provides strategies for planning your objectives, estimating your financial and time investments, coordinating your use of Short Codes, and inviting people to participate in your mobile marketing programs.

Understanding the Costs of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing involves both up-front and variable costs that you need to be aware of before you plan and eventually execute your strategy. The following sections explain how to include costs in your plan.

How you absorb these costs depends on the approach you take to executing your mobile marketing program. If you’re simply going to run one-off campaigns and don’t plan to strategically invest in mobile marketing (which given the pervasive of mobile in society today isn’t advisable), you need to simply consider the variable costs. If you plan to strategically integrate mobile marketing into your business, however, you want to consider the up-front costs as well.

Calculating up-front costs and estimated timelines

Some mobile marketing costs apply at the outset of your mobile marketing practice. Following are some common up-front costs to consider:

• Strategic resources: You need to estimate the costs for your team members, consultant retainers (including your marketing agency), and their training, as well as the costs for the development and maintenance of your strategy. This activity can take as little or as much time to complete as you want, depending on the nature of your program and your partners.

• Mobile marking platform and development fees: You pay these fees to gain access to the application platforms that power your mobile marketing programs (messaging, applications, websites, voice, location, social, advertising, and commerce) and the software developers you hire to build your mobile programs if you choose to bring one or more of your program elements in house (for example, mobile websites and applications). Trying to build a mobile marketing platform or mobile websites and applications yourself can become quite expensive and time consuming. Moreover, it may take some time to find an individual mobile web and application developer you’re comfortable working with.

In addition to monthly fees, you should budget for account setup and training fees when you sign up with an application provider.

• Connection aggregator fees: These fees apply if you decide to go it alone and build your own mobile marketing platform software for sending text messages, enabling direct-to-carrier billing or related services. You need to connect your application to a messaging connection aggregator, and this setup will cost you between $1,000 and many thousands of dollars per month, depending on the aggregator you use. Connection aggregators’ fees typically are included in mobile marketing application fees (discussed earlier in this section), which is one of the many benefits of working with an application provider. (You can read more about connection aggregators in Chapter 1 in this minibook.) Like working with an application provider, contracting with a connection aggregator can take a few days to weeks.

If you have high-throughput requirements — that is, you need to send and receive hundreds or thousands of text or e-mail messages per second — you should expect to pay extra to the connection aggregator or application provider for this higher-than-average throughput.

• Short-code leases: A Common Short Code (CSC) is a phone number that is only five to six digits long. If you’re going to run any text-messaging mobile marketing programs, you must lease a CSC. In the United States, short-code leases cost $500 to $1,000 per month and are billed quarterly. You may be able to rent a Short Code from your application provider or connection aggregator, but you’ll probably pay a similar fee.

Leasing a CSC takes about an hour, but then you must work with your application provider to have the Short Code activated and approved for use. It takes 8 to 15 weeks (or more) to obtain approval across all participating wireless carriers. You can read more about Short Codes in the section “Working with Common Short Codes,” later in this chapter.

Over the last year, the use of a Long Code (10-digit phone numbers) rather than a Common Short Code has been increasing. Long Codes are much cheaper to use than CSCs and have reduced carrier oversight. However, in the United States especially, the industry is evaluating their practice and use. To find out more about using Long Codes, contact a leading service provider, like Twilio (www.twilio.com).

Accounting for variable costs

Following are the variable costs of a typical mobile marketing program:

• Program strategy development: These costs include all the activities needed to conceive your campaign and lay out the plan. This activity can take as little or as much time to complete as you want, depending on the nature of your program and your partners.

• Creative concept development: These costs include all the design activities associated with your campaign. This activity can take as little or as much time to complete as you want, depending on the nature of your program and your partners.

• Content licensing and/or creation: These costs include licensing fees or design fees for any content you may use for the campaign (such as images, ringtones, videos, or news feeds). This activity can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks, depending on the type of content and who you’re working with.

• Mobile marketing platform application licensing fees: These costs are the fees you pay a service provider for hosting and reporting on your campaign — that is, if you’re not already licensing an application or haven’t built it yourself.

