The future of Premium Rate SMS?

Is there any more room for the humble content provider in todays consumer market? And is it really worth it?

Well, the saleman in me says yes of course there is, and always will be - as long as you have the cash funds to back you up and allow you to make some money. On the other hand, if you're a 9 to 5 worker and have a great idea, unless you're willing to take on a financial baker who's going to take a chunck of your profits off you, then sadly the inn is full.

I think that from here on, the real benefit that organisations will recieve is the information you can collect, for example, I bet you anything that from a well publicised competition the amount of information you can get from an individual consumer would be great, and here's where we see the benefit.

The best way to find an answer is to ask a question, and the best way to ask a question is with a carrot. For example, how does Coke-a-Cola really know the demographics of their consumer audience? Sure they do things like their market research campaigns where they get a bunch of kids in a room and ask them questions, but that's kind of limited. A much better way is to run a competition and ask them a question about themselves, either subtley or straight up.

A standard line is "SMS your name and age to 19xx xxxx", or "Text your name and address to 19xx xxx" - you could probably even ask them for their name, age and address for the trifector. What's the names of my consumers? How old are they? And where are they? This allows us to know how we price our products? Can our target audience afford to buy our product? How do we market our product? And where do we market product so that our customers can better be exposed to our branding?

It wasn't until Esendex that I really thought about marketing, and best practice market at that. Previously I'd worked for some large corporates that had their own marketing departments that looked after these matters - yes we had sales meetings that talked about how we can sell our products better, but being more effecient with our marketing dollar was not our concern, well not the concern of the sales division anyway.

This is why I'm such a big wrap for running compeitions with Premium Rate SMS services, is that it's relatively cheap, easy to use and thanks to shows like Australian Idol and Big Brother, people have no qualms about sending off a text message and obeying your demands of personal information - plus because it's a competition, people are more likely to be truthful for fear of missing out on that major prize!

Sure there will always be a Gumi Bear, Crazy Frog or whatever is on the horizon which somehow gets into the charts turning over vast sums of money, but as the most consumer friendly, consumer hip and the most consumer acceptable way of market research the greater community makes it king of the marketing castle.

And I thought day dreaming at work was a bad thing?

It's funny being a bit of a day dreamer myself I always thought that doing it during work hours meant that I wasn't effectively making best use of my time, and always found myself feeling somewhat guilty if I felt that I'd been away with the fairies for too long - despite most of the time I'd been thinking about work, how to close deals, how I could have done something differentlly, better and/or easier.

I was listening to a talk back radio station today as I was driving back from lunch and I didn't really get to hear much of the interview itself, but from what I got it was abhout thinking differently and allowing yourself time during the day or week to do nothing but play with new things, new ideas and so on. One of the examples he gave immediately was as part of Google's work policy they allow one full day per week for staff to do nothing but play with things, and use their resources with the hope of coming up with a good idea - Google Earth for instance!
They quickly followed up by then saying that companies like 3M have actually been doing this for years, and allow 15% of a staff memebers time for the same thing - and neither company attaches a KPI to this either, so there's no pressure to come up with something better than the last.

The philosopy behind this idea is that we as a business hire you as a staff member and we think you're smart, so we're going to allow you time to play be creative and hopefully we may get one solid idea out of you that can change the way we do things around here for the better.

The question that was mentioned that I thought was a great question was this - if our industry was recreated tomorrow what would we do differently, what would we do to improve the system and service?

So if I had the chance to recreate the mobile services industry or Esendex for that matter? I'm not sure, and that's probably something for another blog.

What I will be doing is looking at the way I organise myself so that I can make the time in the week that allows me to think about it!

Cheers,
C

To use offshore services or not? And if so, how good are they?

Whilst there will always be a place for the cheapest services ever in every market place whether it the bloke at the set of traffic lights who kinds of cleans/smears your windscreen with something fluid, take away restaurants on the side of the road somewhere a long way from somewhere else or an SMS service, I put it to you that not all SMS services are created equally.

From the providers such as ourselves who deal directly with the networks all the way down to those providers who have a single connection with a Telco that even the locals where the Telco is based have never heard of them, and everyone in between!

I know what you’re thinking, but I really don’t have anything against cheap and cheerful services, or cheap and nasty services for that matter, just as long as the companies using these services understand that what they are getting are not necessarily the same as other services offered in the market place. I have no qualms admitting that when potential customers ask me for pricing so low that I may as well be paying them for sending messages through our gateway I’m offended, both personally and professionally – professionally because I must have missed that element of our site which gives people the impression that we are prepared to compare the quality of our products and services to the cheapest of the cheap in everyway, and personally because they must be assuming that I am without any moral substance that I am prepared to sell a product I know most likely will only work sometimes, rather than all of the time.

Let’s get something straight, this is not about how good any of these products are when they are working, because let face it, when it works it works and all services are on par. The Lipmann’s test is when the service is broken. How long before it’s resolved? How long before I can speak to someone? How many times do I have to contact them before they give me an answer? Do they appreciate your pain in having the service not working when you need to contact your customers? For what ever reason are you going to be offered the same level of quality, support and timely response as you will with a locally routed service and if you’re the kind of person that demands a quality service, then you’re going to have to pay a premium for that service.

If quality is not your only concern, and price is a factor that you just can’t ignore then go for an offshore route by all means, please, but understand that not all offshore SMS services are created equal either.

I guess you are looking at a couple of types of offshore services, those who use well known and large Telco’s like Sprint, Vodafone and O2 for example, and those that use networks so small, that the only people who have heard of them work for them or have a family member that does.

The problem with these services is that the networks that are used to pass the messages through generally have interconnect agreements which means that application to consumer messaging will be block, and does get block – i.e. web based SMS services.

A recent example of this would be Telstra blocked messages from a number of providers from passing through which effected companies like Tri-Tel from successfully sending outbound messages.

If you are going to take the opinion that you don’t see the value in paying for a locally based service, then look at the offshore route, but do yourself the favour and ask them which countries are they routing their messages to, and through which networks? In most cases the difference in cost per message will be less than a couple of cents and out of that you will not only get a more reliable service, but a much improved delivery success rate meaning that you are not paying for lost messages.

Of course there are a number of other reasons why going locally is the best option, but I’ll leave that for another day and another post.

Welcome to Esendex Australia

Hello, hello - this is the first blog for Esendex Australia and so just wanted to welcome you and invite you post your thoughts and comments on anything regarding SMS and/or Esendex.

We are looking forward to posting our news and events here, as well as hearing what our customers have to say as well.

Regards,
Chris