Ratul Shah is the presenter for the first part of the solution showcase. Unlike every other presenter that's talked in this room so far today, Ratul is maneuvering through the crowd with the hand-held mic. What a showman. :)
Industry Standard Terms
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.
Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.
System Terms
FanMail Solution
Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru
FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:
krohn email@example.com to 88769
but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:
stubbs to 88769
then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.
The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.
The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .
In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:
butter to 88769
The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature. People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.
What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.
The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.
Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.
Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!
Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:
Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!
Industry Standard Terms
- SMS = short message service, aka text messaging. It has a 160 character limit.
- MO = mobile originated = a message sent FROM a phone
- MT = mobile terminated = a message sent TO a phone
- short code = a 5- or 6-digit number that you buy from a carrier to send messages to your customers. http://www.usshortcodes.com
- vanity short code = a short code that spells something out, such as our, ETSMS
- random short code = a short code that doesn't intentionally spell anything. These cost slightly less.
- private short code = only your traffic goes through this code
- shared short code = a code that you share with other SMS users. Keywords differentiate your traffic from the traffic of other people on the shared short codes.
- MMA = Mobile Marketing Association http://mmaglobal.com/policies. A group that creates guidelines for United States mobile marketing.
- Aggregator = a third party company that maintains connections between the carriers and the content providers. When we provisioning a short code for you, we work with an aggregator to get you approved for all carriers.
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.
Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.
System Terms
- Subscriber key = unique identifier for subscribers. Allows you to identify subscribers by phone number instead of email address.
- Publication list = contains subscribers who opt-in using their mobile device
- Data extension = contains subscribers whom you import through the GUI or the API
- Keyword response - text in and receive a response
- Mobile capture - captures email address for list growth
- Vote and check vote count - submit your vote. poll the response
- Outbound (with opt-in) - a message from ExactTarget to the mobile device
- Custom campaigns
FanMail Solution
Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru
FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:
krohn email@example.com to 88769
but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:
stubbs to 88769
then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.
The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.
The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .
In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:
butter to 88769
The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature. People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.
What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.
The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.
Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.
Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!
Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:
- Accept tasks
- Assign those tasks
- Assign priority, including deadlines
- Expose the tasks to landing pages so that he could see them all
- Support multiple methods of input, such a forwarding emails to an endpoint that generates a task with the content of the email.
Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!
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