On average, depending on the functionality you license, mobile marketing platform fees range from a few hundred to thousands of dollars per month. Licensing access to a mobile marketing application can take a few minutes to many weeks or even longer, depending on your licensing and procurement procedures and on the number of providers you evaluate and ultimately select.

• Tactical execution of the program: These costs include creative program certifications (as needed), technical implementation, legal fees (if you’re running a sweepstakes program, for example), and any custom nonrecurring software development that may be needed to tailor the application(s) to your specific campaign. This activity can take as little or as much time to complete as you want, depending on the nature of your program and your partners.

• Transactional items: These costs include messaging traffic via Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), or e-mail; Internet and mobile Internet page views; advertising page views and click-throughs; application downloads; interactive voice response (IVR) minutes; content royalties; images recognized; and individual wireless-carrier tariffs.

• Program certification: In the United States, all text-messaging mobile marketing programs must be precertified by the wireless carriers, and downloadable applications are approved by application stores, like the Apple App Store. For text-messaging programs, an application form must be completed and submitted through your application provider or connection aggregator to each carrier. Costs for this activity vary (from free to thousands of dollars), as does the timing (typically, 8 to 15 weeks or more, depending on the nature of the program). For downloadable applications, each application store has its own process and registration fees that range from free to a few hundred dollars.

• Campaign auditing: Wireless carriers in the United States regularly audit text-messaging mobile marketing programs running over their networks. Although no up-front cost is involved when a carrier audits your program, you may incur a cost for updating your program if, after an audit, a carrier finds that your program doesn’t comply with current industry guidelines.

• Traditional media and retail channels: These costs are the fees you pay to promote the program in any traditional-media, new-mediator retail channel.

Depending on the provider you’re working with, you might be quoted a single price for your entire mobile marketing program plus fees for traditional media buys and retail promotions. Or, you may get a detailed breakdown of the costs. Often, it’s helpful to ask for the breakdown if you’re not provided one so that you can adjust your plans and strategies accordingly.

You can often reuse portions of your strategy, creative elements, and any custom software and content development in future campaigns, as well as in your broader strategic mobile marketing program. This multiple-use strategy can end up saving you quite a bit of money and time down the road.

Estimating your timeline

The last step is to plan your timeline. You have to consider several activities when you develop your program, and each of these activities takes time. Some activities can be done in parallel; others need to be done in a serial manner. The time you actually need depends on the nature of your program and the partners you’re working with:

• Certification for and launching a typical text-messaging mobile marketing program: This can take 8 to 15 weeks, in addition to the time required to design the program, develop its creative elements, and coordinate media channels.

• Receiving approval from an application store: Plan to take one to four weeks after the development of your application is complete.

Mobile websites, IVR Long Code messaging, or mobile advertising programs need no approval or auditing, so those can go live as you’re ready to release them.

You may be able to speed your timeline if you’re working with a platform provider or mobile website and application developer that takes care of precertified programs and other elements, in addition to having templated services that streamline the setup of your programs. Consult your platform and development providers or connection aggregator to see what can be done if you’re on a tight timeline.

Working with Common Short Codes

When it comes to commercially addressing text messages, your Common Short Code means everything. In the United States, all commercial text messages (text messages for the purpose of mobile marketing) must be addressed and sent via Common Short Codes.

A Common Short Code (CSC) is simply a short (five- or six-digit) phone number used to address and route commercial text or multimedia messages through wireless operator networks (see Figure 2-1). CSCs are critical because nearly all effective mobile marketing programs leverage text messaging in one way or another.

Common Short Codes are effective for mobile marketing because they’re all of the following things:

• Bidirectional messaging: Messaging traffic can be addressed both ways with CSCs, both to and from the mobile subscriber and you.

• Cross-carrier enabled: After they’re activated on a carrier network, CSCs work across most of the leading U.S. carriers, extending a marketer’s reach to more than 235 million mobile subscribers in the United States.

CSCs are country specific, unlike Internet domains, which work worldwide. You need to lease a CSC in each country where you want to run your mobile marketing (see the next section in this chapter).

