The Tribune

By D’Arcy Rahming

I read on CNN the other day that some people are texting in their sleep. Sort of like how people sleep walk. They are really tired, or actually half asleep, so it is sort of a random stream of consciousness texted out. It’s funny and somewhat embarrassing what they’re texting and, for the most part, harmless. Fact is, some people are actually so attached to their cell phones and texting that they sleep next to them.

This is good news for marketers. The fact is that e-mail open rates are really low because of spammers, yet text open rates are still above 90 per cent. Most people open their texts. Of course, depending on what is written, it will be quickly and angrily deleted if it is not something they requested. So marketers and businesses using texting should be careful not to spam persons.

Businesses and marketers often do not know which part of their marketing is working, and which part is not. With text messaging it is easy to see the immediate impact of an advertisement. The most important part of the text is the opening sentence. If that does not capture the reader’s attention, the text will not even be read. The only way to find out which text version will have the greatest effect is to test and measure.

I recently advised a client about to send out a ‘text blast’ to persons who had previously bought minutes at his business. His original idea was to blast out a single message, but I convinced him to try different opening lines on two sample groups. To his amazement, one group pulled a four times’ greater response than the other group. So he used that for the majority of the list.

He was able to tell precisely which opening line was better because he measured it. The best way to measure a text is to put in a code of some sort. In his case, he had them respond to a different phone number in his business. So we knew that if someone was calling on one phone line he would have heard about our offer from one of the test groups.

Finally, texting works best with information marketing. What this means is that people should be receiving useful information on products, services and events, instead of being hit over the head with sale after sale. Twitter is a growing phenomenon in marketing circles, granting access to people who don’t have personal computers but possess smart phones. I am going to talk about Twitter in my next article.

NB: D’Arcy Rahming holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. A lecturer at the College of the Bahamas, Mr Rahming has clients in general insurance, retail, the health and medical fields, sports federations and financial services. To receive his marketing newsletter FREE go to http://darcyrahming.com.