In a recent post I wrote about getting started with SMS marketing, it is a cost effective way to reach customers in a very short timeframe.

Most of us keep our mobile phones within arm’s reach and check new messages within minutes. So it’s no wonder SMS marketing is now a popular way for marketers to connect with customers.

But have you ever considered how SMS can actually support your other communication channels, such as email? Here are some ideas to get you thinking how your SMS and email activities can work together to grow, maintain and engage your customer base.

1. Email acquisition

Web forms are a great way of capturing new subscriber details to your database, but they’re not the only way. You can also do it via SMS with something we call virtual numbers.

Virtual numbers are a mobile phone number that is connected to your database instead of a handset. So if someone sends a message to your virtual number, it is captured directly within your database. Virtual numbers are extremely effective for offline email acquisition campaigns as they provide a simple, familiar way for people to submit their email address.

You simply ask people to SMS their email address to your virtual number and they become instantly subscribed to your database. This is a very popular method with offline competitions aimed at growing your email database.

2. Update bounced customer emails

Before deleting a customer’s record from your database because their email address has bounced, try contacting them by SMS. Tell them you’ve tried sending them an email about “xyz” and that it has bounced. And ask them to reply with their current email address.

This is where technology becomes your best friend too, because e-messaging platforms like Vision6 can automatically capture your customer’s reply SMS and update your database with the new email address. You can even automatically re-send your original email message to your customer’s new address, so this whole process can happen in close to real time without you even lifting a finger.

3. Engage email subscribers

Integrating SMS with email as part of a promotional campaign can be a very effective way to capture people’s attention, particularly when people aren’t reading your emails. Consider this example SMS message that seeks to drive people back to their email inbox to register for an event.

“Matthew, last chance to register for Vision6 webinar. Registration closes tomorrow. See your inbox for more & hope to see you there. Reply stop to unsubscribe.”

With the right targeting, these sorts of messages can work really well to entice people towards opening your email and following through on your call to action.

Whitepaper – How to Choose an SMS Vendor. A 30-Point Vendor Selection Checklist  by mobileStorm

What you are going to learn:
The use of email by marketers to target audiences has been in serious use for the past 8 years. Equally as long, has been the use of SMS (short message service) or “texting”. SMS has been used worldwide as a marketing, commerce and communication medium from everything from buying sodas from a vending machine to getting stock tips and sports scores.
Read this whitepaper and learn about the key criteria for selecting an SMS vendor when looking for expertise to help your enterprise make better decisions on reaching and building an audience.

Topics covered:
- How to choose an SMS Vendor

- What is SMS?

- What should be top of mind?

- Selection process

- Expert advice

- Technology & features

- Account management & customer service

Publish Date: April 2010

Author: Marwan Soghaier & Jared Reitzin, mobileStorm

Number of Pages: 9

We are happy to feature the latest Ninja to arrive at the Hive. The eMail Guide team welcomes SuccessByEmail.

With over 15 years experience in the email marketing industry, SuccessByEmail is ready to implement unique and custom strategies that provide excellent results for their customers.

• Delivery of the right message at the right time – whether by sending an email or a direct text to a cell phone (SMS) – is essential to an effective marketing message.
• By tracking every aspect of email deployments with world class analytics, SuccessByEmail helps you make better marketing decisions and increase your bottom line. You view your own email statistics for instant tracking and reporting.
• Leads are generated by utilizing SuccessByEmail’s analytics and directly capturing those interested in your message from your website.

SuccessByEmail can help you increase your list of subscribers, do critical business promotions, and send out email newsletters – all at affordable prices using easy self-service tools. They provide one of the most powerful enterprise-class email deployment engines available.

Take a narrated tour. To see how easy and effective your email messages can be with the SuccessByEmail email marketing system, take a narrated product demonstration tour. You can stop, replay, or skip sections of the tour as you wish. SuccessByEmail’s strategy development and custom support are unequaled in the business.

In addition to their self-serve email deployment services, SuccessByEmail offers fully deployed email marketing services managed by their own product specialists. You can sit back, relax, and enjoy the results of SuccessByEmail’s powerful and effective email services.

Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time!

With over 15 years experience creating corporate websites and custom applications, the people behind SucessByEmail.com know what it takes to create the most effective and comprehensive email marketing messages. Aside from providing you with one of the most powerful enterprise-class email deployment engines anywhere, we are committed to adding value for all of our customers by helping you implement unique and custom strategies that yield maximized results.

Weather you’re looking for an affordable way to send an email newsletter, critical email promotion, or simply build your list, discover how SuccessByEmail can help meet your needs.