• Billing engines: You can use premium Short Message Service (SMS) and charge people for participation in your programs. (For more information about premium SMS, also called PSMS, see Chapter 6 of this minibook.)

• Effective mechanisms for permissions marketing: CSCs are the primary means of obtaining opt-ins in mobile marketing.

• Useful: CSCs are useful for a wide range of marketing campaigns and services.

The following sections show you how to acquire and use CSCs for your text-messaging campaigns. Chapter 3 of this minibook shows you how to launch and run those campaigns.

Acquiring a Common Short Code

You have two ways to gain access to a CSC for your mobile marketing program:

• You can lease a CSC directly. Choose this option when you want to run lots of different campaigns with no limit to the complexity of the campaigns.

• You can rent access to an existing CSC. Choose this option when you’re on a budget or you need to run a minimum number of simple campaigns.

Many countries don’t have a centralized Short Code administration body, in which case you must rent access to a Short Code. Although this approach may get you up and running faster, at less expense, you should take care when using this model. Depending on the relationship you forge with the application provider, the provider may end up owning all your customers (all the opt-ins) on the code. Also, if the application provider does not pay the Short Code lease or if a program on the code in a shared model runs afoul of the carrier requirement, the carriers may turn off the code and your programs along with all the other programs running on the code. If you’re going to be doing any mobile marketing beyond one-off campaigns here and there, make the investment and lease your own CSC.

If you’d like to lease your own CSC directly, you can obtain it from one of the few Short Code administration bodies:

• United States: Common Short Code Administration (www.usshort codes.com)

• Canada: Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association Common Codes Administration (www.txt.ca)

• Latin America: Administracion de Codigos (www.latinshort codes.com)

• United Kingdom: U.K. Mobile Network Operators (www.short- codes.com)

• France: Association Française du Multimédia Mobile (www.smsplus.org/index.php)

To lease a Short Code or obtain access to one in other countries, you need to go through your application provider or a local aggregator. Ask your mobile marketing provider or local aggregator for assistance.

If you decide to lease a Short Code, it’s a pretty easy process. The following are the steps for doing so in the United States. Remember that every registry may have a slightly different process:

1. Go to the Common Short Code Administration website at www.us shortcodes.com.

2. Click the Get an Account Now button, complete the form that appears (create a user ID and password, enter your address, and so on), and register your account.

If you’re the marketer (as opposed to the application provider), select the role of content provider and click Create Account.

3. Log in with your user ID and password, click the Apply for a New CSC link (on the left), and fill out the form that appears. Click Submit.

If you’re having your application provider do this for you, be sure that he puts your contact info in as the content provider. That way, if you leave your application provider, you are the leaser of record for the Common Short Code, as opposed to him. In addition, you need to specify whether you want to lease the code for 3, 6, or 12 months, as well as indicate the type of code (random or vanity) that you’d like. (See the following section for an explanation of random and vanity codes.)

4. Read the terms and conditions and select the I Agree check box.

5. After you’ve accepted the terms and conditions, confirm your purchase.

Your code is e-mailed to you. If you do not complete the payment for the Common Short Code immediately, the administration will hold it for 60 days. If you do not pay within 60 days, the code goes back into the pool of available codes.

Leasing your CSC is just the first step. After you’ve leased your CSC, you then need to have it activated on the mobile operator networks and have it bound to an aggregator, who in turn binds it to a mobile marketing application. After this binding is complete and your CSC is registered in the carrier networks, all messaging traffic addressed to the CSC must be routed through a carrier network, who hands it to the registered aggregator, who in turn routes it to your specified application provider’s text-messaging platform.

Leasing your own CSC can cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per month, and it takes many months to get a new CSC approved. If you’re not prepared to get your own Short Code — due to the expense or due to the time it takes to activate one — you can ask an application provider or connection aggregator to rent you access to one of its CSCs.

Deciding what type of CSC to use

When you lease or rent access for your CSC, you have some other choices to make — namely, choosing the type of CSC to use. Here are the options you have and some tips for making the right choice:

• Choosing random or vanity codes: You need to choose between two Short Code schemas:

• Random: The code-administration body gives you a random number sequence.

