Top 10 reasons to leverage MMS Marketing
- MMS works universally on both smartphones and feature phones
SMS and MMS are the most widely available messaging channels today. Both SMS and MMS are delivered into the same inbox. Today they work on both feature phones and smart phones but in a few years it will also be available on your home phones, TV’s and in your car. Your do not need to install an application or create an account to benefit from or access an MMS message.
- MMS allows you to provide a rich multimedia experience to your audience.
You can deliver multiple images, audio, or videos within a single message. Today most MMS service providers will resize and adapt this content for the destination device. Video and Audio attachments are often limited in duration based on the network operator and the destination handset. You can generally send 25-30 second of video before reaching the size limits set by the US carriers for message delivery. Any more than 30 seconds and and the video quality will be degraded due to lower bitrate or audio sample rates. Many companies include their logo, product information or coupons.
- MMS messages are traditionally opened within a few minutes of receipt.
As Derek Johnson from Tatango recently pointed out, a common statistic thrown around the industry is that 90% of SMS messages are opened within three minutes of receiving them. This would imply that the same or greater amount of MMS messages are read within the first three minutes. Why? Becuase many phones, including the iPhones popup a preview when you are notified that a new message has arrived. It would be safe to assume that having a picture popup instead of text would not only speed the original 90% of people viewing of the message but convert some of the 10% who decided to ignore the SMS to review an MMS immediately.
- MMS marketing can utilize both outbound and inbound communication.
Delivering ALOT of content to a phone is not the only benefit to MMS messaging. You can reply to an MMS easily, either as an SMS reply or an MMS reply. This makes MMS a fantastic two way communication mechanism where one party may have more to say than the other. You can have people submit pictures without going through the pain of downloading and installing an application, worrying if the app supports their phone or they will be charged for data. It is also just as quick to submit an MMS message as it is to submit a SMS text message from the inbox.
- MMS messages can be shared and forwarded by recipients to anyone in theirphonebook.
Any MMS message delivered to you can be shared with your contacts. In fact, you can forward an MMS to multiple recipients at the same time. Selecting friends from your phonebook is probably the most simple and reliable way to share content.
- MMS messages provide you with device and network information about your audience.
When an MMS message is delivered the service provider can extract both device information and network information. Device information can be used to segment your audience by the type of phone they have. Network information can be used to determine their carrier and sometimes other information. Knowing this information often helps define the type of messaging campaign and frequency of messages you should be sending to the subscriber.
- MMS messages do not require text abbreviations because they can have over 1000 characters
MMS is capable of delivering 1000′s of characters of text in a single message. How much can your brand or enterprise really say in 160 characters of text? You certainly do not need to deliver a novel of text but sending a a few hundred characters per communication would be enough room so you do not have to abbreviate anything to get your message across. It also also means that each message can contain multiple links to different pages.
- MMS messages provide delivery receipts which guarantee important messages are delivered.
With each MMS message delivered a delviery receipt is returned providing the status of the message. MMS delivery receipts are part of the standard so obtaining a FINAL delivery status for each message is possible no matter which carrier you are on. This does not happen with email communication, social networks or even every SMS message.
- MMS messages are delivered over the same shortcode as SMS messages.
You do not need to spend money on a new shortcode. Your existing shortcode supports MMS already. You also do not need to start a new Opt-in list. Your existing subscribers that have opt-in on your shortcode can receive their MMS messages on the same shortcode. There are a few steps required to get your shortcode approved for MMS. You simply need to file a new brief with your aggregator. Contrary to what you may have heard, every Tier 1 carrier in the US supports MMS messaging.
- MMS messages are relatively inexpensive compared to the benefits.
MMS MT pricing has come way down from the levels it was at just a few years ago. You can now deliver an MMS message for only a few pennies more than an SMS message. If you are already paying for a Shortcode and/or SMS connectivity then adding MMS to your mix is a no-brainier.
Update: MMS Opt-in Confirmation Message
The mobile marketing best practice guidelines require you to deliver a confirmation message after someone has opt-in to your campaign. This message normally contains information about the campaign and how to opt-out. Using our platform, brands can now detect the handset of the subscriber by sending the opt-in confirmation message as an MMS instead of an SMS. The additional benefit here is that all future MMS messages can be specifically optimized for the recipients mobile device. You can also export their handset information and segment your list based on whether they are a smartphone subscriber or feature phone subscriber.
NFC Authentication Goes Mobile with Android App
Skycore LLC’s codeREADr app authenticates NFC transactions embedded in tags, wristbands, FOBs and phones.
First pilot tracks & validates reusable, rechargeable NFC wristbands for secure ticketing and stored value.
