SMS Ad Campaigns Target Students, Not Parents
I recently received an email from an advertising agency in which they asked on behalf of one of their clients several very good questions about cell phone text messaging advertising campaigns. Underlying the questions, as you'll see below, is the client's concern that they don't want to have us deliver their message to the cell phones of tens of thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of college students and recent graduates and have the message annoy or even offend those Millennials.
Below are the three questions from the client as passed along to me by the advertising agency and my responses to each. Note that I've slightly edited the questions and answers, in part to protect the identity of the agency and its client.
- I'm very unhappy when I receive ads on my cell phone since I'm paying for them. What percent of college students knowingly agree to receive text message / SMS advertisements to their cell phones? I can't imagine anyone doing this.
I do not have statistics on the number of students who have agreed to receive cell phone text messaging ads from any vendor. I only have our numbers. Our list is 100 percent double opt-in and that's the highest standard in the industry. Keep in mind that we are not marketing to ourselves. I'm 41 years old and I also cannot imagine giving consent to receive marketing messages to my cell phone, but we're not marketing to 41 year olds. We're marketing to Millennials and what they feel comfortable receiving and want to receive is what is relevant, not what I feel comfortable receiving and want to receive.
- Doesn't the use of a cell phone text messaging advertising campaign require us to have people who can respond quickly to questions/responses? How do we get around this?
It depends upon the response that the client specifies. If the client specifies that the student should text an answer and the client intends to personally answer all of the questions then they should allocate sufficient staffing resources to ensure that they can answer all of the questions within one business day. But the vast majority of clients either
- include a link in the text message to the client's web site so that any inquiries come in through the web site and therefore are handled in the same fashion by the same people who already are responding to inquires from the client's web site or
- allow the students to reply back for more information and then use an autoresponder to send them the additional information so the client can tell the student to text A back if they want more information about X or text B back if they want more information about Y or text C back if they want more information back about Z. If the client wants the autoresponder, we can do that at no additional cost. We just need the creative for each option.
- include a link in the text message to the client's web site so that any inquiries come in through the web site and therefore are handled in the same fashion by the same people who already are responding to inquires from the client's web site or
- Unless people have smart phones with Internet access, isn't the percentage of recipients who visit websites using their cell phones low?
Yes. The vast majority of the responses to a cell phone text messaging advertising campaign will likely be from the free email follow-up to the same students. The SMS (cell phone text message) is primarily for branding. The responses, including clicks to the client's web site, will come primarily from the email follow-up. But it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of college students have cell phones and the vast majority of those phones are web-enabled. Again, we're not marketing to 41 year olds who have old phones or who were unwilling to pay for a more expensive phone because they only want the phone to be a phone. Today's college students are far more likely to have web-enabled phones than are their parents.
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