Content Marketing

Image Courtesy: Cellcom.eu

So, the Product Manager for a dating app walked up to my desk and said, “The content for the SMS you had given was awesome. But it didn’t fare well in terms of user acquisition. I’m not sure why.”

Code Red! Code Red! We had a problem!

“What is the frequency of the texts that we are sending?” I asked.

“Twice a week!” he muttered.

There we had the answer.

One would agree that the mobile phone is that communication platform with the most impact on users due to its penetration. Just because a piece of content reads brilliantly well does not mean that it will reach the users as much.

The question therefore is when to (or not to) send an SMS.

Here are three simple lessons that I learned:

Use SMS to deliver critical information or one that requires immediate action.

The frequency of the SMS determines the open-and-read rate. The lesser the frequency the better the open rate.

To-reference information is for E-mails.

Consider this. You have a payment receipt (one that will be referred to in the future) to be sent to the user. With a character limit of 160 and the difficulty to search through for information, wouldn’t it be easier to send the payment receipt through an e-mail? It would save the user a lot of trouble. Trust me!

Save everyday updates for Push Notifications.

Push notifications are your best bet when it comes to everyday updates.

You may have daily updates that the user had signed up for or information that you are tempted to send every day. Pace them out else users will tend to ignore them and may miss the critical action-driven ones you send them.

So, do not do it!

This sums it up for us. I will add to the list as and when I glean from something new. Meanwhile, if you have anything to share on when to use SMS or how to make it work, drop them as comments.