Boston, MA (April 30, 2012): Skycore LLC, developers of the commercial barcode and Near Field Communications (NFC) validation app, codeREADr (https://codereadr.com), today announced powering the first pilot where reusable, rewearable NFC-embedded wristbands can be tracked and validated using mobile, NFC-enabled Android devices.
Wristbands embedded with NFC chips are currently used by some festival organizers to improve ticket security. Some multi-use transit cards, like Boston’s CharlieCard, include NFC chips to enable fast, contactless validation. However, in both cases those tickets are typically validated either with stationary hardware or expensive mobile computers.
“Our commercial codeREADr app is the first to enable mobile tracking and validation of both barcodes and NFC targets using Android 4.0 (ICS),” said Rich Eicher, CEO of Skycore LLC. “This year there will be many new NFC-enabled devices introduced well suited for mobile commerce and enterprise applications. One of the more prominent is the new, unlocked and aggressively priced ($399) Samsung Nexus available at Google Play.”
In their pilot, a Baltimore based ticketing service provider, MissionTix (http://www.missiontix.com) is offering their venue clients stylish, reusable NFC wristbands for their patron to keep and ‘recharge’ online. In this way they may attend multiple events sponsored by the same venue, or participating venues, without having to get new tickets issued.
When the Android device taps the NFC wristband, codeREADr powers the NFC chip for a fraction of a second to read transaction data embedded in the chip. The app then validates this data in real-time against an on-device or online database of authorized values, typically managed by a ticketing company or other service provider on behalf of the venue or merchant. The embedded data cannot be forged or rewritten, making codeREADr’s NFC solution especially secure for ticketing and stored value transactions.
“MissionTix is the first to deploy our platform’s ‘One ID’ transaction technology using NFC,” said Eicher. “With it, a single ID embedded in a barcode or NFC target can be tracked and validated at one venue or an unlimited number of venues and merchants. Not only is this convenient for consumers but combining goods & services from multiple providers can potentially offer greater value to consumers.”
About Skycore LLC
Skycore LLC, a Boston-based mobile service provider since 2003, enables the creation delivery, reading and validating of data embedded in 1D/2D barcodes and NFC targets.
About MissionTix
MissionTix, a Baltimore-based online ticketing service, has catered to promoters, venues and festivals since 2001,offering lower service fees, marketing strategy and support, and personalized customer service.
Acteva Announces Next Generation Smartphone Lead Retrieval System
World’s first lead retrieval app integrated with Conference & Tradeshow Registration solution simplifies attendee data collection and eliminates exhibitors need to rent expensive equipment
SAN FRANCISCO, April 17, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Acteva today announced the first-of-its-kind, fully integrated Smartphone based Lead Retrieval System (Acteva LRS) integrating its Cloud based Online Registration, Payment and Management solution for Events, Conferences and Tradeshows, and Smartphone based bar code scanning service from codeREADr (https://codereadr.com) allowing exhibitors immediate access to their prospects data via Smartphones.
Acteva provides its customers with two types of completely integrated Bar-Code Scanning Services – “Lead Retrieval Service” and “Check-In Service”.
The Lead Retrieval Service (LRS) is intended for use by large conferences with Bar-Code Name Badges and Exhibitors. With LRS, the event organizer will distribute an event-unique URL to their exhibitors. The URL will allow the exhibitor’s event coordinator to set up their booth staff on the Acteva LRS system. Once enabled, the booth staff can scan attendee’s bar-coded badges. The information on the scanned leads is immediately available in the LRS database and can be accessed and downloaded at any time.
The Check-In Service can be used in conjunction with or separately from LRS for bar-code based check in. With the Check-In Service, the organizer will distribute bar-coded tickets that event attendees will receive via email, print out at home, and bring to the event. At the event, the organizer’s staff can use a Smartphone with pre-installed codeREADr app to quickly scan the bar codes; at that moment the system will mark the ticket as having been used. The attendee status will be marked as “checked in”. The same bar code can be used over and over again for different sessions but can only be used once for an individual session.
“For over thirty years, conferences and trade show lead retrieval primarily has been run by large registration companies using booth-bound devices to read bar codes or magnetic stripes on name badges. In today’s event world, most show planners and attendees already have Smartphones or iPads. Smartphones let you do everything, anywhere. One can access work documents, learn about prospects while still on the show floor. Using Smartphones is quickly becoming a competitive advantage. Information will be easier to access, communication will be simpler and attendees and exhibitors will achieve better overall tradeshow results,” says Rich Eicher Sr, Director of Business Development for Skycore LLC, developer of codeREADr.