With SuccessbyEmail you can:

• Get started fast with customizable HTML email templates
• Easily create your email messages with our email wizard
• Build and manage your email lists
• Instant tracking and reporting
• Ensure deliverability of your email message
• Easy collection of email addresses from your web site
• Automatic bounce-back and unsubscribe management
• CAN-SPAM and PIPEDA compliance
• SMS text messaging

Start your FREE trial today! Click here.

If you want to see how our email marketing system works, we invite you to take a look at our narrated, online product demonstration. Our flexible tour format allows you to stop, skip or replay sections as needed.

The Following Topics Are Covered In This Email Marketing Tour:

• Welcome/Getting Started
• Defining Your Message
• Importing Your Lists
• Creating Your Email
• Viewing Your Email Statistics
• Take a Tour Now!

To setup a demonstration of Success by email, click here for details.

Additional Services Provided by SuccessByEmail.com

Although SuccessByEmail offers you numerous professionally-designed templates, we also offer to design custom HTML email templates specifically crafted for your organization.

SuccessByEmail.com Strategy Development will help you:

• Identify your e-marketing objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Define email address and demographic collection strategies
• Define email content
• Define and refine data integration and collection from online and offline sources
• Employ marketing methods and techniques to increase email subscription rates and drive more traffic
• Identify key subscription questions
• Maximize deployment frequency and timing
• Select subject lines
• Determine email content volume and relevancy
• Select ideal templates
• Refine list-building strategies
• Utilize surveys and contests and interpret their results

Managed Deployment Services

Most SBE customers use the comprehensive self-serve tool to deploy their email messages and measure campaign results. SuccessByEmail also offers email deployment services managed by product specialists for those customers who prefer to sit back and experience the results and power of effective email marketing.

It’s not email! That’s according to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as he announced Facebook’s new “messaging” application today. Unified messaging isn’t a new idea, others have failed with this in the past, but they didn’t have Facebook’s huge client base to roll it out to either.

He also made the case that this is not an email killer as has been claimed in some media hype, but he did suggest that it may well be the better way for younger people who are more accustomed to “real time” communications.

The basic goal is to make communications via this platform feel like a conversation and a no-brainer.

Right now it’s doesn’t support IMAP, but Facebook does plan to support that standard email protocol.

The new feature will start rolling out as invite only over the next few weeks.

You can request an invite from Facebook here!

The new service has 3 key features:

Seamless Messaging

The idea here is for people only to have to worry about the message and who they are sending it to. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the message is via SMS, email or IM — the platform doesn’t matter on the Facebook service.

Conversation History

Threading is confusing for most according to Facebook. Their idea is to sort messages as conversations between people so that you end up with a history of each of those conversations. Consider it a log book or even a e-scrapbook of your interactions.

Social Inbox

This is basically filtering depending on your choices — allowing you to organize your preferred or priority messages. This might sound familiar to Gmail’s Priority Inbox but, it’s true when Facebook makes the claim that they do have some more behavioral tracking data which makes the filtering that much more powerful and personal.

So what’s my take on all this?

It’s another way for them to open up more doors to advertisers to market to their membership. I appreciate the fact that Facebook wants to portray this as a noble attempt to make it easier to connect and communicate with friends. However, I believe this came out of that basic need to monetize Facebook and you do that by opening channels you can sell to potential advertisers. Sure they want to make the world a smaller, more connected place, but someone has to pay the bills some way.

Can Facebook really unify messaging across platforms such as mobile, social and email without most of their member’s heads exploding? If so, they’ve got a marketing channel to offer that may make all past mediums pale by comparison for flexibility, power and reach. It’s no slam dunk, but the game just got a whole lot more interesting.

As Loren McDonald points out in his blog today, the one certainty is that this development and the announcement of “Project Phoenix” from AOL email, assures us of  of email address changes and list churn.

What do you think?

Blog coverage

Facebook Messaging: So, what’s wrong with email?

Email Marketing Reports: Actually, Facebook changes everything (and nothing)

Blue Sky Factory: Facebook Messages: Email Marketing Analysis

Direct Mag: What You Need to Know About Facebook’s New Messaging Platform

Mashable: The New Facebook Messages: A Walkthrough [SCREENSHOTS]

Marketing Vox: 10 Ways for E-mail Marketers to Survive Facebook Messages

EmailBlog.eu: Facebook launches new multichannel Messages system

Loren McDonald of Silverpop: Are You Ready for a Flood of Email Address Changes?

Sendlabs: Staying Alive: Email Marketing Industry Still A-OK After Facebook Messaging Announcement

AllFacebook.com: Facebook Vs Gmail: Would They Switch? [Results]

Pure360: Facebook vs Google, AOL, Yahoo and everyone else

Splash Of The Titan Part 3 – Facebook’s New Email Offering

Blue Sky Factory: How to Prepare for Email Marketing’s Biggest Challenge Ever: Facebook Project Titan

AdvertisingAge: Facebook Email Move Challenges Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Mashable: Facebook Announces New Messaging System: “It’s Not E-mail”

Tech Crunch: Facebook’s Modern Messaging System: Seamless, History, And A Social Inbox

Live stream from MPEIS

If you could talk to a room full of the top marketers in North America, what would you say to them? We go to people on the street and ask them what advice they want to give.

