3 GOLDEN RULES OF SMS/MMS MARKETING

• Category: Mobile

November 16th, 2009   Posted by: Sam Granleese   Comments (2)

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA), their sales representatives Big Mobile, and digital agency Tongue (formally known as New Dialogue) were recently reprimanded by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in relation to an SMS campaign for Coca-Cola. VHA and Tongue will pay $110,000 and $22,000 in fines to ACMA for breaches of the Spam Act, while Big Mobile will compensate the recipients of the messages.

It is important that this incident does not set back the mobile marketing industry, as the breaches to the Spam Act in the campaign were quite simple and should have been easily corrected with the right procedures and knowledge in place.

So what were they, and what are the fundamental rules of permission marketing to mobile phones?

The Spam Act sets out that commercial electronic messages (emails, SMS messages, MMS messages, instant messaging messages, et al) must generally have the following features:

1. Consent – it must be sent with the recipient’s consent. The recipient may give express consent, or consent may be inferred from their conduct and ‘existing business or other relationships’. This is usually by opt-ing into a database owned by a carrier and often at account creation, or directly with a brand that a recipient has a relationship with or gave consent to at some point to message them.

2. Identify – it must contain clear and accurate information about the person or organisation that authorised the sending of the message.

3. Unsubscribe – it must contain a functional ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘opt-out’ facility to allow the recipient to stop receiving messages from that source, the identity, in the future.

It is important to remember that all three are intrinsically linked, and must reflect the relationship the recipient of the message has with the sender.

For example if Coca Cola is sending a message to people who have previously given it permission to communicate with them by mobile, they must identify themselves as Coca Cola and fulfill any opt-out requests themselves with their database, even if the send is being managed by a third-party SMS vendor.

A common alternative to this is for a brand to partner with a mobile carrier or database with a special offer. This is where the relationship is different. In this situation mobile users have given permission to a company, for example Vodafone, to occasionally send them special offers from partners (this agreement is also usually limited by a frequency i.e. no more than one per week).

If a brand like Coca Cola wishes to give a special offer or advertise a message to this database, the message must be delivered by the owner of that relationship (i.e. Vodafone) who also manages any opt-outs from the database after the send. Below is a correct example of a Qantas campaign our agency executed with Vodafone members last year.

Permission marketing is common sense and with mobile messaging this is no different. Theoretically the owner of a database will only send partner messages that offer their members value (if this is what they promised the subscribed user) otherwise they risk that mobile user opting out forever and foregoing future revenue. Australians like receiving offer messages, as long as they are getting something of value that is relevant to them, and from someone they have said is okay to occasionally send to them.

So just make sure you follow ACMA’s three golden rules of consent, identity, and unsubscribe, and you’ll have access to a very effective, and oft-appreciated, medium.