Tradeshows and Conferences typically provide exhibitor booths to facilitate interacting with Event attendees and a means to collect their information as potential sales leads. Now, instead of using expensive third party scanning devices and services, Acteva Pro users can use the Acteva LRS to retrieve the leads. Event organizers using Acteva Pro can easily set up the exhibitors to use the LRS system by sending a link. Once the codeREADr App is downloaded onto the exhibitor’s Smartphones (iPhone or Android), they can scan the name badges and retrieve the leads anytime during and after the event.
“Acteva is excited to announce this ground-breaking app that allows exhibitors to easily capture, qualify and manage conference and tradeshow leads anywhere, anyplace. This is a tremendous value add for Acteva Event organizers to offer to their exhibitors,” said Bill Briner, Vice President of Products at Acteva. “Since 1998 Acteva has always been ahead in innovation for the Event Registration arena and with the introduction of this feature we have made lead retrieval much more cost effective and easier to use.”
For more information on the Acteva’s Smartphone Lead Retrieval System visithttp://www.acteva.com/smartphone-lead-retrieval.html
About Acteva:
Founded in 1998, Acteva is the largest and most experienced Online Registration & Payment; Event, Conference, Tradeshow, Class & Training Management and Secure Private Community Solution provider in the market today. They have been helping organizers manage and promote their events, classes, trainings, and online payment management for over 12 years. Acteva is a pioneer in the Event technology industry, helping more than 20,000 organizations host over 400,000 events that have been attended by more than 7 million people. Acteva serves corporations, organizations and numerous non-profits such as the Food Shippers of America, Crain Communications, American Red Cross, the Leukemia Research Foundation, the World Cup Dreams Foundation, World Policy Institute and many more. For more information about Acteva please visit www.acteva.com.
The Acteva logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=12443
About Skycore, LLC
Founded in 2003, Skycore LLC of Boston, MA, is a leading mobile service provider enabling the creation, delivery, reading and validating of data embedded in 1D/2D barcodes and NFC objects. Their codeREADr.com app & Web Service enable data capture, tracking and authentication using iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices.http://skycore.com
Update: Messaging History
The “Messaging History” tab in the “Messaging” section now allows you to sort all ofyour messages. Instead of having all types of messages (SMS MO, SMS MT, MMS MO, and MMS MO) in one single table, now you can view each type in a separate tab. These tabs provide valuable details for tracking purposes such as phone numbers, date, cost, and delivery status. With this new feature, you can keep track of all originated (MO) and terminated (MT) messages pertaining to all of your campaigns in a more organized way.
Update: Replicate an MMS
Creating many MMS messages can become tedious for brand managers who want to perform A/B tests or deliver only slightly different content to different lists. We have therefore added a feature in MMS Storage MMBox to create “Replicate” an MMS that was already composed. The brand manager can then simply open the copied MMS message and edit the slides or content they want changed.
Replicate MMS Screen-Shot:
Skycore: Loyalty Program for TV & Film
Skycore’s Mobile Marketing Platform helps you target and keep loyal customers through multiple channels. Using mobile QR, Web and Email technology, customers can scan barcodes to see videos and opt-in to receive more videos by email and take polls or surveys.
- Video QR Codes: Skycore’s QR codes which can be placed in many locations, including movie posters, and can link the viewer to a landing page with video trailers.
- Opt-In: After scanning the QR code and viewing the video, the customer can be given the option to opt-in to a loyalty program. Opting-in will let the customer receive more trailers, exclusive videos, as well as surveys and polls right to their phones through Email or SMS/MMS.
- Video sharing: After viewing each video, whether through QR scan or email, customers will be given the option to share the videos with friends via Facebook, Twitter or Email.
Update: iFrame opt-in widgets
While we have always provided hosted opt-in pages for web and mobile web, these pages were not always able to be customized enough for our clients branding needs. These pages were usually in the form of a popup where our clients could put their logo and some additional text. Now we updated those widgets to look more generic and provided them as iFrame pages so they can be embedded on any page on the internet or mobile internet and still remain compliant with short code regulations.
Read more »
Update: Unicode / UTF-8 Support for SMS Keywords and Native Commands.
Today we have enabled Unicode SMS Keywords as well as language ported standard commands such as HELP, STOP and YES so they will work globally on our platform.
Italian
HELP = AUITO
STOP = FERMATI
YES = SI
NO = NO
CANCEL = CANCELA
Read more »
Skycore API v1.3 MMS MO / SMS MO
Brief Overview:
This document will provide a technical description of the MMS/SMS MO API. In brief, this API allows those with an SMS/MMS MO-enabled shortcode to forward received messages (MMS/SMS MO) to your server.
