I hate waking up in the middle of the night. But sometimes you just need to get a glass of water, find a midnight snack, or roll over so your right shoulder regains feeling. But twice in the past week I had to wake up for an entirely unacceptable reason.

Spam text messages.

You know what I’m talking about. You’ve nestled in for a few precious hours of sleep. You’re just about to hit a quality REM cycle…then…BZZZZZZZ. Your cell phone vibrates spastically on the end table two inches from your head. You’ve got a new text message.

Now you’ve got two choices. You can assume it’s a life-or-death message from a friend and check it. Or you can assume it’ll wait until morning and ignore it. If you’re anything like me, you can’t fall asleep until you know for sure. So you roll over, fumble for the phone, and squint groggily at the three-centimeter fluorescent green screen.

-- Mailbox -- Text Messages -- New --

And that’s when you see it. Unbelievable.

Instead of a message from your sister saying she’s just won the lottery and wants to share it with you, you find yourself staring at a spammy plea to change banks, buy a hybrid car, or donate $2,000 to a nature reserve in Zimbabwe. Grrr.

That’s right, friends, the world’s “beloved” spammers have branched into the world of text messaging. How wonderful. Not.

What’s that mean if you've been thinking about adding SMS (or voice messages) to their marketing mix? You definitely should – done well, it’s a fantastic new medium to reach your audience. And luckily most of the best practices you’ve learned from your permission-based email marketing program will also apply to text messaging.

But today’s lesson is more high-level: make sure you have permission to text your audience. Your subscribers are going to be inundated with more and more spam texts in the future (*ahem, two nights this week). It’s more important now to make sure they want to receive your information and are looking for your texts amidst the clutter.

And please don’t send text messages in the middle of the night (unless you’ve got a really good reason). Some of us are trying to sleep!

Nicole
Marketing Communications Associate