Posts Tagged "TextMe"

Having just blogged about a scenario blending elements of customer analysis-driven mobile marketing programs, I found it timely that my colleague John Wood the same day posted to the Interactive Mediums product blog about several new features in TextMe that have a similar intent.

The first is a new capability called “Contact List.” Although it’s useful to view customers associated with specific campaigns or that are part of existing opt-in message lists (features already in TextMe), a level of abstraction higher inclusive of all your customers can potentially have greater value. Especially over time, marketers can identify patterns of behavior across all activities which can inform the “best next action” to take with particular customer segments.

Continuing this theme of “more is better” when it comes to customer insight, another new capability within Contacts called “User Data” allows marketers to configure TextMe to gather whatever data is fundamentally a part of executing a successful mobile marketing program (beyond basic, lowest common denominator demographic data). Such configurability allows Marketers to fit TextMe to their needs, not the other way around as can be the case with some mobile marketing services providers. It also allows Marketers to build the foundation for a Mobile Customer Data asset specific to their business, which by its nature holds greater value than a fixed, prescribed list of attributes available for collection.

Perhaps just as important is that this new capability includes validation so that data written to a marketer’s Mobile Customer Data Asset conforms and does not require additional cleansing to be analyzed or re-used.

The last of John’s posts describes a significantly enhanced Survey Campaign, which has become more of a customer intelligence and research tool. Past limitations such as single question surveys and no data validation have been removed, making this now a viable customer intelligence solution for brand managers, market research firms and others needing to reach out to customers using the convenience of mobile.

If you are not already subscribed to the TextMe Product Blog, I suggest you do to follow additional developments in this direction.

Alright…so it’s been quite awhile since our last post. We’ve been busy working on a lot of new features with our TextMe platform, here are just a few:

• Web voting widgets: No you can create true multi-channel voting by adding a web voting widget to your website. Web votes can be unlimited, or limited to the number of allowable entries that are defined on the campaign.
• Dynamic tags for vote response messages: A ‘dynamic tag’ is a small string that can be inserted into a message that will be changed in real time at the time of vote. For example, inserting ‘[TOTAL#]‘ into a vote response message will change the string to ‘42′ if there are currently 42 total votes. We’ve added a slew of tags available for each voting option (keyword, description, current number of votes, current percentage) as well as total number of votes.
• Contest response tags: We currently support four types of unique contests, and we’ve added a ton of tags for each type of contest. A few examples include, current number of entries, count of entries left until a winner has won, etc.
• Routing campaign management updates: What’s a routing campaign? This is the simply the mechanism that we’ve setup to route incoming text messages to and from another system. When we receive a text message with a matching keyword, we’ll forward on to the third party system for that system to do their processing, and once they’re done with that processing the third party can then send a message back to the user through our messaging API.  We also support nifty stuff like sticky sessions (basically locking a phone number into a route for short period of time). We’ve also added keyword management to the API.
• Email and SMS notification of activity: A great example of this is with our info on demand campaign. Upon receiving the corresponding keyword, we can send a notification to any email address or mobile phone number via SMS. To test this out, just text DEMO to 839863 and you’ll get a call from a member of our team.

If you’d like to chat about any of these features in more detail, give us a ring at 866-683-9863 (866-6TEXTME), or email us at hello@interactivemediums.com.

In addition to that stuff, I just wanted to let people know that we’re working hard to build the best mobile marketing platform out there, and are adding new stuff each week. We support clients from big (Orbitz, Anheuser Busch, Ogilvy) to small, and we understand that everyone has their own unique needs. Here are some bread and butter features that we think are important, but we frankly don’t spend much time talking about:

• Support for multiple accounts: Need to manage multiple accounts? Want to assign different permissions to each user? Want to get setup with your own domain/sub-domain? No problem.
  
• Support for multiple short codes: Yep, we can do this.
  
• Aggregation partner managment: We currently work with three different aggregation partners are and are building relationships quickly. We can work directly with an aggregation partner, or you can setup an account with them directly and just provide us your account details.
• Short code management: We’ll work directly with the CSCA (Common Short Code Administration) on your behalf to secure your code and manage billing. Or you can work with them directly.

Finally, there are great things happening within mobile right now outside of mobile messaging, and we’re jumping in (hint: it starts with iphone).