SMS MO
To receive SMS MO postback notification you need to have that option enabled in your account. Once the SMS MO postback is enabled you will start receiving HTTP Posts on URL of your choice for each SMS MO received related to your account.
MMS MO
To receive MMS MO postback notification you need to have that option enabled in your account and you need to configure it within the particular MMS MO campaign. Once the MMS MO postback is enabled you will start receiving HTTP Posts on URL of your choice for each MMS MO received on the MMS MO Keyword. If you have (optionally) enabled the MMS MO moderation panel then the postback notifictions will only be sent upon manual approval by the moderator.
The XML bundle has the following anatomy:
<POSTBACK>
<NOTIFICATION id=”264″ created=”2011-09-28 17:31:02.835577-04″>
<ORIGIN>SMS_MO</ORIGIN>
<CODE>N211</CODE>
<BODY>
<FROM>15552312102</FROM>
<TO>86717</TO>
<KEYWORD>STOP</KEYWORD>
<RECEIVED>2011-09-28 17:31:02.278751-04</RECEIVED>
</BODY>
</NOTIFICATION>
</POSTBACK>
The XML bundle has the following anatomy:
<POSTBACK>
<NOTIFICATION id=”263″ created=”2011-09-28 16:30:01.835577-04″>
<ORIGIN>MMS_MO</ORIGIN>
<CODE>N401</CODE>
<BODY>
<FROM>15552312102</FROM>
<TO>86717</TO>
<KEYWORD>testoffer</KEYWORD>
<TRACKINGID>MMS_MO_815</TRACKINGID>
<SPID>000165</SPID>
<TIMESTAMP>2011-09-28 15:25:30.222581-04</TIMESTAMP>
<CONTENT>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
</CONTENT>
</BODY>
</NOTIFICATION>
<NOTIFICATION id=”264″ created=”2011-09-28 16:36:02.299301-04″>
<ORIGIN>MMS_MO</ORIGIN>
<CODE>N401</CODE>
<BODY>
<FROM>15552312102</FROM>
<TO>86717</TO>
<KEYWORD>testoffer</KEYWORD>
<TRACKINGID>MMS_MO_816</TRACKINGID>
<SPID>000165</SPID>
<TIMESTAMP>2011-09-28 16:34:40.422537-04</TIMESTAMP>
<CONTENT>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
<FILE>…URL of Content Here…</FILE>
</CONTENT>
</BODY>
</NOTIFICATION>
<NOTIFICATION id=”265″ created=”2011-09-28 16:38:02.299301-04″>
…
</NOTIFICATION>
</POSTBACK>
Each MMS MO message is represented by a <NOTIFICATION> tag and all of the nodes and data contained within. When new MMS MO are received by our system, and approved in the moderation panel, they are bundled as shown, and sent to your postback URL using a process that runs every 1 minute. Each bundle can contain up to 300 notification nodes, each representing a different incoming message.
The content node contains all of the pictures, videos, audio, text, and smil that compose the received MMS MO message. The URL points to the location of the content on our servers. For those developing the back-end handling of the postback URL, you may choose to download/store these content files for whatever purpose you see fit. You may also choose to store the URLs for download at a future time.
Breaking down Each Notification
Many of the tags are self-explanatory.
- <FROM></FROM> tags contain the phone number, including the country code, of the sender.
- <TO></TO> tags contain the destination shortcode. In the above example, shortcode is 86717.
- <KEYWORD></KEYWORD> tags contain the keyword recognized that was passed in the MMS.
- <TRACKINGID></TRACKINGID> tags contain a tracking ID, which contains the ID we’ve assigned this MMS MO on our system.
- <RECEIVED></RECEIVED> tags contain the timestamp when the SMS MO was received by our side.
- <SPID></SPID> tags contain the SPID of the sender’s carrier. In the above example, 000165 corresponds to the mobile carrier Sprint. For the full list of SPIDs and their corresponding carriers, please refer to the SPID reference table in the last section.
- <TIMESTAMP></TIMESTAMP> tags contain the timestamp that our system received the MMS MO. This is different from the ‘created’ attribute under the notification tag, which represents the time we sent the message to your postback URL.
You can set your postback URL by logging into your account and going to ‘Account’ tab and selecting the ‘API settings’ button. Enter the URL under the setting ‘API Postback URL’ and make sure that the ‘enabled’ and ‘MMS MO postback’ checkboxes are selected. Hit the save button and any MMS MO campaign you’ve created with ‘Postback Processing’ enabled will start sending messages to your URL in the XML format shown above.
