Please take a look, it would be fantastic to hear what you think!

1. VIP preview campaigns
   This is a great added-value service you can offer to a select group of customers by alerting them to new stock arrivals, exclusive viewings or personalised offers and if you encourage your VIPs to forward the SMS to a friend in order to expand your customer base.
2. Launching a new product?
   Send customers the latest information about your new product, including their nearest point of sale. Give your customers the opportunity to reply in order to receive bonus packs or free samples.
3. Sale campaign promotions
   Why not tell your customer database about your latest sales promotions in advance via SMS. You can send a simple text message to inform customers of upcoming sales, a new store opening in their area, limited offers etc straight to your customers, regardless of where they are.
4. Virtual coupons
   How about sending a virtual coupon to some of your customers which they can then present to receive a discount, special offer or free entry? If you give customers the option to reply to the SMS with the details of a friend or family member who might also be interest in receiving a coupon, you can build brand awareness and increase your customer base. You can set up your message to be received at a specific time, such as lunch times, bank holidays, Mother’s Day etc.
5. Making your campaigns viral
   Encourage recipients to pass your SMS onto others. This increases the credibility of the message. Incentivise them by offering entry into a competition or specified discount as a reward. This can be particularly effective when promoting an event or show.
6. Steal the march on your competitors
   Say you’re a retailer and you’ve just managed to obtain the latest products at a rock bottom price. However you only have a limited window to sell the items before your competitors obtain the same stock. Placing a newspaper advert or direct mailing your customers would have long a lead time. SMS provides a great channel to communicate the news instantly.
7. Give your email newsletter an extra push
   Do you send an email newsletter to your customers every month? Increase your opening rates by sending an SMS featuring the highlights or headers of your latest edition. You could even include a link in the SMS body to the online version of your newsletter if most of your recipients are likely to have internet capability via their phones.
8. Updates to customer details
   Do you have a missing field in your customer database or need additional demographics? Rather than employ a costly telemarketing company or have to send out a costly questionnaire, why not simply use an SMS campaign asking the recipient to reply with the required details in order to be entered into a prize draw, or some other incentive. You can easily track all customer replies
9. Test marketing
   Test marketing can be an expensive exercise through traditional channels. Using SMS is cost effective channel which is quick and easy to set-up.
10. Pre-orders
    Planning to launch a new product soon? Contacting your customers via SMS and giving them a chance to pre-order for a discount or an exclusive bundle of products, will allow you to gauge the likely demand for your product before you launch.

Have you used SMS in an innovative marketing campaign recently? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Something hard to comprehend is that Voice SMS has been available for several years.  So why now is it becoming more popular?  I guess this could be because of several reasons…. the increase in mobile penetration, the overall acceptability of SMS, the realisation that Voice SMS has additional benefits over and above SMS ?  These are just a few points to think about.

At Esendex, we have seen many uses for Voice SMS.  Hospitals, pharmaceuticals and chemists use Voice SMS, to send to high risk patients for dosing reminders.  In this instance, when messages are particularly important, SMS to voice is a fundamental feature because you are able to confirm with the “acknowledged” status that the message has been listened to.

At Esendex, we have seen a large take up in Voice SMS by debt collection companies. We have a client who began using SMS to voice, at the beginning they were sending thousands of messages each month, unfortunately for us, it has been so successful in collecting debt that they now only send a small proportion of what they had started sending as they no longer need to send follow up messages.

There are a variety of reasons why you might choose Voice SMS over SMS. To name a few,  it could be that you provide services to people who are partially sighted, blind or elderly and therefore find SMS to voice a quick and easy method to communicate information?  It could be that the message you need to send is quite long? (Text messages are charged in multiples of 160 characters)

The key factors to think about with SMS voice messaging is the speed of the message and the retry costs.  If this is something that you are thinking about, then my advice is to check the speed that the messages are read, if they have an Australian accent,  whether or not there are automatic retries on the account and are they free?

If you are an existing customer and would like to try Voice SMS simply visit your account to enable.  If you don’t have an account the please sign-up for a free trial – It would be great to hear what you think!

A virtual mobile number is an 11 digit number that allows you to receive SMS back to the number you sent your SMS from. Yes in most cases you could supplement the originator with your own mobile number, however the replies will go back to your mobile, and whether that’s scalable for your business is then I guess you need to decide.

Many of our customers offer 2-way SMS services to their customers, employees and suppliers as they can see the benefits of getting replies directly to their SMS account. In fact, many start with a send only SMS service then move on to a send and receive SMS service later on.

Web SMS providers do different things, such as offer dedicated virtual numbers, which just means you’re the only company using it. Alternatively they will suggest a dynamic virtual number which means that every SMS message goes out with a different number as the originator than the last.

Here at Esendex, we offer dedicated virtual mobile numbers. We feel that dedicated virtual mobile numbers have a number of distinct advantages over dynamic virtual mobile numbers.

You effectively “own” the number, so you can use it for advertising and to publicise it to your staff, customers and clients. With dedicated virtual numbers you can be confident knowing that your replies are getting through, as only respondents to your SMS business campaign use that number. Recipients will also see the same number every time so they know who the message is from.