We took our cameras to the street to find out how and where people socialize online. Do they interact with brands on Facebook? How do they feel about ads on social networks? The answers may surprise you.

How much do you use SMS/text? How do you talk to your friends and family? Some people you SMS and some people you phone. The phone is a more formal communication method. How do you feel about SMS advertising?

We stepped out on the street with our cameras to ask people if they had any brands they love or just like. Which brands do the best job of marketing via email to you? We get some interesting responses and ask why they love who they love.

Do people prefer to be the instigators of communication with brands? How do they feel if a brand emails them with triggered suggestions or coupons based on their behavior? The reactions of those we spoke to were not as predictable as you might think.

Source: eROI

• What new factors marketers must consider when optimizing email for “readability”
• What percentage of the eROI study participants’ lists are interacting on mobile
• What days and times generally get the highest mobile read rate
• A few simple steps for ensuring email campaigns are optimized for marketers’ target audience/s

Source: iMedia

by Chris Marriott

Billy Squier made the song “Everybody Wants You” a No. 1 hit back in 1982, and although this pop culture reference might seem as stale as the beer I drank back then, it calls out through the ages to ask a key question of email and mobile messaging marketers today. Namely, who owns the e-direct customer when every product manager wants him or her?

Let me describe a scenario that should sound familiar to any marketer with experience in a large or even medium-sized enterprise. Email and mobile messaging fall into the domain of one (or perhaps more than one) program manager. This person has the responsibility of growing the email and mobile audiences while maintaining their engagement. After all, it hardly serves a marketer to keep filling a leaky bucket.

Meanwhile, this company has more than one product to sell. Perhaps a bank has consumer deposit accounts, small business accounts, credit cards, and investment products. Perhaps a consumer electronics manufacturer sells TVs, audio equipment, and handheld electronics. Perhaps a retailer has merchandisers for apparel, appliances, toys, and other goods. In any case, many marketers have a host of product managers or merchandisers who all want to promote their portfolios to the same pool of customers via email or mobile messaging.

Those of you who have faced this issue, or those of you who think fast, see the inherent issue with this arrangement: The message platform managers win by keeping the total number of contacts relatively small, while the product managers win by blasting away to drive revenue. Since the product managers don’t care whether customers flee, they have nothing to lose by sending offer after offer. And, since marketing dollars within an organization typically flow from the product managers to the program managers, they tend to get their way, much to the consternation of the program managers. Response numbers matter, but not as much as revenue numbers.

Source: ExactTarget

by Al Iverson

This article from the CTA Tattler blog points out that Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus riders who use US Cellular are currently unable to obtain bus tracking info via SMS. The issue supposedly relates to a problem with the CTA’s SMS partner, TextMarks.

Reading between the lines, I wonder if perhaps there is a spam blocking issue here. Maybe this specific carrier is unhappy with some practice the CTA is engaged in, or perhaps some other TextMarks client has done something that raised the carrier’s ire and resulted in them blocking all text messaging functionality between the carrier and the partner’s clients. (I don’t mean to imply that this is proof that TextMarks did something wrong. I don’t know anything about them. I’m theorizing.)

Transcontinental has acquired Montreal-based LIPSO, a provider of integrated mobile solutions, including connectivity, transaction management (SMS, MMS, etc.) and applications development. As an enhancement to its marketing communications solutions in new media and digital platforms, this purchase adds a number of key services to Transcontinental’s marketing communications offering, including cell phone bar code reading, mobile couponing in retail sales, and electronic ticketing in transportation and entertainment.

“Every day we work with our clients on the analysis, execution and deployment of their marketing strategies based on one-to-one marketing and new communication platforms,” said Christian Trudeau, President of the Marketing Communications Sector, Transcontinental. “The LIPSO acquisition fits right in with this approach and makes it possible for us to create a unique centre of excellence for mobile marketing solutions. It also confirms our leading position in the delivery of marketing communications solutions.”

Vivianne Gravel, President of LIPSO, added: “I’m very happy that our company is now part of a major corporation like Transcontinental, which will ramp up our development. This acquisition will keep ownership of LIPSO technology and its jobs in Canada. It’s exciting news for LIPSO clients and employees.”

Sophie Hennion, Chief Executive Officer of LIPSO, said: “This transaction will help LIPSO’s growth in terms of both products and services development and business development, in a period of rocketing demand for mobile applications.”

Details on the transaction price and information have not been released. As of today, the 30 LIPSO employees, Vivianne Gravel and Sophie Hennion join the approximately 850 employees in Transcontinental’s Marketing Communications Sector.