• Vanity: You pick the numbers for your CSC. An example of a vanity Short Code would be 46445, purchased specifically to spell googl. Choose to lease a vanity code when you want easy recall (77777) or to build your brand (57238 = kraft).

• Deciding on five or six digits: In the United States, you can lease five-digit codes as either random or vanity Short Codes, but six-digit codes can be leased only as vanity codes.

You may see four-digit Short Codes, but these codes tend to be reserved for the sole use of wireless carriers. Codes greater than six digits are called Long Codes, and they’re primarily used for running cross-border international programs.

Going dedicated or shared

You can choose to run multiple mobile initiatives on a single Short Code simultaneously or to run only one at any given time. When multiple mobile marketing campaigns are run on a single Short Code, the code is referred to as shared. When only one service is running on the code at any given time, the code is referred to as dedicated.

In Short Code terms, dedicated and shared have nothing to do with who owns or leases the Short Code; they apply solely to how the Short Code is being used. Therefore, you can use your own dedicated code, rent a dedicated code, use your own Short Code in a shared model, or rent access to a shared code.

Both dedicated and shared Short Code models have pros and cons, as you see in Table 2-1.

The shared and dedicated models are not cast in stone. As part of your CSC strategy, a Short Code can be used as dedicated for a certain period and then used as shared with multiple initiatives running on it. Consult your application or connection aggregator partner for details.

Table 2-1 Short Code Models

Model	Pros	Cons
Shared	Multiple initiatives can be run under one Short Code for a lower cost per initiative.	You need to include keywords in SMS messages to identify the initiative. User flow and instructions for initiatives are more complex. One noncertified “outlaw” initiative could shut down all other initiatives on a shared Short Code.
Dedicated	End-user task flow is easy. End users can text without having to include keywords to identify the initiative. You have more flexibility in initiative tactics. Reporting is easier.	The company is not amortizing Short Code costs over multiple initiatives. All metric data can belong only to the initiative on the dedicated Short Code.

Managing Opt-Ins

Mobile marketing is about reach and establishing a dialogue with the members of your audience through and with the mobile channel. Sometimes, this interaction occurs only one time: A customer reaches out to you to request some information via your website. At other times, you invite a customer to receive ongoing communication from you via text messaging, e-mail, or downloadable application alerts. If the customer gives you consent to contact him in the future, you have the right to contact him again via the same channel. This process is often referred to as obtaining an opt-in. As a result, the process of obtaining opt-ins is crucial to your long-term success in mobile marketing.

The following sections help you determine how to obtain opt-ins. You can read more about the legalities of obtaining permissions in Chapter 1 of this minibook.

Industry best practices and regulations require all text messages to contain opt-out instructions, such as a stop keyword. For more information about opt-out instructions, see the section “Handling Opt-Outs,” later in this chapter.

Placing an opt-in call to action in media

A request for an opt-in is called an opt-in call to action. You can place an opt-in call to action in any traditional, new, and mobile media channel, including the following:

• Television

• Print

• Radio

• Point-of-sale displays

• Face-to-face encounters

• Outdoor advertising

• A web or mobile Internet site

• An e-mail

• A customer-care call

• Online advertising

• A dialog pop-up setting in a downloadable application

Figure 2-2 shows the seven primary calls to action you can use to enhance your media. The following sections explain these calls to action in more detail.

All the following opt-in methods can be monetized. For details, see Chapter 6 of this minibook.

Dialing and pressing

Dialing and pressing is all about using the voice channel of the mobile phone. You can encourage people to call a phone number by asking them to “Dial 1-800-XXX-XXXX to experience the sounds of the movie” or “Call 408-XXX-XXXX to listen in on the game,” for example.

You don’t have to answer the calls yourself; you can use an IVR system to ask the caller to make selections. Selection options in an IVR session could be “Press 1 to receive a ringtone,” “Press 2 to get your last five transactions,” or “Press 3 to get the movie listings sent to your phone.”

Texting

Texting simply means sending and replying to a standard alphanumeric or multimedia message. You can place the call to action in traditional, new, and mobile media by saying something like “Text win to 12345 to enter the sweepstakes.” You can also obtain a mobile subscriber’s opt-in via texting.