Our prices for our VMN’S are $25 a month and SMS replies are free. Get in touch with us at sales@esendex.com.au and we will add a 2-way SMS messaging facility to your Esendex account straight away.

One SMS is much like another, right? So why are everybody’s prices different?

Esendex has never sought to be a least-cost router although we’ve always tried to be competitive. Our pricing policy is based on 4 basic principles:

1. Keep it simple
2. The more you spend, the lower the price
3. The greater your commitment, the lower the price
4. Esendex needs to be a profitable business to offer a viable, long term Business SMS Service. 

Keep it simple

We operate in a number of markets, not just Australia but also the UK, Ireland, Spain, France and Germany and and over the years we have realised that the vast majority of our customers send “local” traffic: Australian customers tend to send within Australia, German customers tend to send within Germany.

We have sufficient volume in each market to offer our customers a “blended” price: we make no distinction between local and international traffic. We do not operate on a credit basis – one SMS – or indeed Voice SMS – can be sent anywhere.

Some destinations cost us a little more, some a little less but we can absorb these variances. Most of our customers find this clarity important.

We also make no charge for delivery receipts, set-up, support or our SDKs.

The more you spend, the lower the price.

Other SMS providers prefer a flatter price profile, ie there is a smaller discount for higher volumes. Some even offer flat pricing regardless of volume.

This can be to our disadvantage in straight price comparisons but we believe that it’s the right thing to do.

When you are doing your own price comparison its worth considering how we’ll compare in the future when your volumes have grown, not just now when you are starting out.

Some of our customers have even chosen to do their testing with the cheapest service they can find and then move over to us once they’ve gone live.

The greater your commitment, the lower the price

We offer 2 basic pricing schemes: Prepaid SMS and our SMS Tracker Tariff.

Our lowest pricing is reserved for those customers who can make a greater commitment to us.

Potential customers sometimes ask why they should pay more if they pay in advance. We ask our Credit customers to commit to us (a minimum spend of just $25 for at least 3 months for our Tracker Tariff) and we feel that we need to reward or incentivise this commitment. And for those customers who can commit to a specific volume each month we’re able to lock in an even better price with a bespoke tariff.

We also believe that it’s in everyone’s interests to enter into a longer term arrangement – we’re still working with almost 75% of our first 100 customers from 2002!

Esendex needs to be a profitable business to offer a viable, long term Business SMS Service.

The SMS market is a competitive one and we’re mindful of this – in fact we’ve just reduced all our prices. But if you are to enter into a long term relationship or are prepurchasing messages you need to know that those messages will still be available when you need them in the future.

Esendex is no start-up. We’ve been profitable for many years and can afford to continue to grow and develop our service.

We also need to be able to afford to deliver your messages via more than one route.

The Mobile Network Operator’s connections fail. If your supplier’s pricing is based on a mark-up on a single route what happens when that route fails? Can they still afford to deliver your message? Esendex can deliver via a minimum of 4 routes into each of its markets and this is absorbed within our pricing.

So is Esendex right for you?

Our pricing works for most – it’s not right for everyone.

However, we are also flexible. If you are delivering to a specific market or have particular constraints or issues we may be able to construct a bespoke tariff.

Give us a call on 1300-764-946 or email sales@esendex.com.au if you’d like to talk through your requirements. ]]> http://blog.esendex.com.au/post/our-pricing-policy-explained/feed/ 0 http://blog.esendex.com.au/post/are-you-using-an-sms-service-to-build-customer-loyalty-if-not-why-not/ http://blog.esendex.com.au/post/are-you-using-an-sms-service-to-build-customer-loyalty-if-not-why-not/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:00:21 +0000 Ann http://172.16.1.140/blog/?p=288

I recently wrote an article on using Business SMS services to increase customer loyalty and retention and thought it would be useful to offer a chopped down version on our blog.

It has been proven time and time again that customer loyalty and retention are central for increasing business revenue. After all, it costs on average, three times more to acquire new customers that it does to keep an existing one. A study by the global business consulting firm, Baines and Company concluded: “A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.” 

We are seeing more and more of our customers turning to Business SMS to build loyalty with their customers as its immediate, discreet, has high readership (over 98%), is cheaper than the phone and direct mail, and it encourages a response. One of the best devices for contacting people is the mobile phone, as they are always with their owner and they can use it wherever they are.

So how can a business use SMS to improve customer loyalty and retention? Here’s a few ideas for you:

• Regular SMS communication keeps your brand in the minds of your customers
• Use SMS to confirm appointment times, reducing no show rates and therefore your costs.
• Provide excellent Customer Service. Get your customer service team to communicate via SMS with customers.
• Encourage repeat purchase by sending timely reminders – such as insurance renewals, garage services, hairdressers etc.
• Use SMS to confirm delivery time of goods.
• Reinforce and build brand recognition and awareness through SMS marketing campaigns.
• Send last-minute promotions via SMS to boost demand for your products and services.
• Allow your customers to send SMS messages back to you. SMS lends itself to 2-way communication with customers.
• For many people today, SMS is the preferred method of communication for customers and if you don’t offer this channel your customer may go to a competitor that does.

And one last thought, always, always ensure your message recipients have opted in – there’s nothing worse than getting unsolicited text messages from companies you’re never heard of!