Success by Email

To understand the small and dynamic integration shop Successbyemail.com, it is important to look back at their history.  Originally named “Save-A-Stamp”, BrunoPalozzi has been developing their email and SMS deployment platform for almost ten years as a department within their parent company “Systems Interactive”.

The Swiss Army Knife of Email Systems

Now as a distinct service and brand, Successbyemail.com is a hidden gem – a robust and specialized Email Marketing Service Provider and Deployment Platform with a specialization in integrating systems. Unlimited templates, dynamically insertable data fields and allowing databases to be portable and exportable are already enough to turn my head, but Success by Email also provides an API for the client’s other systems to be able to speak with their email platform.  Bruno provided two examples of how they specialize in allowing diverse systems to speak to each other to create a sophisticated value proposition for email marketing.  Currently, they are working with a client on a kiosk that sends electronic postcards from visitors, but also provides an opt-in that grows and defines their subscriber list.  The other example is a prescription reminder alert via SMS, that they provide for two pharmaceutical companies – a system they envisioned and implemented in the last year.

With no set-up fees, no data set-up and campaigns as large as you want Success by Email pride themselves on being very flexible and responsive.

Emails that say SkuYou!!

Another good example of Systems Interactive innovative technology development and integration is “SkuYou”, a 2-D barcode system that can be read by handheld devices *and* have the users information added and/or updated within the client’s email platform database immediately.

Successbyemail is Unique in Expertise and Value Proposition

With no set-up fees, no data set-up and campaigns as large as you want Success by Email pride themselves on being very flexible and responsive. If permission email marketing is the hidden gem of internet marketing, then Success By Email is truly a diamond waiting to be discovered.

You can find out more information about Success By Email in The eMail Guide’s Listings here

The thought of launching social marketing gives us that wonderful, heady feeling of both excitement and dread. By comparison email feels old-school and boring, although there is nothing boring about how much revenue email drives.

No need to take sides. Email and social marketing are inextricable. Consider the most important feature for any peer collaboration tool: The alert system. And that is mostly done via email (with a few notable exception teen services that alert via SMS). If you don’t got that, you don’t got much participation beyond maybe the founder and a few eccentric loyalists. Email is ubiquitous for both consumers and business professionals, and it’s still the best way to connect a social network with the rest of its members’ lives.

That’s the one thing I love about making the social media marketing channel and the email marketing channel work together. It’s a natural bond to create great subscriber experiences based on interactivity.

But I don’t love everything about how these channels work together. Here is one caution, one opportunity and one thing I hate about the ways marketers use these two channels:

One Caution: Social activity can significantly increase the volume of email messages from you to any one subscriber. You know that your marketing newsletter has nothing to do with the service alerts. But the subscriber only knows that they get a lot of messages from your company. That’s why it’s ever more important to synchronize the social aspects of your website with the email marketing program. Be sure not to overwhelm. Give subscribes a choice about the number and cadence of all email marketing – including alerts. Keep reminding them why they are getting alerts at a rapid pace (i.e: “Someone thinks your are smart and/or good looking” or “Remember, you asked for these”).

One Opportunity: Test how social media can actually enhance the value of all your email marketing. If connections are important to your business model or your customers, then certainly launch a blog and invite feedback. Allow readers to subscribe to your feed via email. Create a forum where customers and prospects can interact, post product reviews, and help each other. Allow free flow of information – and engage with participants as moderator, as well as subject matter expert. Encourage honesty, even when it hurts. Use email to follow up on questions and feature forum topics (or even summaries of the threads) in your email newsletter.

One Thing I Hate: Automatic download of my address book into the social network’s invitation widget. Please, don’t do this on your site – it is pretty much guaranteed to produce both a terrible email stream (and get you quickly blacklisted and blocked at the ISPs) and a miserable experience for most of the recipients. Plus, it’s a lousy first impression of your service for your new member, who is sure to get some nasty flames from friend and business associates that no one (lest of all the address book owner!) knew were on that list. I know it SOUNDS like a great way to build a community fast – but it’s at best a risky business move and a worst fatal for all email marketing you want to do in future. Better, wait until you’ve established some value with the new member and then ask her to start telling her friends about it. Or, set a lot of parameters around the “invite a friend” to make sure that everyone who is invited is truly a friend.

What do you love, struggle with and hate (or even get annoyed by) when you combine social media with email?

Stephanie Miller @ www.returnpath.net Twitter @stephanieSAM

At Bongos on Monday night the ExactTarget team were clad in orange shirts inviting everyone to text:

Bongos to 38767

Being a Canadian my text message was a little slow to arrive but the guys at ExactTarget new exactly how to fix that.

Nice job Scott and Ratul.