Hoping to entice marketers and advertisers with a better-than-average response rate, Infinite Media of White Plains, NY, is using a recently acquired cell phone text messaging database for prospecting.
“The response rates from text messaging are some of the best response rates,” said Richard Johnson, VP of sales for Infinite Media.
The company recently put its Cell Phone Texting World list on the market, giving marketers the chance to send SMS blasts to as many as 25 million people. The minimum order is 150,000.
Johnson said marketers have the opportunity to create “a highly delivered ad” such as a link to a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) page. Marketers could also deliver more elaborate ads to those with phones that could support viewing them, such as an iPhone, said Johnson.
However, marketers can use the list for simply to send mass text message blasts for advertisements such as a sale at a retail store, a party at a bar or club, or to direct them to a particular Web page.
Johnson noted that the list is selectable by geographic location, so if for example a department store wanted to send a text blast to everyone on the list within 30 miles of said store to alert them of a sale going on, it could do so.
“Really, there are a lot of possibilities,” he said. “You can instantly communicate with your prospects, it’s so real time.”
Marketers would have a limit of 160 characters of information they could text to the phones.
Johnson said with there being a sort of “gray area” in regards to legal statutes using text messages for direct marketing opportunities, the owner of the data required a triple opt-in for a person to appear on the list.
“They wanted to ensure that the people on the list really wanted to receive promotional messages,” he said.
Names appearing on the list first saw opt-in language when opening up the contract for the phone, he said. That was followed by an opt-in disclaimer when text messaging on the phone was activated, and finally consumers who still wanted to opt-in were directed to a third-party Web site to do so, he said..
Johnson said each marketing message someone on the database receives will be accompanied by an opt-out option.