Mobile marketing programs and any other programs that use text messaging (such as IVR, Internet, mobile Internet, or applications) must use a CSC to address and route text or multimedia message traffic. For details on CSCs, refer to the section “Working with Common Short Codes,” earlier in this chapter.

Snapping and scanning

Snapping and scanning means taking a picture and scanning a bar code — nearly every phone today has a camera on it.

The camera is a wonderful tool for gathering opt-ins. You can instruct audience members to take a picture of an object — a soft-drink can, a magazine ad, a movie poster, an action code (quick response or QR code), or almost anything else that has clearly defined edges — and then instruct them to use a scanning application (like Scanbuy’s Scanlife application for action code scanning) or have them e-mail or text (via MMS) the picture to your mobile marketing program. When your program receives a picture, it processes the picture and then opts the mobile subscriber in to your program.

Submitting

Another great way to invite someone into your mobile marketing program is to present a form on an Internet page or a mobile Internet page, or in an installed application.

Dialing an abbreviated code

Two companies — Zoove under the brand StarStar (www.zoove.com) and Single Touch (www.singletouch.net) — have developed two alternative opt-in channels; they invite you to place calls prefaced with ** and ##.

Zoove’s method uses the star (*) key on the mobile phone. A mobile subscriber on the Sprint network, for example, can press **267 — that is, **AOL — and the Send/Talk button on his phone (typically, the green button). In return, an AOL promotional mobile Internet site is sent to the phone. Single Touch’s solution works the same way but uses the pound (#) key instead.

Both services are still limited in their deployment across wireless carriers, but you can see the possibilities of these methods of opt-in.

Executing opt-ins

To leverage text messaging, you need to be familiar with two important text-messaging opt-in classifications:

• Mobile originated (MO): A mobile subscriber composes (originates) a message on her phone and sends it to you.

• Mobile terminated (MT): A message goes from an application provider’s service to a mobile phone, so the message ends (terminates) on the phone.

When someone opts in to your mobile campaign with an MO message, you return an MT, discussed in the following sections.

Executing a single opt-in

In a single opt-in, someone sends in an MO and you send an MT back confirming the opt-in. For subscription alerts or ongoing programs, very few carriers support single opt-ins. Mostly, this process is used for one-time interactions; when the initial interaction is done, no future interactions will occur.

Executing a double opt-in

A double opt-in is typically used to gather an individual’s confirmation. The flow is straightforward:

1. The user opts in to the program.

2. The mobile marketing application responds with a text message that asks for confirmation (“Reply y to 12345,” for example).

3. The user sends the confirmation.

4. The mobile marketing application processes the request and sends back a welcome message (such as “Thank you. You’re now in the group. To opt out, reply stop, or for help, reply help”).

Executing a multistep opt-in

You use multistep opt-in when you want to challenge consumers with additional questions before they can participate in your program. You may ask users for their ages if you’re running a program suitable only for users 17 and older, or you may ask a series of questions to collect additional metadata (data about themselves). After a user responds to the additional challenges, the interaction may end, or you may follow up by triggering a double opt-in as well to get expressed consent for future marketing.

Handling Opt-Outs

Sometimes people just want to leave — opt out and stop interacting with you. Maybe they’ll come back, and maybe they won’t, but you need to handle their requests with grace. Accept each request, reply politely, and never contact the person again. Otherwise, you’ll become a spammer, and you don’t want that.

Every best practice guideline on calls to action covers opt-outs. You’ll want to include opt-out instructions in your media and in the legal terms and conditions that explain your program.

You can use any of the opt-in methods discussed earlier in this chapter to capture opt-outs. But the most convenient way to gather an opt-out is simply to have the mobile subscriber send the mobile marketing application a text message that includes the keyword stop (or any other reserved opt-out keyword, such as end, quit, or cancel), or in the case of application alerts, include a disable alerts option within the application’s settings. In the case of text-messaging opt-outs, when you receive the opt-out request, you’ll want to send a final reply, such as this: “Thank you. Your opt-out request has been processed. We’ll miss you. If you’d like to join again, reply join to 12345.”